you can't do homework you can't do exercises you can't do fake stuff you have to work on real products that real companies with real customers with real data to get better at product management and so any kind of like training mentorship reading Etc that you do is
just the layer on top of that the real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps there are ways that I think great PMS use to go faster on this Loop but you still have to do the work at the core is you have to actually execute and deliver great products you
have to do it over and over and over again Fareed most of it is the chief development officer at reforge where he's been for over two and a half years before that he spent three and a half years at slack leading a lot of their growth efforts and about a year at
instacart leading a number of their key growth analytics and product efforts here's a GM at Zynga his VPR product at RunKeeper and something that I only learn learned during her chat is that he spent six years at Pixar doing character simulation rigging and building 3D
animation Tools in our conversation we focus on the Journey of becoming a great PM including crossing the Canyon from IC to manager the importance of expanding your scope and how to create opportunities where you get more responsibility as a piano Fareed is such
an eight plus Human full of so much insight and I'm really excited for you to learn from me with that I bring you Fareed most of us this episode is brought to you by coda coda is an all-in-one dock that combines the best of documents spreadsheets and apps in one place I actually use Coda
every single day it's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing it's where I plan my content calendar capture my research and write the first drafts of each and every post it's also right curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers and it's
also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast over the years I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly Rich collection of templates
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get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement that's c-o-d-a dot IO slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude hey John hey Lenny excited to be here
John give us a behind the scenes at amplitude when most people think of amplitude they think of product analytics but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP what's the thought process there well we've always thought of amplitude as being about supporting the full
product Loop think collect data inform bets ship experiments and learn that's the heart of growth to us so the big aha was seeing how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations experiment in cdb
came out of listening to and observing our customers supporting growth and learning has always been amplitude to our Focus right yeah so I'm ample tries to meet customers where they are we just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups
there's never been a more important time for room absolutely agree thanks for joining us John and head to amplitude.com to get started Fareed welcome to the podcast thanks for having me Lenny I'm super excited to be here so to set a little context for listeners that aren't super familiar
with you can you give us just like a 45 second overview of your career and all the wonderful things that you've done great hi I'm Fareed mosavat I live in Berkeley California with my wonderful wife and two children but I've been a product leader across a variety of
different companies over the course of my career today I am the chief development officer at reforge where I help run all of our content teams parts of our operations and our Partnerships with wonderful experts like yourself awesome what about all the other things
you've done ah so previous to this I spent almost four years as the Director of product for a team called life cycle it's lack that is effectively a growth team we're responsible for the self-service business at slack all the way from first sign out first team creation through to the first invite
activation expansion modernization and even connecting the dots with our SMB sales team to help nurture some of the a small self-service teams into larger commitments through our sales team I came to that through a variety of different growth and product leadership
roles at a bunch of different startups and larger companies I built one of the first growth teams at instacart for about a year and a half in the middle of their acceleration I was VP of product at a company called RunKeeper before that in Boston health and fitness
Tracking Company I was a general manager at Zynga I got there through a startup that I was an engineer at basically started as an engineer Ended as a head of product over the course of a couple of years and then got acquired into Zynga and actually started my career
with almost seven years at Pixar Animation Studios working on visual effects software tools and other Creative Tech to try and solve problems for a bunch of wonderful films you've probably seen or your kids have seen please tell us the films that you worked at I had no idea that you worked at
Pixar I am credited on Finding Nemo cars Wally and up what I did not know any of this yeah yeah basically I started there right out of college I was super interested in computer Graphics I'd actually been an intern there was very lucky to be interested in that in
the moment where they were really accelerating the growth of the company going from like the whole company is working on one film to like okay we're trying to release a film every 18 months and so they really scaled up and I had been studying computer graphics and then
I was an engineer focused on the computer graphics and a little bit of research on that in college was an intern there and joined and just got to see a fun gross period at that company uh and really I think in a lot of ways is the root of why I love doing product
management because everything I worked on was like at the intersections of like interesting creative problems interesting technical problems an interesting storytelling problems and so in a lot of ways it was like the I think if I connect the dots backwards to the Steve jobsism this would be the
beginning of how I got interested in solving like high-level strategic problems across a bunch of different people doing different kinds of work and maybe how I got relatively good at it was because even as an engineer I was sitting in the middle of those uh pieces
but I got bored which sounds crazy and decided to jump into a startup that nobody had ever heard of and had a deploys in 2006 and the rest is history from there I wasn't planning to talk about Pixar but I am so curious one more question there what's something that you
learned from Pixar that has informed the way that you build product or think about product or your career at the foundation of it is when I first got there I thought what was important was like modeling how things work in the real world they're making things look right
so to speak and what I learned there is that like actually you're trying to deliver an end experience and product and story to your viewers to your audience and it doesn't actually matter what's real it matters what you see on the screen it matters the emotion that
it creates the story that it creates how it reinforces all the other pieces and so the technical pieces were just a means to that end so of course we use like real physics and real math behind the scenes to do stuff but if you had to budge the numbers to make it look right
that's the right thing to do and so I remember like as I was working on early effects bubble sand so this kind of stuff I was trying to do things the way it would really work and then like the camera would look at it and it almost the first lesson I learned there was
like no what matters is the end result the end product the end feeling I feel like I go back to that a lot as I think about product development not just from an engineering and Technical standpoint but from uh you know what's in your strategy doc isn't that important it's
actually just an input into the end experience that you're trying to deliver for customers when we're thinking about content development in our programs like it's not important that all of the principles fit perfectly together into this MEC framework it matters that you
help people solve actual problems like what's the end goal that you're looking for and I feel like that's the lesson that like I just keep going back to for my time there it's a great segue to reforge which I want to spend a little bit of time on folks that listen to this podcast know
that I'm a huge fan and we have a lot of freeforge alumni on this podcast and so a couple questions there one you said you're a chief development officer is that your title yes what is it that you do as a chief development officer it's funny because uh in a lot of ways it's
kind of a not a made-up title but like trying to figure out how a roll that I ended up slotting into As I Grew my engagement with the company how do we describe what it is and so I think what's unique about reforge versus a traditional sort of software startup or
a SAS company or all the other things you see is that we're not just a software company of course we have a website go to it you see things see it's deliberate but we also build a lot of stuff and experiences that fit into that we build content we build programs today
we're going to build all kinds of other content we have live cohort experiences that are designed and platful and we like build and try to make solve certain customer problems we have a member slack that we try to design to solve certain problems we have the people like
yourself and a lot of the guests that you've had on the podcast like Elena or Adam Fishman or Casey who plug into our system to help us build all of those things because at the end of the day our job is to help unlock the expertise that's locked in the heads of the
greatest operators in the world so who do we work with how do we develop that content how do we make their ideas shine how do we solve real member problems how do we help people do work a lot of that is a product experience that in some ways like a Pixar movie there's like the
technical aspects and the ux aspects but there's also all the content and the partners that we work with and those pieces and I kind of own all of that piece like the production content the new product experiences and all the pieces that fit in there so we have a
team of really talented amazing people that work on these things and I lead those teams it's interesting how that comes back to your Pixar experience of the combination of intersect section of Art and technology and yeah that's so interesting okay never thought about it
that way yeah but like we said it's easier to connect the dots in Reverse than moving forward I have always been not that precious about titles career roles Etc I've really found myself drawn to is this an interesting problem that I believe I can bring something valuable
to the table can I help solve this in some meaningful way and will I learn something great and new from this role and at every step I made the decisions have gone up and down the title stack from VP down to icpm from you know engineered a product from product to
this new thing and content and in every single one I think it's a lot about what are you bringing to the table to help solve that problem what are you taking away from the job and learning from it and how do you turn that into the next step awesome and we're going to chat
about a lot of those learnings from your experience going through these career Journeys but one last question on reforge actually how big is reforge at this point like how many cohorts how many students students how many people work there what's like the operation scale at this point it's hard to count
how many employees because it's growing so fast I believe we are at just around 150 total employees across the whole company right now that doesn't include our Executives and residents subject matter experts and the partners we work with that's full-time employees working
on the business of course we have a large product development product design engineering and data teams but also the teams that I run we call them strategy leads content producers content strategists content designers building all of that content as well as our
partners team and operations teams and so it's a relatively large company at this point it was when I first started working with it it was a scrappy operation of just a handful of folks but we've grown quite a bit over the last year with that we support I believe now
19 total cohort based programs across product engineering marketing and growth related topics as well as a bunch of new experiences that we're working on for the coming future here in the next year we have well over 10 000 active members on the platform about a dozen Executives
and residents that work to help us deliver those programs and hundreds of Partners we call them experts and operators in the space who contribute to our programs in different ways either as guests or as mentors or helping us develop content behind the scenes
awesome and I taught a couple guest lectures this past cohort and I think my second ever lesson was with you you were the teacher yeah we talked about instant instant buy I think you created instant books sorry on the reforce platform for experimentation and testing
program which was yeah actually also my first program that I helped lead that reforge and I think you were my first guest so uh thanks thanks for not making me look bad thank you so what's cool about your background working at reforge and all the companies you worked at is
that you've seen a lot of PM careers go well and PM careers go not so well and so what I want to spend our time on is talking through just the career development Journey for product managers and in particular the challenges that PMS face trying to become better PMs and
just like why It's innately tricky to become better as a product manager such a weird job to get better at and so my first question is actually why is it so hard to become better as a PM like why is it innately a tricky thing to develop as a PM one of the trickiest bits about it is
that there's no clear obvious pre-training you can do that gives you like a baseline set of understanding that you can use to be a product manager people come from mbas people come from certain kinds of like majors and college Etc but it's not like engineering we're
like okay with a couple of weeks of boot camp or a couple of years of a computer science education I have some foundational knowledge that helps me go from zero to one in my first job not only does it help me break in because I like have a credential that helps me
like land that job and we can talk about why Landing your first PM job is so hard but also there's not a lot of stuff that one-to-one directly correlates to the work you're going to do on a day-to-day basis I think there's a idea that Naval ravacon talked about on Twitter and then
blog posts a long time ago this concept of specific knowledge that can only be gathered by actually doing the work and a lot of product management really is like that you get better by doing it and so you sort of starts in the same place if that makes sense and of course there
are different skills and intellectual capacities Etc that help different people be more successful at it but at the end of the day you don't know if a PM is going to be great until they start doing that work so I think that's one of the pieces that it's very hard the
second is the thing I just alluded to which is breaking in and getting your first role it's just like a very difficult situation for a lot of companies and there are a couple of different paths to it but none of them are straightforward there's no like clear linear path except for maybe being
like a Stanford or Harvard grad top tier School grad in CS with an internship goes to Google to do an APM program there are a couple of these things that are Surefire but I don't think they guarantee success and they are actually like very limited in terms of the number
of people that they let into the business and so I think this is what makes it so hard is that there's not any upfront training you can really do to prepare yourself or even knock down the door to break in but then also like it's not clear there's a lot of training
within a company that would help you be successful generally on the job of product management you can learn how to be a good pm at Google you can learn to be a good PM app Facebook but it is up to each individual pm to figure out how to generalize what they're doing to move
from different kinds of product across different kinds of product work as they get more senior to solve bigger problems Etc and so what we try to do at reforge is we are focused on helping people accelerate that learning loop it's not hey if you take this class now you're
qualified to be a PM it's not really like that I don't know if that's possible I hope it will be someday but it is very difficult I think it's more hey we want to help you when you encounter certain kinds of problems not have to solve them from first principles
but sort of follow in the footsteps of the people who have done great work in the past generalize those lessons but at the end of the day you still have to get down and do the work you can't do homework you can't do exercises you can't do fake stuff you have to work on
real products that real companies with real customers with real data to get better at product management and so any kind of like training mentorship reading Etc that you do is just the layer on top of that the real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps
there are ways that I think great PMS use to go faster on this Loop but you still have to do the work that the core is you have to actually execute and deliver great products you have to do it over and over and over again yes let's absolutely dig into that let me put out
a couple mental models that I'm thinking as you're talking one is just if you think about a pie chart of a great PM's career and or Investments they make along their career Journey like how do you break up that pie chart like some percentages doing the work some percentages courses maybe some
percentages books so just putting that out there in case that's useful to think about and then the other is thinking about like the trajectory of a PM on a line chart and what are these inflection points that you've seen most impact the career trajectory of a PM so let's start
at the first one the pie chart idea like what percent is spent on different things unsurprisingly because reforge is all about growth Loops I think of this in terms of a loop actually which is like what is that sort of learning or career acceleration or ability acceleration
Loop and at the core event at the top of the loop is execution you have to have a real problem you're working on with real customers that you want to solve in some way so you're executing you're delivering you're learning at the beginning it's all about execution so
we'll start with the pie chart at the beginning it's almost all execution what are the problems you give a junior a brand new pm known problem known solution please work with engineering and design to deliver that thing on time and then tell us what happened so it's like a
very tightly constrained problem as you level up then some of these things become more unknowns so there's execution but I think the next step that great product managers do is they think about how to generalize that execution a little bit so it's not just okay now I
know what the best settings page for slack is it's what generalizations did you make what are the things that you can take that are applicable to other stuff some of that is execution oriented how to best work with Engineers how to iterate on designs what customers do and
don't do rules of thumb those kinds of things and I think that's where reading courses Etc can help because sometimes by bringing other X or one-on-one conversations with experts Etc like there are a whole bunch of different ways but is that the generalization step hey I did this thing
oh other people have done something similar how do I connect the dots on that how do I make this experience bigger than what I've just done and lead me to help solve other problems these are things you're doing in your head basically you're just kind of like
developing Frameworks mental models things that you're just like taking with you to the next project in your mind exactly so to use an example there was a time at instacart where we were working on onboarding brand new onboarding and activation flow for customers and we
tried a lot of different stuff we tried like the slimmest fastest lowest friction least number of steps path in and then we had this hypothesis about helping people get set up and so we took like the opposite approach which was like a really long onboard with a bunch
of different steps I wanted to see was that more effective or less effective and the generalization is oh four products that have a high bar to activation sometimes more setup and higher friction good friction could actually help those customers be successful there are other
kinds of products that are high intent where they know what they need to do to have simple actions where lowering friction might be the right thing so that's a generalization it's a generalization oh I learned a thing it's a hypothesis about how that might
generalize to other kinds of products or other kinds of problems that you approach and I think some of that can come from seeing it from the outside listening to a podcast hearing me say it taking a course Etc but at the end of the day you have to experience it to see
how it applies to the real world and then the next bit is communication and I think this is a bit that a lot of product managers are obviously in any job Miss but you can't just do the work you have to actually communicate the work you have to talk about what you're
doing what you've generalized what you've learned so that you can hit the next step which is scale your opportunities go from smaller known problem known solution to maybe known problem unknown solution type work which is sort of the next step and then eventually to where you want to be as a
like senior great high level individual contributor pm to the not quite known problem maybe a goal with a set of problems and unknown Solutions unknown problems unknown Solutions where you're actually identifying customer problems and moving towards on that so scaling up
your opportunity and then executing again and I think of this as like a loop of learning and so of course the percentages change over time as you move more senior in your career but also depending on where you're at in the step but the percentages change got it so
just to recap execute you just do the work just ship yep generalize learnings from shipping to like build up your gut feeling of what will work and not work exactly learn to communicate things you're doing and then scale the things that you're executing based on this kind
of gut feeling you're building and communicate that out and just continue do you think scaling take on more scope or have more impact is that kind of anything about scaling that last piece yeah I think it's one moving from knowns to unknowns so like you're being given
hairier harder to untangle types of problems with more unknowns and more autonomy and I think the second is yeah of course with although I think for the beginning of your career you tend to go deeper so it's like okay I'm gonna work on growth let's say or core product or
zero to one products or technical scaling whatever it is I'm going to go deeper on that and then over time that sort of turns into width but this is why the generalization step is important if you want to be a product leader you cannot not be seen solely as a
specialist in a certain kind of product work and so the generalization step is really important if you want to move from growth to core product you need to show that you're not just running experiments and driving numbers up you need to show and communicate that you're
learning deeper lessons about how customer psychology works and what products people resonate with and how to think about the business more holistically and then communication no one knows what you're thinking if you don't tell them so if you don't communicate
you don't have control over those scaled opportunities usually your manager or the organization or the company does Maybe by switching jobs you have some control but you need to earn that right you need to communicate and that's why I think there's like pieces of loop you
can control and pieces that are externalized I'm curious in your own career what the biggest inflections of growth have been either in terms of learning or impact or just like opportunity the first big one was when I switched from being an engineer to being a product I didn't even know it was
product management but a product leader of some kind and I think there are two things that happen one is you got to be doing this stuff but often somebody needs to see it the scale opportunity piece of the step often requires someone from outside to notice that you're doing something
really well and trust you with a bigger opportunity and I think of this as sponsorship not mentorship I don't necessarily find that in my career I've had a lot of managers where I'm like wow they're like day-to-day help was super awesome at helping me be a better leader
I hope that I've been that for some people but I don't have a ton of examples of that in my career but what I do have is a couple examples of people who deeply trusted me to solve big problems and I don't know Makita have had that or otherwise but one was CEO of
that startup who's now a venture capitalist named Nabil Hyatt who like was like Hey you seem to understand the data better than anybody here you're solving these problems help us figure out what we're going to do next which now we call product management by the
way yeah it was called conduit Labs okay it's a game company and then eventually I was the director of product for the Boston for our Boston Studio the next one's that slack I was an icpm working on activation and growth on a team of three or four other PMs and there were a
couple of moments where by communicating my work and talking through how I was solving problems people noticed that I knew what I was doing and gave me bigger and bigger opportunities one of those was mercy and Grace who I think has been on your pod and it was a wonderful sponsor for me
and then again when mercy left a bronderwood who's the CPO said it seems like you have a handle on this I'd like you to take on a bigger range of problems across all of this growth and not just the modernization piece that I've been working on before so I think
in each of those steps it's about creating trust and knowing that you have a sponsor there someone who's gonna who's gonna go to bat for you I really love this point of sponsorship I've been we haven't talked a lot about this on the podcast there's a lot of talk of
finding a coach or having a manager that teaches you how to do the job but this idea of just like getting to a place where someone gives you an opportunity to shine and that's been really big in my career just like certain managers just here at Lenny you take this and
let's see what you can do is there anything else you can recommend to folks to create opportunities for sponsors should we talked about communication executing well is that just the core of it like doing a great job and communicating the Great job you're doing
this idea that like it's what you do and that's multiplied by your ability to show that work and communicate it and that's the impact that you can have but you have to have not just impact on the customers but also in the organization and I think it is impact on the
organization changing the way people think about problems helping generalize what works and what doesn't work bringing learnings to the table for me I've worked a lot on growth and I've treated a huge part of my job as not just moving the numbers but also teaching the organization how our growth
model Works how the pieces fit together what our customers care about what's working what's not working and that creates a lot of a leverage in other parts of the organization because they can do better work by having more information but also be trust trust from
leadership trust from your peers and otherwise so now how do you get to that some of it's just locked someone's got to believe in you you can create your luck by being good at communicating and solving hard problems I think the other piece is knowing when you go into an organization
is this a role that's important to the company is it on the list I think it is easier to find sponsors communicate and create Leverage if the thing you're working on is in like the top four or five most important things the company is working on and I find myself drawn to those kinds of
problems and I think that's one way because then all of a sudden CEOs notice what you're working on as a product notice what you're working on and your peers notice what you're working on and the other bit is curiosity I think to be in the seat where people want to
sponsor you I think you have to show a handle on not just what you're doing but how that relates to all of the things around you so I call this like going two stack levels up two stack levels down in terms of your curiosity and what you understand and also knowing what's to
the left and what's to the right so let's use the example of if I'm working on activation on growth let's say or monetization it doesn't matter one of those two pieces when I say two stack levels down I like to understand how we build customers how it works in
strike what are our donning policies what are the technical things that work and don't work in the pieces like all maybe down to the database right like technical curiosity those kinds of things but also like mental models for what's above you how do we grow how does
monetization fit into that what are the trade-offs versus free growth versus paid growth how important is this to the company how does it fit into our long-term strategy those kinds of things so it's like the Strategic things above you I like two stack levels because it's
like you should understand your boss's priorities and your boss's boss's priorities eventually that means you have to know what the board is thinking right and then left and right is what our the core product teams working on that I could help advise on in terms of
modernization or they could advise me on what they're thinking and what might be coming next how do we fit together with the Enterprise part of the business even though I'm working on self-serve how do I think about sales do they have input like interesting customer conversations
or input it's this curiosity like walking around getting to know what people are doing and being seen as an expert are you the desk people go to when they have questions are you a person that people ask the opinion when you're trying to figure out how the dots
connect I have found for Me Maybe This is just because this is the strength of mine that connecting the the dots of how the whole company works and all the pieces fit together has been one of the ways that I've driven that sponsorship I think for each individual you have to
figure out what your superpower is and where you can be actually top ten percent and then lean into to Opportunities and also problems that help you show that and shine it that way that is such cool advice I think what's cool about that is I imagine you just go to your manager and even just ask hey
I'd love to understand just what are your highest priorities and then what are your managers just like ask these questions just that alone I think communicates a lot about how much you care and your interest there and that creates trust even if you don't do a ton
with it and knowing what your manager cares about is just going to help in so many other ways you're just like okay absolutely to them I'm gonna make sure to do a good job there so that is a really cool framework not only do a good job there but I'm going to figure out
how to communicate what I'm doing to be only the parts that are important and matter to them I'm gonna know that when I hit a certain decision that needs to be made whether I need their input or not there are all these different pieces like understanding
when to be heads down when to be heads up when to communicate when not to but I think like understanding how all the pieces fit together you're really just trying I always think of it as trying to build a mental model of how the company works and what's important to it and
what's the equation so to speak or what are all the boxes and then figure out like how is my work creating leverage in that and I find that when you are thinking at that level people tend to trust you the core of trust is people your manager and their leaders need to
feel like you will do a good job and a bigger responsibility and what gives them trust oh they do a good job or they're curious and excited and understand all these things that they need to understand so it'll make sense and I'm always wary of asking PMS to do more work like it's such a busy long
hours job already and let's go about these things you're talking about is it's not like necessarily a lot more work it's just like a little bit of research a little bit of digging and thinking yeah I think the hard part of this is I have not figured out how to do
this well in a remote environment without throwing a lot of one-on-ones on people's counters because sometimes you figure this out just by hearing conversations hanging out on lunch and asking questions and those kinds of things but it's certainly not impossible you just have to work out
a little more just more zooms yeah this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your sock 2
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takes for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off pedanta just go to vanta.com Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today so I know something you spend a lot of time thinking about is the transition
from a icpm to a manager and you have this really epic post that I think you call the product leader Canyon that you think of this as a canyon that a lot of PMS don't cross so and I spent a little bit of time here can you maybe just talk
about what this Canyon is and why it exists yeah we talked a little bit about like the first sort of very hard part in product management Career Development which is like how do I land my first job not a pro at that we can talk about that more but like then this sort of path
from I see to more senior IC working on bigger problems that are more business impact Etc it's a relatively straightforward path we just talked about some of the ways that you do that you get a deeper understanding across a wider range of business problems you
solve more unknowns versus being handed problems to solve Etc and you do that by being good at your job and you do that by being good at your job basically as a solo product manager like on an island we talked about communication and those kinds of things but at the end of the
day like we described like most of the work is execution most of the work is partnering with your engineering manager and partnering with your designer and your team to build stuff and deliver stuff and you've gotten there by being really good at that right you've gotten there
by getting in the weeds getting in the details sweating what matters like working hard at it and so someone says we'd love for you to lead this team great it's really easy to look at that and say okay now instead of owning free to paid conversion ion growth overall
and the first thing you do is like start to figure out what are the most interesting and valuable projects that I can work on and as an IC because I only have one person on my team to go dive in and like work on those things to make a lot of Leverage and this kind of can
create a little bit of a spiral of like failure because it's the hard job the IC part of the job is really hard so now I gave you more work across more things you're already working 56 hours a week and now you got to keep track of more projects across more teams and more people and maybe you
kept the two or three most critical ones to yourself so that's one angle is like learning about yes it's probably the right thing in the near term for you to focus and work on this and be really directive about what to do and get into every single detail and make sure you deliver
the best product but long run you've taken a learning opportunity away from someone else and you've taken the opportunity for you to be a leveraged person that is more valuable than just their time away as well so I think that's one piece that drives a lot of
failures just this like okay now I have more problems to work on I'm going to go deeper on it and handing the people on your team the least interesting least leverage least fun stuff to do thinking that's how you get to like level oh now I get to work on the fun projects and
the interesting and high leverage ones and I'll leave all the other ones to other people I think you call this the manager death spiral is that the same yeah yeah manager death spiral this is not unique to product manager this happens in almost every leadership role
you're in a position you have broader responsibility you got there by being the best I see on the team probably so your instincts are to I see a bunch of important stuff and do management stuff too right people may be like oh how do I avoid this death
spiral do you have any advice maybe you'll get there but just like how do you avoid this death spiral of keeping all the good stuff and just not scaling yourself I think the first is honestly just you have to start trusting other people which is not common to where you've been told
today but you have to start trusting you have to shift from doer to editor is the way I think about it you have to shift from my job is to do the work to my job is to make the work better my job is to plus the work to review the work to help other people solve problems sometimes
that's by being directive right sometimes that's by letting them run because you're like Lenny you're great please go solve this problem call me when you have a problem if you have people that are in that upper quadrant of like they understand the problem they
have the level of experience to solve it it's maybe not 100 important maybe it is that kind of thing and then there's the coaching middle which is like how do I help make that work better you have to start figuring out like where is each person on your team in their expertise
and what level of input is the highest leverage for me I actually think of it as start thinking in terms of being lazy that's the least amount of work I can do to make this thing as good as possible versus how do I do as much work as possible to make sure it's great so it's
like looking in terms of Roi the other is just like hiring bringing on great people you trust making sure you're staffed appropriately so there's just a second bit I think one of the bigger mistakes that new ICS make on teams is they still treat problems the same way
they did as ICS which normally when you run a pod basically your job is how do I deliver the most value with the resources I have when you're a leader it's now your job to propose what are the resources we need to have the most impact on this problem and I think I
personally have messed this up a bunch of times where like at the end of the quarter I'll be like yeah but like we only had four engineers and this is like what we could do like that wasn't what we asked you to do we asked you to solve this problem so if adding four more
people is what you needed or you needed the marketing team to do X Y and Z you need to go out and do that work now it is not just your job to get what you can get done with the resources in front of you it's your job to Marshall resources both inside your org and across your
organization I think that's another big area that's related to the trust bit because it's again it's this habit of oh I got here by doing everything myself you have to start realizing that like your job is to convince other people that do work too awesome so going back to the canyon so
the first piece was essentially over focusing on just being too good at the thing you're already doing versus going broader so it's like hey how do I maximize my output I can do this myself faster than I can explain it to someone else so I'll just do it and then finding
that you're blocking your team because you're in the middle of every single decision finding that you're totally overwork and finding that people aren't learning or growing because those opportunities have been taken from them so what do you do to on to break that
you have to just like slowly start to give up trust do that so I think that's the one one bit is that like death spiral of what's getting getting stuff no no you can curse all you want that's all good okay great oh you've just done well be careful with all you want nobody has cursed yet on this
podcast then it's allowed okay you know it's the internet I don't know we'll solve that okay don't worry I think the other is what I call the four types of product work and I think this is not always right at the man manager stage but for every great product leader you
go from being an expert in some type of product work and I'll describe what those are to now owning a portfolio of work across a bunch of different dimensions so the way I think about product work and Casey Winters and I worked on this framework together a lot
of it comes from him so I don't want to oversay it but it's all part of our product strategy program at reforge is first feature work adding new features product experiences Etc into a product in order Drive engagement with your existing customer base and solve a wider range of problems
the second is Growth work how do I help my customers or a broader range of customers connect with the experiences we already have and drive acceleration and either Top Line growth or monetization or whatever the most important metrics are I think you've had
many guests on to talk about growth type works the third is related to growth but I think is slightly different which is what we call product Market fit expansion so it's not exactly Feature work which is like hey now that I use your product more I have this thing I
need you know in order to keep using it because I'm a power seller I'm uh you know those kind of thing but instead we want to attract whole new sub-segments of markets to the product by adding something and there are two forms of product Market fit expansion there's either taking the same product and
finding a new audience things like internationalization or vertical like I'm going to sell the same product to a different vertical because we're a verticalized product and the other is selling a different product to the same audience this is what like bundling strategies basically look like
right so adding new marketing tools to a marketing Suite Etc that attract a different kind of customer and that either Drive upsell or Drive New audiences to come to that so that's the Third Kind of product work and then there's the fourth that is always
forgotten by a lot of PMS which is so what is the stuff we're doing that is because we are growing there's new product work we need to do most people think of this as technical scaling but I actually put things like trust and safety and other kinds of what we call
user scaling problems in this as well there are a lot of problems that come up at Airbnb just because instead of having 10 hosts you have 10 000 hosts right there are a lot of problems at Twitter and Facebook that are well total sized that are a result of their scale and I
think that's a chunk of work that I put in the same category as technical scaling which is like how do we make sure the product continues to work for the people who are using it and so the challenge of the four kinds of product work okay great we have a framework
how's that useful for read it's not that useful it is to know what kind you're doing but I think as you go up the stack of product leadership you are going from being probably an expert in one of these so for me growth to needing to think about all these other ones and you've probably never
done them before right so how maybe you've done two but how do you lead across a bunch of different things and how do you make sure not to be over focused on the one that you care the most about and we've all seen this right it's like growth leader takes over and everything's a growth problem
everything's an experiment everything like should be measured that's not necessarily true for some of these other kinds of work and so how do you start to lead and grow and build a portfolio across those and I think that's where some of the stuff we've talked about
before deep curiosity looking across asking a lot of questions getting to like a foundational understanding of what's important there Etc is really important got it so part of this is learning new types of product work so we're talking about trying to like move
from IC to manager and the things I get in the way and so is the advice there just start to learn and understand maybe say you're doing Feature work you're just building a like a dashboard for your users and is your advice there like start thinking about how growth works
and understand the growth strategy of the company so that people give you this opportunity of okay let's put read on maybe a couple other things here because he's already understands a little bit more about growth yeah I think there's like a framework thing and then there's
like a what practical advice so from a framework perspective I think it's important to ask the question for each of the things that I am responsible for what category does this fall into what's important about it what are the right ways to think about building that given
that it is different than what I've built before so some of this you can do within an org if you're working on core product stuff you probably have an adoption problem on one of your products and there's Growth work associated with driving usage of that thing and so I
think there's a piece at which even within a certain sub segment that this can be valuable you could be working on Enterprise which looks a lot like a lot of scaling work right and a lot of Feature work get me the right administrator of dashboards and these
kinds of things but also like maybe you have a problem that's a growth problem how do I drive adoption how do I actually drive usage how do I make sure that our new Enterprise customers are activated and retained and so I think at scale any product leadership work has
some pieces of these different kinds and I think building a mental model for what are the things we need to do what's the right portfolio allocation across these different types of product work and do I have enough of a baseline understanding of the different ways to evaluate and
think about those and what the goals are in order to drive leadership across work I might not be able to do myself very well like I am not a good technical PM despite having added engineering background it's been too long but I hope that I can lead technical scaling a
technical debt restructure on my team or at least understand whether it's important or do or not so if you think about this concept of getting through this Canyon broadly it boils down to more scope maybe that's the way to think about it it's like more scope of product
work that you work on being better at different types of work scaling yourself so that other people can do work on your behalf or within your umbrella and the point you made about not being satisfied with the resources you have and helping people understand here's what we could
do if we had this many resources and making the case for that it feels like that's the overview is how you think about it yeah I think that's exactly right and the last one's really important because you have now you have moved to owning the impact as a leader you now own the
business outcome the impact the delivery not some sub problem or known answer you have to define the solutions you have to talk about how many people you need to do them and you need to figure out what do you need from the rest of the organization to do that so yeah I think
those are the three big buckets of things that I see trip people up awesome and just add plus one to that last point just like a lot of PMS end up being victims of the resources they get and like oh how could I have possibly had this impact with the resources you gave
me versus how do I avoid that and Empower myself to help people understand here's what I need to do this thing that you want me to do if you think this is important here's what we need and put it on other people's plate doesn't mean you'll get it but it's important to put
that up front yeah and that goes from uh would be nice and makes you a better like more junior or even senior PM makes you a more effective one it's a it's extra credit at the leadership level it's like Baseline the Baseline is okay I believe this is the outcome we need to get to by
this time and this is what it's going to take here are the trade-offs here's what I need here's what I can get you if I can't do that and the reason I drum this one home is I feel like this is the mistake I have made now multiple times in my career and I
can't like at this point I'm embarrassed to have seen it happen over and over again because you just get caught up and like okay here's the team I have I got to build the road map I got to make sure everybody's got work to do and you stay focused on beating that beast and you
forget to ask is this even the right group to solve this it may be you need a smaller team even maybe even a bigger team I mean maybe you need different people and I think often you like find yourself victim of the circumstances instead of owning the situation I love
that where'd you kind of realize this was something you should be doing I've learned different versions of this lesson now multiple times I learned it in this car I had a very small team and we've got a lot done but honestly I think I failed to make the case that we
should grow it faster and only it was only like once someone was like we should add more people it's like great yeah let's do that I don't think I was hurt by that but I think like it was uh oh you have permission you should have asked kind of thing and I think that
slacked the lesson I Learned was about cross-functional like I think we did a good job of making the case for why we needed new teams or add more things to drive more impact but I still took a very like product approach to solving activation monetization expansion type problems what I think is I look at
what could have moved the needle more and what it could have made me a more successful leader at that company it would have been partnering more closely with marketing for instance to figure out how we could be working on things together helping Drive their roadmap in
vice versa same with sales same with the data org same with Finance those kinds of things where I don't think I was driving enough of the high level outcome I owned which is like driving growth of a self-service business across the other parts of the company that needed to do
that I was a product leader side did product work you know and I lesson learned yeah thanks for sharing that so we've been talking a lot about the regular path and getting better and accelerating your path as a product leader and staying on this track there's
also this alternative track that I know you're passionate about and reform just become a beacon it feels like of folks that are moving away from working at one company to working at many companies and scaling their impact and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what you've seen
there there's a large trend of just like senior people becoming advisors writing things newsletters for example and I'm curious what you think is happening there and how you think about that it's interesting the whys are hard to like pin down but it's definitely happening I
think some of it is maybe covid induced some of it is remote work driving these Trends and some of it is just like there are a lot more leaders who are a lot more in demand so just to like recap the trend that I think we are seeing and that has been really interesting is a
trend of like senior leaders people with like meaningful operating experience first diversifying their impact maybe while they're still at a full-time role someone like yourself Lenny maybe was full-time at a at Airbnb or a similar company and said hey I'd like to do some
advising some Angel Investing some speaking maybe I'll start writing a newsletter on the side and then moving to this new category that I don't feel like really existed maybe it did in certain pockets of executive leadership around Tech and startups but really
seeing it in product management will shift towards the best use of my time in my career is to work across a portfolio of problems at a variety of different companies and so we are seeing a larger percentage of our like executive Network it's still small but working on things
like newsletters podcasts those are sort of the like at the edge of the like content creator side but also full-time advisors fractional heads of growth fractional heads of product one day a week Etc long-term advisory relationships running workshops these kinds of things that are
more like a la carte I think they love it because of the flexibility that it creates for them they love it because of the high upside and sort of like non-linearity of possibility of results now instead of having equity in one company for four years of a hundred
percent of my time it's a portfolio approach to the not just the time and energy but also the upside and opportunities that are there as well as the fact that they're just so in demand for senior leaders who have been in meaningful seats at well-known companies
you're getting hit up by recruiters all day long and the decision what do I want to spend the next four five six years of my life on if it's just one thing is a very difficult one and so what we're finding is people seeing hey you don't need me full-time what you need is me
here a day a week to help your up and coming leaders be awesome and we're just seeing more and more of that in the industry and it's been a really interesting Trend to observe of our Executives and res evidence I would say most now are exploring this kind of like
advisory fractional or otherwise portfolio-based approach to their Futures whereas most of them came from full-time roles beforehand and the EI program at reforge is designed for that the idea there is you don't know what you can do next come teach them class at
read forward and help some folks out and then use that as a time to explore what you can do next right yeah it is and the hypothesis I was one of the first cir so I started as a PIR at the company and then ended up joining full-time as an Executives the hypothesis was hey let's
give people six months to a year so that they don't just hop from one really high stress really difficult job into the next one we also want great operators teaching and meeting our programs how do we build a win-win situation and so what we did was and created the executive and
residence program as a way to help top operators have like a transition point but I think the hypothesis was that most of them would like take on the next VP product troller CPO role or CMO type role and what we're finding is that more and more of them are using that space in time
they are building up their understanding of where they're experts and what they're like real 10x value is and then finding ways to do that across a variety of different companies and organizations versus just a single one one because they want to try before they buy so to
speak in terms of like even if you do end up somewhere full-time it's nice to be able to like really work with them and get to know them because at the executive level in particular it's a really high level of commitment you have a lot of opportunities so you want to be
really careful about it but also too because it may not be the best use of your energy like when you have a lot of Frameworks and you have a lot of broad understanding you have a lot of examples your value to the ecosystem is often by helping lots of companies be successful
not just one I suspect that's how you feel about what you're doing as well yeah when I started down this path of experimenting with a newsletter back in the day I called it a project avoid getting a real job and I was trying to do is figure out can I make a living doing this thing even
though I don't know if there's any way to make money writing a thing like my wife's always like there's no money in writing what are you doing I thought you wanted to start a company that you wanted to like do some advising well let me talk about why I think the
generalization there's no money in writing is kind of true but I think it's true because it's in general maybe not but what's happening I think is people are figuring out what is my specific knowledge just to tie the knots back to the thing we started at the beginning
that because I've taken so many reps at this is actually not easily replaceable in a focused area so modernization or like building zero to one paid channels as a marketer or whatever it is like just narrow enough that I know I'm I'm one of the five best
in the world down or I can make the case that I'm one of the five best in the world at it you as a company probably can't hire that person because you're too early you don't have enough money you don't have enough clout Etc and that I have generalized and knocked
in my mind that I can actually like be really effective in a small amount of time so what works for you I I don't know a lot about like the mechanics of your newsletter but it's not just writing you're writing about a very specific set of topics that you have
unique experience and that has harnessed a very focused community and I think we're seeing this across a bunch of different things that there's a lot of sub expertise like no one can be an expert at like company some people claim to be but like when you get down to it I feel like an expert on
Bottoms Up SAS activation strategies like I can speak pretty confidently about that if somebody has a problem in that space I can usually in an hour accelerate their learning pretty dramatically and I think as we're finding like what these things are and
people are getting smarter about what they're looking for I think it's opened up this space where you can be like the best in the world at a relatively narrow topic and make a real meaningful living out of it there's two thoughts I want to go into here and then I think we should
probably wrap up but one is I do worry there's like everyone that gets to a certain point it just like exits the career track and who the who's left to build things and I worry there's just everyone's trying to become an influencer creator person so what I want
to chat about briefly is just like downsides of this path in life and the other pieces like for folks listening that want to pursue this direction what could they do to set themselves up so the first piece is just like what are the downsides I'll share a few already so in this life that I lead
now I get no health insurance benefits I get no time off I get no 401K matching none of that I have to basically yeah pay like an absurd amount of money for health insurance and find ways to take time off like invent PTO policies for myself and all these sorts of things and
I've gotten used to it but it is weird and my wife's also an independent self employed person so we both don't have like if we have a child we have no like mat Leaf Pat leave we just have to figure that out I don't know how I do that so that comes to mind for me what
else have you seen as the downside of this path yeah the second is it's unclear what the longevity is like how far can you be removed from your full-time experience and still be valuable this is why I actually think this is a better path than what used to happen
which is all the great operators turned into VCS but to capitalists right and there you're like pretty disconnected from the Ops I think this advisory type path I'll leave the Creator piece alone because I'm not as familiar with it but in the advisor path you are still
maybe spending a day a week with these companies you are still doing you're helping grow the Next Generation I don't like to say generation but like next crop of up and coming leaders so the question mark for me is longevity is it possible to build more and more amazing companies
if more and more amazing operators are leaving the full-time Workforce I don't know but I hope that it's better than what it's been because they're actually they're building and doing Etc so I think that's the other like question mark and downside and I think
we think about this as part of our ecosystem I think as long as people are doing and generalizing and executing as I talked about at the beginning I think they can still be valuable in a meaningful way and maybe provide access to that kind of knowledge for a broader range of companies the other is just
like if everybody does it then maybe it's not so unique anymore so I think there's another there's a question there as well and the other piece is like you're constantly having to do sales and BD as an advisor like who's the next company you're always wondering if there
will be more if they stop it's a real part of it that's why it has not been attractive to me personally I will say I I like being focused on a singular problem for some amount of time I do a lot of portfolio type stuff outside I advise casually I do some coaching and
not coaching exactly but mentorship for a couple of different up and coming product leaders I do some Angel Investing those kinds of things I like to see what's happening around me but I do like having an anchor that's like my main thing and I don't like selling I
really just it turns out I don't and so you have to like that I think to do some of this stuff but I think there are things like our platform at reforge we'll be able to do for these kinds of operators a long period of time to make that easier and easier so no promises stay tuned oh okay
so then going back to maybe as a final question for folks that are just like that sounds great maybe in the future I want to become full-time advisor eir person writer person what advice do you have for folks to set their career up for a place where they can get to a
place where they can become full-time advisors let's say this is this generalized step I talked about in the learn Loop becomes even more important if what you want to do is not just do your current job well but be able to communicate why that expertise is valuable to other people other companies
across a wide range of things so I would say choose your opportunities carefully to be building the right balance of depth and breadth across different things you need to connect dots so you do need different data points from different types of product work and
different types of organizations because you don't want to be so narrow that like only d2c e-commerce company that sell you know once a year purchases or whatever is the only thing you can work on that's just I'm just an example I could have come up with a bunch of
others you need to have some bread right but it's like same problem different industry is one way to think about depth that's focused different problems same industry is another way to think about it but yeah have to come up with a unique an intersection that is clearly
you are in the top tier of the people who know how to do that that's a little bit nuanced there's an art to it I think in some respects but I think that's an important piece of the puzzle the second work at great places I think this is good advice for almost all product
managers in particular but really anybody working in Tech For Better or For Worse where you worked matters to people and for two reasons one it's easier to do great work at a place that is fundamentally working you know when the tide is rising there are tons of
opportunities to make meaningful deep awesome impact and the second is what you talked about like you're going to be in the sales this eventually and it's a lot easier to sell experience of places people have heard of than places nobody's heard of unfortunately that's I
think a big piece of this puzzle as well I don't have to spend a lot of time talking about what slack is you probably don't have to spend a lot of time talking about what Airbnb is and I think that helps and it is a meaningful part of the piece of the puzzle absolutely
freed I feel like anybody that's listened to this episode is going to be a better product manager I'm very confident of that and I'm really appreciative I hope so I am I'm sure of it and so just to close where can folks find you online if they want to reach
out learn more and how can listeners be useful to you you can find me on Twitter almost most days uh far 33d it's been my handle since I was a young man check me out there it's just the reasons that it is and that's probably my social network of choice and best place to to
communicate or hear what I'm thinking about or what I'm doing obviously I do ton of work at reforge on our events I toast a bunch of different things do a lot of stuff if you're interested in these kinds of topics please I don't want to make this a sales pitch but like
we have a lot of programs that are dedicated to deep dives into the problems that we've talked about here I'm dedicating this next chapter in my career to helping a wide range of product leaders be great at their jobs and that's what we do for a living and I hope that we can help folks there as to
what people can help me with I don't know I'm always looking for people working on interesting stuff or with interesting unique problems if you're a Founder working on something interesting and you're looking for an advisor practical advisor not for me but we have
a wide range of network experts that I'd be happy to connect folks with and if you're a product manager on a team that's looking to figure out how to break through on certain problems reach out maybe we can help with reforge or maybe I can help individually thanks for
being here fried yeah cheers thanks for having me Lenny I think what you are doing is wonderful and making a big difference for PMS everywhere so thank you thanks man cheers thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to
the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode