Fareed Mosavat
Fareed Mosavat is Chief Development Officer at Reforge, where he leads production, content, and new-product experiences. Previously, he led growth and product teams at Slack and Instacart, was a GM at Zynga, and also served as VP of Product at RunKeeper. Before all of that, Fareed’s fascinating career began in engineering for Pixar, where he learned the art of storytelling and collaboration. He also provides solid examples of how to generalize your learnings and explains why this will expand your options, make you a better PM, and boost your chances of moving into a leadership role.
Career Skills
Sponsorship is more critical than mentorship for career acceleration because it involves leaders trusting you with high-stakes opportunities and advocating for your advancement.
"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, their day-to-day help was super awesome at helping me be a..."
Senior product leaders are increasingly transitioning to 'portfolio careers' that combine advisory, fractional leadership, and content creation.
"We are seeing a larger percentage of our executive network... working on things like newsletters, podcasts... full-time advisors, fractional heads of growth, fractional heads of product one day a week..."
Communication Skills
Product leaders must move beyond working within existing constraints to actively marshaling the cross-functional resources and buy-in necessary to achieve business outcomes.
"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 marshal resources both inside your org and across your organization... you need to go out and..."
Leadership Skills
The transition from IC to manager requires a fundamental shift from executing tasks to improving and scaling the output of others.
"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..."
Effective management and influence require understanding the strategic priorities and mental models of leaders two levels above your current role.
"I call this going two stack levels up, two stack levels down in terms of your curiosity and what you understand... you should understand your boss's priorities and your boss's boss's priorities. Event..."
Product Management Skills
A comprehensive product strategy must balance a portfolio across four distinct types of work: features, growth, PMF expansion, and scaling.
"The way I think about product work... first, feature work... second is growth work... third is what we call product market fit expansion... and then there's the fourth that is always forgotten by a lo..."