How to build trust and grow as a product leader

Fareed Mosavat, Chief Development Officer at Reforge and a veteran of Slack, Instacart, Zynga and Pixar, discusses how product managers actually get better at their craft. The conversation covers why PM skill is hard to develop, the execute-generalize-communicate learning loop, how sponsorship and trust drive career growth, avoiding the manager death spiral, and the rise of portfolio and advisory careers.

01Key learnings

• Get better at product management by doing real work at real companies with real customers; courses, mentorship and reading only add a layer on top of that practice.
• Run an execute-generalize-communicate loop: ship work, extract transferable lessons such as when friction helps activation, then clearly communicate those lessons to others.
• Build sponsorship by doing excellent work and communicating it, so leaders who can open bigger opportunities notice you.
• Learn your manager's and their manager's priorities, and understand adjacent teams, to become someone people trust with bigger problems.
• Avoid the manager death spiral by shifting from doer to editor: trust teammates, delegate meaningful work, and stop hoarding the most interesting projects.
• As a leader, own the outcome by proposing the resources needed to succeed rather than shrinking goals to fit the team you already have.
• Map product work into feature, growth, product-market-fit expansion and scaling work, and build enough fluency in each to lead a balanced portfolio.
• For a portfolio career, cultivate a narrow but valuable specific expertise, keep breadth across industries and problems, and work at well-known, high-performing companies.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.