You Can't Do Homework to Become a Great PM: Fareed Mosavat on Reps, Sponsors and the Leadership Canyon

Fareed Mosavat is the Chief Development Officer at Reforge, where he runs content teams, parts of operations and expert partnerships. Before that he spent almost four years leading Slack's Lifecycle growth team, about a year and a half building an early growth team at Instacart, and held roles at Runkeeper and Zynga. He started his career at Pixar, working on visual effects tools, and is credited on Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E and Up.

Mosavat says Pixar's lasting lesson was that what matters is what appears on screen, not whether the simulation is physically real. When he first built effects like bubbles and sand the way they would work in reality, he was told to focus on the end result and the feeling. If the numbers had to be fudged to look right, that was the right call.

He carries that into product work: a strategy document is only an input into the experience you deliver to customers. In Reforge's content, he says, it does not matter whether every principle fits neatly into one framework; what matters is that people can solve actual problems. He also describes his career as chosen by interesting problems, not titles, moving between VP, individual-contributor PM, engineer and content roles.

On scale, he says Reforge has around 150 employees, 19 cohort-based programs, more than 10,000 active members, about a dozen executives and residents, and hundreds of expert partners.

Mosavat says product management is hard to improve at because there is no obvious pre-training. Engineering has bootcamps and degrees that give foundational knowledge, but PM has nothing that maps directly to the day-to-day work. He cites Naval Ravikant's idea of specific knowledge that can only be gained by doing the work, and says you don't know if a PM will be great until they start.

Breaking in is also hard, with no clear linear path apart from elite schools and big-company APM programs, which admit few people and guarantee nothing. Even inside companies, learning to be a good PM at Google or Facebook still leaves each person to work out how to generalize across products as they grow more senior.

Reforge, he says, aims to accelerate the learning loop, not to certify anyone as a PM: help people avoid solving problems from first principles by following those who have done great work. But "you can't do homework, you can't do exercises, you can't do fake stuff". Training, mentorship and reading sit on top of real execution, repeated over and over.

Asked how a PM's time should be split, Mosavat answers with a loop. Early on it is almost all execution, with a junior PM given a known problem and a known solution. The next step is generalization: not just "what is the best Slack settings page" but which lessons apply to other problems, which is where reading, courses and conversations with experts help.

His example is an Instacart onboarding experiment. The team tried the slimmest, lowest-friction flow and then the opposite, a long setup. The generalization was that products with a high bar to activation can benefit from good friction, while high-intent products with simple actions may want less. Hearing this from the outside helps, he says, but you have to experience it yourself.

Communication comes next: nobody knows what you are thinking unless you share what you did and learned. That lets you scale your opportunities from known problem and known solution toward unknown problems with more autonomy. Early careers go deeper and later ones go wider, so a growth specialist who wants to lead core product must show deeper lessons about customer psychology and the business, not just experiments that move numbers.

Mosavat's biggest inflections came when someone noticed his work and trusted him with more. At a game startup, the CEO asked him, as the person who understood the data best, to help decide what to build next, which became product management. At Slack, leaders including Merci Grace and CPO April Underwood gave him broader growth responsibility. He calls this sponsorship and says it differs from mentorship, which is about day-to-day help.

To attract that trust, he says, treat your job as changing how the organization thinks, not only moving metrics. He taught Slack's organization how the growth model worked, which created leverage and trust. It also helps to work on problems that are among the company's top four or five priorities, because then CEOs, heads of product and peers notice.

He recommends being curious two stack levels up and two down, plus left and right. Down means technical layers like payments and databases; up means your boss's and your boss's boss's priorities, eventually the board's. Left and right means neighboring teams such as core product, enterprise and sales. Being the person who connects the dots makes you the desk people go to, and each person should find their own top-10% strength and lean into it.

Lenny notes this doesn't require much extra work, and that simply asking your manager for their priorities and their manager's signals care. Mosavat adds that you can then tailor your communication to what matters to them. He admits he hasn't solved how to do this well remotely without many extra one-on-ones.

Mosavat describes the "Product Leader Canyon" between strong IC and leader. IC growth is relatively straightforward, because you succeed as a solo PM by being good at execution. When promoted, the instinct is to keep the most interesting and critical projects yourself and hand the rest to others, which creates the manager death spiral: you are overworked, blocking decisions, and taking learning opportunities away from your team.

His advice is to start trusting others and shift from doer to editor. Be directive when needed, let experienced people run when they understand the problem, and coach in the middle, while asking what the least work is that makes something as good as possible. Hiring people you trust matters too.

A second mistake is treating resources as fixed. As an IC you deliver the most value with the people you have, but as a leader you should propose what resources the problem needs, including from other organizations like marketing. He admits he has made this mistake several times, such as saying "we only had four engineers" when the ask was to solve the problem.

The other canyon challenge is breadth. Mosavat describes four types of product work, a framework he developed with Casey Winters for Reforge's product strategy program. Feature work serves existing customers, growth work connects people to experiences that exist, product-market fit expansion adds new audiences or products, and scaling work covers technical scaling plus trust, safety and user-scaling problems.

Most leaders are expert in one type, and the risk is treating everything as that type: a growth leader makes everything an experiment. The remedy is curiosity, asking which category each responsibility belongs to, and building a portfolio allocation. He says he is not a good technical PM but wants to understand whether technical debt work matters.

Lenny sums it up as more scope, scaling yourself and asking for resources, and Mosavat agrees that owning business outcomes is the baseline at leadership level. He recalls failing at Instacart to make the case for a bigger team, and at Slack taking too product-centered an approach when closer work with marketing, sales, data and finance might have moved activation and monetization more.

Mosavat sees a trend of senior leaders diversifying into advising, angel investing, writing newsletters and fractional roles such as head of growth one day a week. He suggests drivers include COVID, remote work and heavy demand for experienced leaders. Reforge's Executive in Residence program was meant as a transition between big jobs, but more participants are using it to build portfolio careers.

He argues that people are discovering narrow specific knowledge, such as bottoms-up SaaS activation, that few can match and that early companies cannot afford to hire full-time. With enough reps and generalization, they can be effective in a small amount of time. Downsides include no benefits, uncertain longevity, constant selling and the risk that too many great operators leave building.

Mosavat himself prefers an anchor role with some outside advising, mentoring and angel investing, and says he dislikes selling. For anyone aiming at this path, he advises balancing depth and breadth to reach a unique intersection where you are top tier, and working at great places, because it is easier to do impactful work there and easier to sell experience from names people know.