Fareed Mosavat: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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 why it's innately tricky to become better as a product manager. It's such a weird job to get better at. So my first question is actually, why is it so hard to become better as a PM? 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 a baseline set of understanding that you can use to be a product manager. People come from MBAs, people come from certain kinds of majors in college, et cetera, but it's not engineering where like, "Okay. With a couple of weeks of bootcamp 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 have a credential that helps me 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 do on a day-to-day basis. I think there's an idea that Naval Ravikant talked about on Twitter and in blog posts a long time ago, this concept of specific knowledge that can only be gathered by actually doing the work. A lot of product management, really, is like that. You get better by doing it, and so you start in the same place, if that makes sense. Of course, there are different skills and intellectual capacities, et cetera 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's very hard. The second is the thing I just alluded to, which is breaking in and getting your first role. It's just 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 clear linear path, except for maybe being a Stanford or Harvard grad, top-tier school grad, NCS 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 very limited in terms of the number of people that they let into the business. 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, 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 at 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, et cetera. So what we tried 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. earning 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 following 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 at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management. So any kind of training, mentorship, reading, et cetera that you do is just a 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, and you have to do it over, and over, and over again.…

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