Fareed Mosavat: belief

Transcript context

…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. Fareed Mosavat 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, about a year at Instacart leading a number of their key growth analytics and product efforts. He's a GM at Zynga, he's VP of Product at Runkeeper, and something that I only learned during our 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 PM. Fareed is such an A-plus human full of so much insight, and I'm really excited for you to learn from him. With that, I bring you Fareed Mosavat. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc 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 where I 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 and guides in the Coda Doc Gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better, and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account. I'm excited to chat with my friend, John Cutler, from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.…

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