Fareed Mosavat: belief

Transcript context

…These are things you're doing in your head, basically. You're just developing frameworks, mental models, things that you're just taking with you to the next project in your mind. Exactly. So, to use an example, there was a time at Instacart where we were working on onboarding, brand new onboarding and activation flow for customers. We tried a lot of different stuff. We tried the slimmest, fastest, lowest friction, least number of steps path in, and then we had this hypothesis about helping people get set up. So we took the opposite approach, which was a really long onboarding with a bunch of different steps and wanted to see, "Was that more effective or less effective?" The generalization is, "Oh, for products that had a high bar to activation, sometimes more set up and higher friction, good friction could actually help those customers be successful. There are other kinds of products that are high-intent where they know what they need to do to have simple actions where lowering friction might be the right thing." So, that's a generalization. It's a generalization of, "Oh, I learned a thing." It's a hypothesis about how that might generalize other kinds of products or other kinds of problems that you approach. I think some of that can come from seeing it from the outside, listening to a podcast, hearing you say it, taking a course, et cetera. But at the end of the day, you have to experience it to see how it applies to the world. Then, the next bit is communication, and I think this is a bit that a lot of product managers, obviously, and any job miss, but you can't just do the work. You have to actually communicate the work. You have to talk about what you're doing, what you've generalized, what you've learned so that you can hit the next step, which is scale your opportunities. Go from smaller known problem, known solution to maybe known problem, unknown solution type of work, which is the next step. Then, eventually, to where you want to be as a senior, great, high-level individual contributor PM to the not quite known problem, maybe a goal with a set of problems and unknown solutions, unknown problems, unknown solutions, where you're actually identifying customer problems and moving towards on that. So scaling up your opportunity, and then executing again. I think of this as a loop of learning, and so of course, the percentages change over time as you move more senior in your career, but also, depending on where you're at in the step that the percentages change. Got it. So, just to recap, execute, just do the work, just ship.…

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