Fareed Mosavat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. Don't worry. I think the other is what I call the four types of product work, and I think this is not always right at the manager stage. But for every great product leader, you go from being an expert in some type of product work, and I'll describe what those are, to now owning a portfolio of work across a bunch of different dimensions. So the way I think about product work, and Casey Winters and I worked on this framework together, a lot of it comes from him. So I don't want to oversay it, but it's all part of our product strategy program at Reforge is first, feature work, adding new features, product experiences, et cetera into a product in order to drive engagement with your existing customer base and solve a wider range of problems. The second is growth work. "How do I help my customers or a broader range of customers connect with the experiences we already have, and drive acceleration and either top-line growth, or modernization, or whatever the most important metrics are. I think you've had many guests on to talk about growth type work. The third is related to growth, but I think is slightly different, which is what we call product market fit expansion. So it's not exactly feature work, which is like, "Hey, now that I use your product more, I have this thing I need in order to keep using it because I'm a power seller," those kinds of things. But instead, we want to attract a whole new sub-segments of markets to the product by adding something. There are two forms of product market fit expansion. There's either taking the same product and finding a new audience. Things like internationalization or vertical like, "I'm going to sell the same product to a different vertical because we're a verticalized product." The other is selling a different product to the same audience. This is what bundling strategies basically look like. Right? So adding new marketing tools to a marketing suite, et cetera that attract a different kind of customer and that either drive upsell or drive new audiences to come to that. So that's the third kind of product work, and then there's the fourth that is always forgotten by a lot of PMs which is scaling work. So what is the stuff we're doing that is because we are growing, there's new product work we need to do? Most people think of this as technical scaling, but I actually put things like trust, and safety, and other kinds of what we call user scaling problems in this as well. There are a lot of problems that come up at Airbnb just because instead of having 10 hosts, you have 10,000 hosts. Right? There are a lot of problems at Twitter and Facebook that are well puzzle-sized that are a result of their scale, and I think that's a chunk of work that I put in the same category as technical scaling, which is like, "How do we make sure the product continues to work for the people who are using it?" So the challenge of the four kinds of product work. "Okay. Great. We have a framework. How is that useful, Fareed?" "How do we make sure the product continues to work for the people who are using it?" So the challenge of the four kinds of product work. "Okay. Great. We have a framework. How is that useful, Fareed?" It's not that useful. It is to know what kind you're doing, but I think as you go up the stack of product leadership, you are going from being probably an expert in one of these, so for me, growth, to needing to think about all these other ones, and you've probably never done them before. Right? Maybe you've done two, but how do you lead across a bunch of different things, and how do you make sure not to be over-focused on the one that you care the most about? We've all seen this. Right? It's like growth leader takes over, and everything is a growth problem. Everything is an experiment. Everything should be measured. That's not necessarily true for some of these other kinds of work, and so how do you start to lead, and grow, and build a portfolio across those? I think that's where some of the stuff we talked about before, deep curiosity, looking across, asking a lot of questions, getting to a foundational understanding of what's important there, et cetera is really important.…

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