How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Pixar)

Product management is a discipline defined by ambiguity. Unlike engineering, where a bootcamp can provide a baseline of functional skills, product management has no standardized pre-training. You cannot simulate the pressure of shipping to real customers, nor can you practice navigating internal politics in a classroom. To truly accelerate a career in product, one must move beyond theory and embrace the messy reality of execution.

Fareed Mosavat has navigated this ambiguity at the highest levels. Currently the Chief Development Officer at Reforge, Fareed’s career spans roles at Pixar, RunKeeper, Zynga, Instacart, and Slack. His journey from visual effects engineer to product leader offers a masterclass in professional evolution. In this deep dive, we explore his frameworks for crossing the "Product Leader Canyon," the necessity of sponsorship over mentorship, and how to manage a diverse portfolio of product work.

Key Takeaways

• The Learning Loop: Growth comes from a continuous cycle of Executing, Generalizing, Communicating, and Scaling. You cannot learn product management without doing the work.
• Sponsorship > Mentorship: Career inflections happen when a leader trusts you with a problem, not just when they give you advice. You earn this trust through deep curiosity about the business stack.
• The "Canyon" Trap: New managers often fall into a "death spiral" by hoarding high-leverage work. Success requires shifting from a "doer" to an "editor."
• Resource Ownership: Great product leaders do not settle for the resources they are given; they define the resources required to achieve the outcome.
• Portfolio Management: Senior leadership requires balancing four distinct types of work: Feature, Growth, Product-Market Fit Expansion, and Scaling.

Mastering the Cycle of Product Growth

Because there is no "bar exam" for product managers, the only way to acquire specific knowledge is through repetition. Fareed emphasizes that training, reading, and mentorship are merely layers on top of the core requirement: getting reps in.

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.

Fareed visualizes career acceleration as a four-step loop:

1. Execute: This is the foundation. You are given a known problem with a known solution (or at least a strong hypothesis). Your job is to deliver.
2. Generalize: This is where good PMs separate themselves from great ones. After executing, you must extract principles. Instead of just knowing "this button worked," you learn "for high-friction products, longer onboarding might actually drive better retention." You build a mental model that applies to future problems.
3. Communicate: Doing the work isn't enough; you must evangelize the learning. By communicating your generalized insights to the organization, you create leverage for others and visibility for yourself.
4. Scale: Successful communication leads to trust. This allows you to tackle larger, more ambiguous problems—moving from known problems to unknown opportunities.

Earning Sponsorship Over Mentorship

A common misconception in career development is the over-reliance on mentorship—having someone give you advice. Fareed argues that sponsorship is far more critical. A sponsor is someone with authority who trusts you enough to hand you a massive opportunity or a difficult problem.

Developing "Full-Stack" Curiosity

To earn sponsorship, you must demonstrate that you understand the business context far beyond your immediate scope. Fareed suggests a framework of looking "two levels up and two levels down."

• Two Levels Up: Do you understand your boss's priorities? Do you understand what the board is asking of your boss's boss?
• Two Levels Down: Do you understand the technical constraints? Do you know how the database works or how billing flows are structured?
• Left and Right: Do you understand the goals of your cross-functional partners in sales, marketing, and customer success?

When you demonstrate this level of curiosity, you signal to leadership that you can be trusted with complexity. You are not just solving a ticket; you are solving for the business equation.

Navigating the Transition from IC to Manager

The transition from Individual Contributor (IC) to Product Manager is difficult, but the transition from Senior PM to Group PM or Director is often treacherous. Fareed calls this the "Product Leader Canyon." Many high-performing ICs fall into this canyon because the behaviors that made them successful as ICs are exactly what cause them to fail as managers.

The Manager Death Spiral

When a strong IC becomes a manager, their instinct is often to hold onto the most critical, high-leverage work because they know they can execute it perfectly. They delegate the "boring" administrative work to their team. This leads to a death spiral: the manager becomes overworked and becomes a bottleneck, while the team is starved of growth opportunities because they are only doing low-impact work.

From Doer to Editor

To cross the canyon, leaders must shift their identity.

You have to shift from doer to editor... Start thinking in terms of being lazy. What’s the least amount of work I can do to make this thing as good as possible?

Being an "editor" means reviewing work, providing strategic context, and unblocking the team, rather than rewriting the spec yourself. It requires a fundamental leap of faith: trusting others to solve problems that you know you could solve yourself.

Rejecting Resource Victimhood

A subtle but fatal mistake new leaders make is accepting resource constraints as absolute. An IC asks, "What is the best I can do with these four engineers?" A Product Leader asks, "What resources do we actually need to solve this problem?"

If a project fails, saying "we didn't have enough people" is not a defense; it is an admission that you failed to make the case for necessary resources. You must own the outcome, which includes owning the resource request.

Managing a Portfolio of Product Work

As leaders scale, they move from being a specialist in one area to managing a portfolio across four distinct types of product work. Fareed, in collaboration with Casey Winters, categorizes these as:

1. Feature Work

Creating new value for existing customers to drive engagement. This is the bread and butter of core product teams.

2. Growth Work

Connecting customers to the existing value. This involves optimization, funnel work, and removing friction to accelerate adoption.

3. Product-Market Fit (PMF) Expansion

This is distinct from feature work. It involves expanding the product's surface area to reach a new market segment (e.g., internationalization) or selling a new product to the existing customer base (e.g., bundling).

4. Scaling Work

Often ignored until it's too late, this includes technical debt, internal tools, and trust and safety. These are problems that only exist because the product succeeded.

Great leaders understand which type of work they are overseeing and apply the correct metrics and strategies to each. Applying a "Growth" mindset (experimentation, short cycles) to "Scaling" work (long-term stability, risk mitigation) can be disastrous.

The Rise of the Operator-Advisor

The industry is seeing a shift in how senior talent engages with companies. Rather than the binary choice of being a full-time executive or a Venture Capitalist, a middle path is emerging: the operator-advisor.

This model allows senior leaders to fractionalize their time, advising multiple companies simultaneously. For the companies, they get access to top-tier expertise (e.g., specific knowledge on bottoms-up SaaS activation) that they couldn't afford or attract full-time. For the operator, it provides portfolio diversification and protection against burnout.

Building Specific Knowledge

To succeed in this path, general competence isn't enough. You need specific knowledge—expertise so deep in a narrow vertical that it is hard to replace. Fareed notes that this path requires a high tolerance for ambiguity. You effectively become a consultant, meaning you must handle your own sales, deal flow, and benefits. However, for those who have put in the reps and generalized their learnings, it offers a way to scale impact across the entire ecosystem.

Conclusion

Whether you are trying to land your first APM role, crossing the canyon to management, or pivoting to an advisory career, the core mechanism remains the same. You must do the work, synthesize the lessons, and communicate the value. As Fareed notes, titles are secondary to the ability to solve hairy, ambiguous problems. By focusing on the quality of the problem and the leverage of your solution, you build a career that is resilient to market shifts.