Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar)
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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. And so any kind of like training, mentorship, reading, etc. That you do is just the 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 that the core is. You have to actually execute and deliver great products. You have to do it over and over and over again. For Reed, most of all, is the chief development officer at Reforch, 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 and about a year at Instacart, leading a number of their key growth analytics and product efforts. He's a GM at Zynga, his VPF product at RunKeeper, and something that I only learned during her 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 our scope, and how to create opportunities where you get more responsibility as a PM. For Reed is such an 8-plus human full of so much insight, and I'm really excited for you to learn from him. With that, I bring you for Reed, most of all. 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 for many guests on this podcast, including Shreos, Gokul, and Shashir, 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 a $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. Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here. John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics. But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launch a CDP. What's the thought process there? What we've always thought of Amplitude is being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments, and learn. That's the heart of growth to us.
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