How to Get Better at Product Management

Fareed Mosavat

Chief Development Officer, Reforge

PRODUCT CAREER

The Problem

PM Learning Has No Shortcut

No clear pre-training path like engineering or law
Your MBA, bootcamp, or degree won't prepare you for day-to-day PM work
You only get better by doing: real products, real customers, real data
Landing your first PM role is exceptionally hard with no clear linear path

"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."

The Framework

PM Career Path: IC to Leader

IC Stage: Become really good at execution and shipping
Senior IC: Work on bigger, higher-impact problems
Team Lead: Shift from doer to editor and multiplier

Sponsorship Loop

Be excellent at your work. Show curiosity across the org. Connect dots that matter. People notice. Leaders want to give you bigger problems. You sponsor yourself.

The Mentoring Shift

As a team lead, shift from: "I'll solve the hard problems" to "How do I plus other people's work?"

How to Get Better

Build Sponsor Relationships & Context

Become an expert: Are you the person people ask for advice? Can you connect dots?
Two levels down: Understand the technical details, databases, dunning policies, payment flows. Know how things really work.
Two levels up: Know your boss's priorities and their boss's priorities. Eventually, know what the board cares about.
Left and right: What are adjacent teams doing? How do your pieces fit with enterprise when you own self-serve?

Two Stack Levels

You must understand the work 2 levels deeper and 2 levels higher than your current role to be truly leveraged and trusted.

The Trust Multiplier

When you understand how the whole company works and you show curiosity, people sponsor you into bigger roles. Not because you ask, but because they see you're ready.

Biggest Trap

The Manager Death Spiral

You got promoted because you were the best IC on the team
You see all the important problems and grab them all
You hand the easy, boring stuff to your team
Your team never learns; you never scale; you burn out

The Fix

Shift from doer to editor. Trust your team with hard problems. Your job is to plus their work, not do it yourself.

Contrarian Takes

What Most PMs Get Wrong

✗Books and courses make you a better PMINSTEAD →✓ They're a layer on top. The real acceleration comes from doing work and getting reps on real products with real customers.

✗Landing your first PM job has a clear pathINSTEAD →✓ It's exceptionally hard. No linear path except maybe APM programs at top tier companies, and those are still rare.

✗As you grow, take on more projects yourselfINSTEAD →✓ Scale by multiplying others. The best leaders hand their teams the hard, interesting work and plus it, not do it.

✗Good strategy docs drive product successINSTEAD →✓ Strategy docs are just inputs. What matters is the end experience you deliver to customers and whether it solves real problems.

Based on Fareed Mosavat's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @far33d on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

03:55 Lessons from Pixar 09:07 What Fareed does at Reforge 11:57 The scale of Reforge at this time 13:51 Why it’s so difficult to become a better PM 18:03 A PM pie chart: execution, generalizing your solutions, communication, and scaling 23:00 How creating trust helped Fareed’s career grow 26:24 How to gain trust by leveraging your curiosity and communication skills 33:50 How to move from PM to Product Lead 36:43 The manager death spiral and how to avoid it 40:43 The four types of product work 44:13 Moving from IC to product manager 47:15 How to ask for the proper resources 50:00 The trend of senior PMs diversifying into advising, teaching, and angel investing 57:20 The downsides of being your own boss 01:00:45 Advice for breaking into advising

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