Stop Doing Work That Doesn't Matter | Fareed Mosavat (Ex-Slack)

So I think of it as like, there's the work and there's the work behind the work. Right? Is the way I just think about this. And like, the work is talking to customers, working with engineers and designers to build things, analyzing data, identifying opportunities, figuring out what you need to change, and iterating. Like, that's really the core loop, right? Then there's all the work behind the work. Every single intermediary output, product briefs, product specs, technical specs, figma docs, exact decks, roadmap reviews, strategy reviews, data reviews, all those sorts of things. And over time, because of the cost of cross coordination across a bunch of different teams, you end up having to spend as much time socializing the work. The process of like a product review goes from we're here to think hard about this problem so that we get better ideas and build better stuff to I need to convince this executive that I'm smart and that I know what I'm doing and just get a green check mark on it. Right. I'm trying to get an A plus and move on. And I think as soon as you see processes that start to feel like we did a meeting before the meeting to socialize the thing so that the meeting was just a checkpoint that's no longer part of the creative process, that's part of like the approval process. And so I find that as a leader, it's my job to see those things because they tend to happen organically. Right. Identify them and rip them out as much as we can.

Today, my guest is Farid Mosovat, a growth veteran who has worked at Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Pixar and more. Fareed and I had some real talk about how to cross chasm from product manager to product leader, how to not confuse the work behind the work with the actual work, and how to look beyond traditional job titles to chart your own career path. Fareed is one of my favorite product leaders, and I think you'll love our conversation. Be sure to like and subscribe for more interviews like this. Let's dive in. All right. Varee. Well, welcome. It's really great to have you here.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here too.

Yeah. So why don't we start with this? You wrote a blog post a while ago about the chasm between product manager and product leader. Maybe you can talk about why the chasm exists and what it takes to cross this chasm.

Yeah. So the way I think about the product leader canyon, or the product leader, is that what. How do you get a leadership role in a company, right? What are the things you do to get that leadership role? And then what the things that you do to get that leadership role is by being really deep, by working like really thoughtfully, usually on a narrow set of problems that you've been assigned as a product manager and really going hard on them and learning them and doing great work and building on those sorts of things. And the way I think about this is there's actually it's usually in one of the the four Kinds of Product work is another blog post we wrote a while ago, Kasey and I, as part of our product strategy program. We think of the four kinds of product work as growth work, which you know is basically like helping your existing customers connect with the existing value of your product and more and accelerate that growth. Feature work building new features and functionality into a product that allows you to basically deepen engagement with your existing customer base, right? That's what most product managers end up working on is feature work. Product market fit expansion, which is entering new markets either with new products that address the same audience and dramatically expand either your monetization or your addressable audience, or delivering the same product to new audiences. So things like internationalization or going up market to enterprise or identifying new adjacent markets with new products like if you think about HubSpot or Salesforce or other multi product companies that they're always building new products, some of those to deepen monetization with their existing audience and some of those to address new audiences. Going from sales to marketing for instance, or marketing to customer support or those kinds of things where a similar product and a similar set of functionality can help you address a new audience. And then last is scaling work. So this is scaling work, not just technical infrastructure. A lot of product managers work on those kinds of things, but also things that that are that become challenges as you scale. So think about the canonical example I use here is scaling is not just about technical infrastructure. It's also something like trust and safety or fraud management or payments or billing or trouble around or internal tools, those kinds of things. And most product managers start in one of these four areas and as a result of their success in that area are asked to lead bigger and bigger functions. And so one, it's the shift from going from one type of product work to managing multiple types of product work and thinking across a portfolio. And often the kind of work that's successful in one doesn't work in another. If I take growth practices and apply it to features, I may not be if take a one size fits all I Might not do great work. Second, you go from being really good at leading engineering and design teams to build features to having to lead other product managers. And I think a lot of early managers, and this is true across all kinds of different functions, but in particular in product, I think the tendency is to want to build the specs and the product and the product briefs and analyze the data for the most important stuff yourself and hand off the easier stuff to your team. And I think that that tends to result in you getting stretched thin and not actually doing the work of leading and managing people. And there's also things like your individual scope versus creating scope for the organization, trying to collect parts versus and add more to your like, empire of things you manage versus working through other teams. There are a lot of challenges and it's just such a different job than product management. Instead of working with designers and engineers directly to build new features or drive growth or add new markets, etceter, you're basically helping other product managers succeed at their job and grow your scale of influence and role. And so how do you find that balance, Right. Between doing the work yourself and leading other people to do that work? And I think that that's a really hard challenge for a lot of folks and it's a pretty big jump.

Got it. Like another thing that's happened recently is just like a lot of like middle managers got laid off. Right. You know, I think there's like a. You have this term called manager death spiral. Yeah, you can talk about that a little bit more. Yeah.

So I think the manager death spiral is sort of one of the elements I talked about in the product leader canyon, which is this idea that as a new manager, you think your job is to basically be a PM for more and more stuff. And so you end up taking on a lot of individual contributor work. You're delegating only the least important responsibilities versus the most important responsibilities. You end up with more work to do. You're not getting leverage, and you get. You just feel totally overwhelmed by the level of work that you have. Right. And you're not able to succeed as a leader. And I have personally done this, like I've 100% done this. When I first took on managing PMs and leading teams, my tendency was to want to work on the most important problems myself and just delegate other stuff, little things to other people. And what I found myself in was I wasn't being a good mentor to other early career product managers. I wasn't getting leverage from my own time in meaningful ways. And I was Actually blocking the development of other people. So I think those things, those are the things that I think of in the manager desk spiral. I think there's sort of a different spiral happening right now in tech because a lot of organizations have found that they've just based on the incentives of their organization or easy hiring or those kinds of things, they made a lot of people managers. Unfortunately there is not a great career path for someone to be a very senior individual contributor in product. Now I don't think that's true. I think it doesn't need to be true. But what it meant was that great product managers, if you wanted to retain them and you wanted them to keep you working, especially because of their nature as people who tend to be, you know, folks who want to lead businesses, we're sort of put in the position of like, hey, why don't you manage 1pm, why don't you manage two product managers, why don't you manage three? And sort of orgs got really, really layered right from, you know, you have some orgs where there's like a CPO, multiple VPs, multiple directors under each of those, multiple group product managers under each of those, multiple early managers under each of those and the people actually doing the work. You end up in like almost a 2 to 1 ratio of managers to people actually doing work and working with individual contributor, like working with engineers and designers. And so I think what we've ended up with is a realization across a lot of these companies that like they don't need that many layers, they need to figure out how to flatten their organizations. And I think that that means that there is an opportunity now if you're a great product manager who loves building things to sort of like step out of the I only want to manage people route and say, hey, I want to take responsibility personally for a really important, strategically valuable project in my company and actually build it and actually do the work of working with the team to build it versus just managing other people to build it. And I think it's a complicated time. I think the number of roles and the number of opportunities and product and all over tech is sort of shrinking. And I think that a lot of people are going to have to reflect on whether they are, you know, want to be pure managers or want to build products still.

Yeah, I know like companies have like flattened the orgs, but I'm not sure if they've also concurrently built like a dual track ladder where you know, the ICPM's can actually keep growing. Maybe some companies have done.

Yeah, there's not, I don't know, a lot of orgs, companies where there are very senior, like principal PMs. The way there are principal engineers or staff engineers and those kinds of things, you sort of get. You kind of hit a ceiling. Now the tricky thing here is if you think about the job of a product manager, what does it mean to be very senior? Right. What does it mean to like, have a lot of leverage as a product manager? It is very hard to have a lot of product leverage, meaning you drive a really important piece of strategy that's really big and important without having a team to do that. Because they tend to involve like large groups of people doing stuff. Right. I think the exception is actually around really important growth problems and product market fit expansion, the other kind of product work. Because I think team companies are figuring out that the best way to build a new product is to have a small team of highly motivated, highly, very senior, thoughtful people with a ton of business context to build those new products with small teams. And we're seeing this like, you know, it's sort of shaking out. The number one thing I hear from CEOs after they do a layoff is we're moving faster and we're more effective as an organization. And why is that? That's probably because you have your people with your best contacts who are your highest performers, leading smaller teams and being able to move more nimbly without having to do all the overhead of communication. And they're able to get a lot of work done and do really great work. And so I think that there is a growing opportunity. If you're a very good product manager who wants to like, I think my recommendation would be find really important problems in the company that are best solved with small teams of people. Don't be a generalist. Actually move towards being really good at a specific customer segment, a really specific type of feature, an important piece of the puzzle, something that's on the CEOs list of the two or three most important things at the company. And I think you can build a lot of leverage and impact with a small team around those types of things.

Yeah. If you have that track record of like, you know, working with small team to shift something great and there's like an important project, then yeah, I think there's opportunity there for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. When I think about the best work I've done at every company I've worked at over the past, like decades, the best work tends to happen at the time when there's a very small team working on a Narrow problem that's really important to the organization. For instance, when I took on monetization at Slack, we hadn't really had a team working on free to paid conversion. It was a pilot. It was just like, hey, can you check this out and see if there's something interesting? And so what was the work I was doing? I was analyzing the data myself or with A1 data analyst to sort of identify where the opportunities are. We were looking at how our trends were changing over time. We identified opportunities, we did a bunch of customer research, and then we were able to do a bunch of scrappy experiments that started to move the needle. And all of a sudden, with a team of two or three people, we went from having very little visibility on this problem to a ton of visibility on this problem, to becoming teachers inside the company to the rest of the organization about how monetization works and what our levers might be and then actually running experiments to do it. And had so much momentum, like really early and a lot of ways as we grew, as we were successful, we wanted to put more resources on it. It becomes more of a leadership problem versus a doing problem. And now, like, things start to slow down. We're trying to take bigger swings, you know, those kinds of things. So. And I've seen that example time and time again. And I think you can, as a product manager, if you're on a problem that people care about, you can have a lot of impact with a very small team.

Yeah. And like, you know, like real talk. Right? Like, doing stuff and working with engineers and designers is fun, man. Like, why is it just like a junior PM thing? No, I, I think it's like what people really enjoy doing.

Yeah. When I think about what separates a senior product, a senior product person, like person who really knows what they're doing from a junior person. It's not, I'm working on, I'm leading people and managing versus I'm not. It is when you're most junior. You're working on a already defined problem with an already defined solution. And your job is to execute that work with the team to make sure it gets done. It's high quality, that it moves the metrics that you care about analyzing that it's really an execution problem. But someone says, we want to build this feature. Here's the solution. Go get it done. Right. As you get more senior, then you're on a defined problem, say monetization or our engagement is too low, or customers don't like X, Y and Z. And your job is to identify the Best solution for that problem, right? So now instead of someone saying to you go build this feature, you're trying to define the feature or the change or the thing so that you go from defined problem, defined solution to defined problem, undefined solution. Your job is to solve that. And then the next step is undefined problems with undefined solutions. So like identifying new opportunities starting from first principles based on like basic research in a high level area. So then you go to like, you know, maybe what are our next three most important bets? As an organization it is not clear to me that you have to be a director or a VP to be working on those types of problems. Like I think there are many problems that can be solved with small teams that are undefined problems with undefined solutions. And that very thoughtful, great PMs with a lot of customer context and company context can actually solve. What ends up being the hard part is convincing other people to do those things right. Like, and that's where like leadership and influence come into play.

Yeah, I think this is like the, it's called the PSH Framework, right. By Shishir. I don't know if you've heard of this, but he had a diagram.

I haven't. He's a very smart guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So why don't we wrap up this topic by like, you know, I worked at too many different companies I think but like I've noticed that as companies get bigger, like product managers like start doing this performance theater thing right where like you know they instead of like talking to customers, they started like you want to do manage up and get optics and they start like making a perfect exec deck and they do all these pre reviews and Yeah, I don't know, it's just like, it just feels like a very inefficient to me. Do you have any suggestions for like, do you have any thoughts on why this happens and like how you can deal with this?

Yeah, so I think of it as like there's the work and there's the work behind the work. Right. Is the way I just think about this and like the work is talking to customers, working with engineers and designers to build things, analyzing data, identifying opportunities, figuring out what you need to change and iterating. Like that's really the core loop, right? It's like that little, you know, hypothesis, solution, delivery, analysis loop. That is the real work. That's like what you have to be doing as an organization to do it. Then there's all the work behind the work. Every single intermediary output, product briefs Product specs, technical specs, figma docs like exec decks, roadmap reviews, strategy reviews, data reviews, all those sorts of things. And over time, because of the cost of cross coordination across a bunch of different teams, you end up having to spend, I would say, like, as I've worked, there are inflection points in companies, but once you get to like, I don't know, I'm not going to guess on company sizes but because it's different for each company, but certainly at a thousand person company, you're probably spending as much time socializing the work and doing intermediary outputs because someone defined a process and you have to do this thing and you have to get this approval and you have to do this gate in order to like get to the next step. And so you end up the process of like a product review goes from we're here to think hard about this problem so that we get better ideas and build better stuff to I need to convince this executive that I'm smart and then I know what I'm doing and just get a red, a green check mark on it. Right. I'm trying to get an A plus and move on. And I think as soon as you see processes that start to feel like we did a meeting before the meeting to socialize the thing so that the meeting was just a checkpoint that's no longer part of the creative process, that's part of like the approval process. And so as a leader, it's my job to see those things because they tend to happen organically, right?

Yeah.

Identify them and rip them out as much as we can. And it happens in everything. It's not just product. Right. It's that someone does something that's useful. They're like, hey, I wrote this experiment hypothesis document and it actually turns out to be a really useful way to talk about it. And then all of a sudden you're like, all experiments need the experiment hypothesis. Correct. And then it stops being a tool for building better work and a tool for convincing other people internally. So what was the question? The question was, what should you do about this?

Yeah, I guess, I guess the change really has to come from top down. Right. Like the leaders have to recognize this is happening. Right? So.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. So for instance, at Reforge, we're a remote, We've. The company was a remote team even before COVID and Brian. The CEO believes that good writing is the best way to drive clarity on a problem. And he cares a lot about like problem clarity as one of the things that's like one of the core values of the company. And that's really good and important. We're a doc based culture. No slides, all that sort of stuff. You think all that stuff's good, right? You don't want people selling. You want them like really thinking about the deep problems. You want them pre reading beforehand so we can have substantive discussions versus just reviewing stuff everybody should have read before the meeting. But what ended up happening was these docs got more and more complicated with more and more writing, with more and more work behind them and they got really unwieldy. And the reason was was because the incentives of the organization were prove that you've thought through the problem really well. So now everybody wanted to show all their work. Right. And it just like ended up being more the value you were getting out of the doc versus the work put into it. Suddenly got into like a bad ratio. Got it. And I think that's what you have to do top down as a leader in an organization is identify where did someone put in way too many hours on this thing and how do we like undo it. So yeah, it's just ripping those out. So one of my things that I've been, I did at Reforge and we've been, I've spent time on in other companies too is like try to get rid of intermediary outputs where the work for the inter, the intermediary output is as big. You could have just gone and built the thing, you know, and try to identify those things and get rid of them.

Yeah. I talked to some folks from Shopify and they have a interesting culture where they actually have like Async product reviews where like some PM just records like a 10 minute loom.

Yeah.

And then they share like a prototype link in the Slack channel and the leaders just try it out.

You know, it's like yep, some great rules of thumb around this are review real prototypes and work not docs whenever you can. I think that that can be really helpful. Review very early in the front so that the team can operate independently after that with trust. So it's like only review early, give them the feedback they need and then let them run independently after that tends to be a good model that I've seen companies do. So for instance, at Slack we were doing a lot of product review stuff and it was slowing everything down. And we got to the point where it was like we identified what are the couple of things that the CEO cared about the most. Let's make sure that the people working directly on the problem not all the Managers between that person and that person sat in a room with the CEO directly and had a discussion as early as possible to understand what his, you know, constraints were, frameworks were, etc. Around that and then let them run at it and check in very occasionally. But again it's about short circuiting. Like the problem you run into is when a PM has to approve it with their manager, then their manager has to go approve it with their manager and their manager has to prove it with them and then with the CEO and then the message the CEO is getting is like through four layers of filter. And so I think the more you can take the actual person at the end and empower them and give them the opportunity to spend time with decision makers, the key decision makers, the better.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think the best managers I've had don't really care if you go talk to their skip level or like the CEO. Like they're not like insecure, you know.

Yeah. Their job is to help you be successful, not make themselves look good. Right, exactly. And I think that's the key thing. Yeah.

So let's talk about like your personal career a little bit. Like you were a PM director at Slack and let's start with like why did you leave and join Reforge?

Yeah, I'll actually start a little bit before that. So I actually was a general manager at Zynga and a VP of product at a startup in Boston called Runkeeper before I moved back out to the bay area in 2014. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I did look at a bunch of like head of product roles at early stage startups. And honestly none of them were a good fit. Mostly because the types of roles that I was being recruited for were at companies that were either like, didn't really have product market fit or were kind of small and they weren't scaling. And I realized personally that the thing I wanted to do coming back out to the Bay Area was have a real like fast growing startup experience. It was learn what it's like to be on the like steep part of the curve at a company. And so I had to sort of say, well, how do I do that? And one of the ways I do, I would, I would have to do that is kind of take a step back on seniority or at least title. Right. And what I realized was that I could have more responsibility with more customers and more impact being an individual contributor PM at some of these fast scaling companies than I could being a CPO at A small startup that didn't really was like mostly like trying to fix itself for instance. Right?

Yeah.

And so I sort of like let go of that title ego and joined Instacart as a product manager and but I tried to identify a problem I could have a ton of impact on that that company needed so that I could be working on again something that's on the CEO's top one or two things that they care about. And growth is a wonderful place to work because it's always on the CEOs like it is always one of the most important problems for a company. And so it's high visibility, it's high impact and you can move really quickly and sort of show your strengths with it. So I had this sort of frame. So then I moved to Slack. Same thing. I actually joined Slack as a senior PM on the growth team working on activation. We talked about this monetization problem. Sort of took that on as a zero to one problem inside the company, showed some success and was able to grow my responsibility over time eventually running the whole growth team there and running the self service business. And so that was an organic growth based around my context in the company, my understanding of it, the trust I'd gotten from other people and my ability to move fast and work with people to move really quickly. Right. And so every time I'm making a transition. So when I decided it was time to leave Slack Co. Had grown a ton. It wasn't exactly the organization I joined. I want, I like, I like being close to the work and was finding myself being more the skills I had to learn to be successful in that org were not the kinds of skills that I like felt naturally inclined towards at that size of company. Right. What I look for is actually I've tried to like worried about ladder stuff and titles. I'm more interested in impact products that I believe that I can like engage with and care deeply about because I think I do my best work when I do that with people I trust and enjoy working with and share values with about what good work looks like and where I can learn something new like that is my most important thing. So I call it. I have this like mental model around give something, take something. When I think about roles. So give something is what do I bring to the table that this company doesn't have or that I can really be super successful at and stand out. Right. So at Slack that was. I had a breadth of consumer growth experience around experimentation, being super disciplined about that, thinking about growth problems that the company had some expertise but was still kind of building. So I knew I could do that and I could bring that to the table, like bring some senior thinking around that. What was I taking from it? I'd never worked at a B2B company. I didn't know anything about enterprise software. I didn't know anything about building stuff for work. And so I learned a ton around that. And that made me a more like full, you know, experienced, more broad, successful product leader over time. At Reforge, it was the same thing. It was like I didn't choose to jump off the product, like, thing. I started out as an EIR teaching courses at Reforge. I started developing some new ideas with the CEO. We tried some new products. I was helping out with that kind of stuff and I decided that this was a group of people I wanted to work with. It was a problem I cared deeply about because it was about helping people in my job do their craft well. I was good at it. And because I'd been on the content side developing a program as well as was like the best customer for this kind of stuff. Like, I too am a product leader. I felt like I could be a really good leader for our content operations and partnerships. And so I said, hey, let's, let's figure out a way in which I can. You already have a great product leader. Like, I don't need to be that. I'm going to do product work on this other part of the business and learn a ton of new stuff that I'd never done before. And that was fun and exciting and I learned a ton from it.

That's awesome. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't have that kind of attitude, man. Like even me a couple years ago we were like, you know, oh, I'm managing like a couple of PM is not going to manage like twice as much. I gotta get a fancier title. I don't know, it's just like really limits your options. I think having that, that you have is like really great.

Yeah, it's like what look and it's a, it's a luxurious spot to be in some respects. Like I have a lot. Look if when I was earlier in my career, I care. I did care about those things. And you do need to because you need. Yeah, I do think you need some proof points on your resume that make you trustworthy for people to take risks on you. Right. And so like there is, there is a point to some of that. But I think as you. As I have grown in my career and I found I have this Problem where if I don't like what I'm doing, I'm not very good at it. I like have a really hard time working. I work really, really hard when I love what I'm doing and I love the people I'm around and I love the problem and I will go to any lengths.

Yeah.

But I kind of like almost turn off like to zero if those elements aren't there. And so I figured out in some of these roles, like even though I had like fancy titles and those kinds of things, if I wasn't engaged, I wasn't doing a good job and I was just hurting myself.

Yeah.

Because life is short because over time if you're not doing good work, people are like, that guy stinks. And like, you know, it's like I don't want to be in that position, so I try to stay out of it.

Yeah, same thing. I. I think when I'm interviewing for jobs, like if it's in a field or area I'm passionate about, then like I would always get the offer, but something I'm actually not interested in then like I usually don't do that.

Well, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

So like what are you doing now? You. You've had left Reforge. What were you think about next?

Yeah. So I wound down my full time role at Reforge in the summer of this year. I took a little bit of time off and started reflecting on what I wanted to do next. And there are. My goal right now is I think that when you just start recruiting, meaning like you talk to a bunch of recruiters and you start taking roles, you are then operating on their timeline. Like a company wants to hire a person to join the in this specific role and you be. It becomes a job of like, okay, am I a fit for that? Am I a fit for that? Am I a fit for that? And you're on their timeline, so it's like they need somebody now. You interview, you go. And all of a sudden once you have offers and stuff, like the pressure is there to like take them. You know, you get you. I find myself like driving momentum. So what I wanted to do is create time and space to take bigger risks, if that makes sense, and try different things. And so I'm trying to construct this next phase of my career around some about. About. I like spending real time with opportunities and being able to like create opportunities for bigger bets and bigger risks. And I don't know exactly what that looks like. So a couple of things that I'm working on right now. One is I'm working with my friend Aaron Harris to build a accelerator type program to help post seed pre A companies at their that have product market fit but need to still figure out their repeatable growth engines like work with us closely to help them drive the growth that that will help them raise a Series A. So that's a project, that's an experiment and it's going to take time to get right and so I want to make sure that I have the space and time to get that right and see if it can be successful and see if it can work. I'm working on a podcast with Brian, the CEO of Reforge called Unsolicited Feedback and one that's just fun. But in a world where I'm in a full time exec role just getting going on a brand new problem, I probably don't have time and space for that. And honestly I get a lot of energy out of it and I've been really enjoying doing it and so I want to keep going with that and see what I can do. And so as I thought about how to piece this together, I realized that the best way to do that was to start thinking about doing advisory and fractional roles. I'd seen a bunch of peers in my space doing that and honestly I just think it's a great way to be really high leverage for a lot of different companies in a short amount of time in the phases that I enjoy the most. So it's like being pretty heads down, focused on a problem in a unique moment in time when they really, really need you and not have to do the things that are like not the stuff that I care about which is like managing people, doing like the work behind the work. It's like really work focused, right? It's like really getting into the weeds and helping people drive success in their orgs. And so I'm doing some advisory and fractional work around growth and product strategy for a bunch of different companies, mostly post product market, like mostly scaling orgs where they're really just trying to figure out their growth engine the most.

Tell me more about that. That seems like, yeah, like you know, Alina and some other folks are all doing this. Like it seems to be a very interesting career path. Like how do you even get started thinking about doing that stuff?

Yeah, I think step one, Elena and I just taught and Brian and I just talked about this on our pod on our podcast with her. So you should totally check. She's a much, she's way deeper in this than I am. I'm Just getting going so she has, like, much better thoughts about it. But I think the first element is you need credibility. Like, that's number one. And your past and your ability to build in your success points in the past are a huge part of that credibility piece. I think number two, I actually think this is one that some people miss. I believe you need multiple proof points across some variety of different orgs because we know this in product. So much of the advice you get is, this is what worked for me, you should do it. Which is generally not good advice. What's better advice is I have seen a problem that looks like this two, three, four different times. Here's a way to think about the differences between those and here's how I think it applies to your business specifically. And I believe that to be an effective advisor, your job or fractional executive, your job is to help those teams shortcut mistakes and get to their own answers faster, not to tell them what their strategy is. And the best thing you can do to have that is to have a lot of examples from your past that you can help connect the dots on and do some pattern matching to help drive some great, strong advice and help them move in the right directions. And so I think it does take a little bit of diversity of experience. Otherwise you just end up. How many times have you been in a company where somebody comes from successful company X comes in and tries to just do exactly what they did at Facebook, at Google, at, you know, LinkedIn, whatever. And that doesn't work at the new place. It happens all the time. It's sort of the I've been successful once syndrome. I think you really do need to have shown success multiple times across multiple companies to be able to. To be credible, but also effective. I think that's the other piece. And then third, you have to, like, love working on lots of different things at once. It's a little bit more like being like. It's not quite like being an investor where you meet with like hundreds and hundreds of companies, but you have to be able to context switch. You have to be able to, like, identify the core problem really, really quickly through this pattern matching. And you need to be willing to change contexts a lot. And I'd say the last thing, the part that's hard is it is a little lonely. I do like working on a team. I do like spending time with people every single day right now, depending on what day of the week it is. I'm talking to totally different people, which is a little bit harder to, like, build real rapport. And build relationships around.

I think there's a difference between being an advisor and a fractional exec. Like the latter is more embedded.

Yeah, it's really about time commitment, but also level of embedding. Like usually when you're an advisor, you have like one point person in the company that you're spending time with and you're helping coach and help them, like, evaluate strategic decisions, etc. Usually CEO or CPO or a new product leader who's like, just learning to cross this chasm. Whereas in a fractional role, you tend to be like more embedded with the full team, you might be in the slack on an email account, like, you know, looking at dashboards, those kinds of things. So it's a little bit deeper and it's a higher time commitment and higher level of work around it. And usually your job is to help set the team up for success so they don't need you anymore, which is means maybe doing some hiring, hiring strategy, those kinds of. Of things as well.

Yeah, got it.

So let's wrap up and I'll just be clear. I'm pretty new to this, so I'm just learning and trying to make it happen and making it happen. But those are the things that I've learned from my peers that I've spent a lot of time talking to about it.

I mean, you can also just be a, you know, famous podcast host and just like riff on, be an armchair philosopher on people's products. That sounds fun.

Yeah, I think it does. I think though, the way I think about these things is they each have to reinforce each other. I don't want to be the slack guy for the rest of my life, if that makes sense. Like, I think that my goal is to continue to learn, continue to grow as a product leader, to continue to grow the number of things that I can help companies with. And to do that, you can't just armchair philosophize, like over time that just like get stale. Right. Because I'm telling the same stories and riffing on the same stuff. And so the advisory and the embedded work, that's an important piece of the puzzle to be able to see what's really happening on the ground in various different places that you can then feed back to that, you know, more public Persona stuff or your writing or your, you know, the next advisory role or, you know, any of this armchair philosophizing, so to speak. So I think it's important to do both or even investing. Like all those things sort of fit together, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's like A. It's like a portfolio that represents who you are, I guess, and what you're interested in.

Yeah, I think that's exactly. If you think about it, as you grow in your career, there are opportunities to be higher leverage by working across a variety of different things versus only one thing at a time is the theory around this. Now the key is how do you do that and continue to stay sharp and do great work? And I think that's why for me, I believe I will end up in a full time operating role sometime in the next year or two. Right. I am just using this as a springboard to find the right things. The things that like, wake me up in the morning and I'm excited to go work on, which is exactly what happened with Reforge.

Got it.

Other people are doing it full, full time, just to be clear. But I'm not sure that that's what I'm going to do. I don't think that's what I'm going to do.

Yeah. For me, like, I'm really passionate about like, you know, the creator stuff and like helping people make living online. And right now it's actually kind of nice to work at a company that cares about creators and also like do this stuff myself. Kind of have a unique perspective on things.

Yeah. You're your own customer, right?

Yeah, yeah.

In some respects. And that's like really honestly, like what's higher leverage than that as a product person to be both the builder and the customer? I mean, it's like, it's like a short circuit.

Yeah, yeah.

For great product work, right?

Yeah, exactly. What about people who are like, you know, just like reading this or listening to this and you know, they look at their company ladder and they're like, you know, I don't want to become a VPN manager 100pm's right. Like, I'm not really into that. So like, maybe this is close to like some tactical steps they can do to explore some other opportunities. Yeah.

So one is look for earlier stage companies. Right. I think there's way more risk, just to be clear. Right. As you go to an earlier stage company because it may or may not work out. And it is important to, if you want to be great at product, you have to work on winning products. Like because you have to see success to like, you know, grow in your own career and also be credible. And so I do think that takes on some risk. But I do think that the earlier in general, earlier stage companies, they have two things going for them. One is that they haven't developed a bunch of processes yet that are like, they tend to be leaner, right? Yeah, the short version. The second thing that's awesome about early stage companies is that they haven't defined what a successful product manager at that company looks like yet. And so you can kind of like you can shape the role to yourself versus having to fit the box. Exactly. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Like if I go join Google as a product manager, like I have to, I have to fit their rubric, their version of what success looks like, their models, their best practices, etc. And if that doesn't give me energy or make, make me happy or make me work well or if I'm not good at those things, I can't be successful in that org.

Yeah.

And an early stage company, you can kind of come in and like shape the way they work around the way you work. You know, there's a little bit of back and forth there that I always joke, like I want to make a fareed shaped box. I don't want to have to fit fareed into the existing box, you know. And so like I think there's some opportunity there at early stage companies and you see this all the time. So I think that those are the two benefits of going earlier stage. And then the last one is the one I've repeated a million times. Make sure you're working on a problem that is important enough to the organization and important enough to the company's success that you have high visibility even without having to like manage a lot of people, you know.

Got it. All right, Free. Thanks so much, man. Sam.