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 needs to change and iterating like that's really the core Loop right it's then there's all the work behind the work every single intermediary output product briefs product specs technical specs figma docs exec decks road map 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+ 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 I as a leader it's my job to see those things CU they tend to happen organically right identify them and rip them out as much as we can today my guest is fared mosat a growth veteran who has worked at reforge slack instacart Pixar and more fed and I have 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 fared 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 very well welcome it's really great to have you here yeah I'm excited to be here too yeah so um 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 did 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 how do you get a leadership role in a company right what are the things you do to get that leadership role and the 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 four kinds of product work is another blog post we wrote a while ago casy 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 as 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 uh identifying new adjacent markets with new products like if you think about HubSpot or Salesforce or other multi-product companies 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 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 successful in one doesn't work in another if I take growth practices and apply it to Features I may not be a if I take a one- siiz 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 briefs and analyze the data for the most important stuff yourself and hand off the easier stuff to your team and I think 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 Etc 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 we 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 man 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 of people who tend to be you know folks who want to lead businesses we sort of put in the position of like hey why don't you manage 1 p. m. two product managers why don't you manage three and sort of orgs got really layered right from you know you have some ORS where there's like a CPO multiple VPS multiple directors under each of those multiple group product managers early and the people actually doing the work you end up in like almost a 2: one 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 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 responsib ability 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 Orcs but I'm not sure if they've also concurrently built like a dual track ladder where you know the icpms can actually keep growing maybe some companies have done this 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 uh in 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 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 context 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 be a don't be a generalist actually move towards being really good a specific customer segment a really specific type of feature an important piece of the puzzle something that's on the CEO's list of the two or three most important things that 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 ship something great and there's like an important project then yeah I think there's opportunity there for sure yeah when I think about the best work I've done at every company I've worked at over the past like decade 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 a one 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 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 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 is it yeah why is it just like a junior PM thing no I think it's like what people really enjoy doing yeah when I think about what separates 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 in managing versus I'm not it is when you're most Junior you're working on a already defined problem with an already defined ex uh 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 sen like leadership and influence come into play yeah I think this is like the it's called the psh framework right by shashir I don't you've heard of this but he had a diagram I hav possible this he's a very smart guy yeah yeah so why don't we wrap up this uh 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 start like you want to do manage up and get Optics and they start like making a perfect exact deck and they do all pre- reviews and yeah I don't know it's just like it just feels like uh very inefficient to me do you have any suggestions for like thoughts on what is 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 needs 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 th 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 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 that 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+ 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 things 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 Doc 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 cor and then it stops being a tool for building better work and a tool for convincing other people internally so what was the question was what should you do about this yeah 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 so for instance had reforge we're a remote we've the company was a remote team even before Co 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 work behind them and they got really unwieldy and the reason 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 end ended up being more the value you were getting out of the dock versus the work put into it suddenly got into like a bad ratio right 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 yes 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 out puts 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 reports 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 um docs whenever you can I think that can be really helpful review very early in the process so that you give the right feedback up front so that the team can operate independently after that with trust so it's like uh only review early give them the feedback they need and then let them run independently after that tends to be a good model um 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 one of 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 approve 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 manages 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 and I think that's the key thing yeah so let's talk about like your personal c a little bit like you were uh PM director at slack and let's start 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 Zinga and a VP a 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 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 H 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 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 CEO 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 have 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 uh 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 company had grown a ton it wasn't exactly the organization I joined I want 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 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 breath of consumer growth experience around experimentation being super disciplined about that thinking about growth problems that the company had some EXP 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 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 e 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 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 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' 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 were like you know oh I'm imagine like a couple PM is not going to manage like twice as much I get a fancier title I it just like really limits your options I think having that you have is like really great yeah it's like what look and 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 a point to some of that but I think as you as I have grown in my career and I've 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 hard when I love what I'm doing and I love the people I'm around problem and I'm 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 kind of things if I wasn't engaged I wasn't doing a good job and I was just hurting myself yeah cuz 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 think when intering for jobs like if is in a field or area I'm passionate about then like and I would always get the offer but something I'm actually not interested in then like usually don't do that well exactly yeah exactly so like what are you doing now you kind of left reforge what are you think about next yeah so I wound down my full-time role at reforge in uh 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 it becomes a job of like okay 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 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 uh build a accelerator type program to help post seed prea companies that there 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 will help them raise a seriesa so that's a project that's a 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 work I'm working on a podcast with Brian the CEO of reforge called un solicited 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 and 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 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 uh companies mostly post product market like mostly scaling Orcs 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 Elina 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 T and Brian and I just talked about this on our pod on our podcast with her so uh you should totally check she's a much she's way deeper in this than I am I'm just getting going uh 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 the 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 Orcs because we know this 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 team 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 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 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 Conta switch like identify the core problem really quickly through this pattern matching and you need to be willing to change context a lot and I'd say the last thing the part that's hard is um 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 right yeah it's really about time commitment but also level of embedding like usually when you're 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 Str strategic decisions Etc usually CEO or CPO or a new product leader who's like just learning to cross this cm 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 um 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 strategy those kinds of things as well yeah got it so let's and I'll just be clear I'm pretty new to this so I'm just learning and trying to make it happen uh and making it happen but uh 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 R be 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 philosophies like over time that just like gets 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 um you know any of this armchair philosophizing so to speak so I think it's important to do both got it or even investing like all those things sort of fit together right yeah 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 you 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 fulltime just to be clear but I'm not sure that that's what I'm going to do I don't think yeah for me like I'm really passionate about like you know the Creator stuff and like helping people make Liv 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 my myself kind of have a unique perspective on things yeah you're your own customer right 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 a short circuit 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 manag 100 PMS right like I'm not into that so like maybe this close with 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 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 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 like if I go join Google as a product manager like 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 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 at 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 uh I always joke like I want to make a fared shaped box I don't want to have to fit fed 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 company's success that you have high visibility even without having to like manage a lot of people you know got it all right you thanks so much man yeah