Stop Doing Work That Doesn't Matter

Mosavat describes the shift from owning a narrow problem to leading across different kinds of product work and helping other PMs succeed. He groups product work into growth, features, product-market-fit expansion, and scaling, which includes areas such as trust and safety, payments, and internal tools.

New managers can get overwhelmed when they keep the hardest individual work and delegate only smaller tasks. Mosavat says this limits their leverage and their team’s development. He sees room for senior PMs to lead strategically important projects with small teams, without making people management the only path to growth.

Mosavat distinguishes the core work of customer research, building, analysis, and iteration from its supporting documents and reviews. At Reforge, complex documents grew as people tried to prove they had thought everything through, reducing their value. He recommends reviewing prototypes early, involving decision-makers directly, and removing intermediary outputs whose effort rivals building the product.

Mosavat says he joined Instacart and Slack at lower titles than he had held before, looking for fast-growing companies and important problems. At Slack, he began with activation and later helped build the free-to-paid monetization effort with a small team. He evaluates roles by what he can contribute, what he can learn, the people, and the problem.

After Reforge, Mosavat made room for an accelerator project, a podcast, and advisory and fractional product work. He says effective advisors need credibility and experience across several organizations so they can adapt advice to each company. For PMs who want to keep building, he suggests considering earlier-stage companies and finding problems important enough to earn visibility with a small team.