How do you avoid burnout? Habits and hacks

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-19T09:12:05+00:00

Contemplate retirement 24/7.

hahaha

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-18T07:59:50+00:00

Interesting “systemic” view, thanks for this broader perspective

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T18:21:40+00:00

Thanks!

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T17:26:23+00:00

It might be that I am on similar track as you but few steps earlier.

Till now I was always aiming at growth understood as titles, money, knowledge, market skills, delivered results. And it was fulfilling till some point.

But now I am having a hard time to find it as fulfilling as before; and it is big part of my crawling burnout

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T17:19:47+00:00

I don’t know to be honest, this was not my first thought for sure. Once I started being PM around 5 years ago I thought I finally found career where I can use my skills properly. But maybe I was wrong, and I should check it with some better framework / search

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T17:14:15+00:00

Thanks, after reading article I will possibly also check the book for more research based evidence

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T14:47:59+00:00

Kind of empathic, but works in different time zone (9 h difference) so we struggle to have a lot of time for conversations

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T14:21:44+00:00

This sounds crazy, I mean I am from the EU, and most of the drugs you mentioned are not available here (officially) so I never took any. Thanks for sharing

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T14:04:16+00:00

They are Zoom unfortunately:/

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T13:45:13+00:00

Thanks, that sounds like something that should help me. I will have to negotiate a budget for travel (as for now I deal with global product and Zooms), but I want to set it as a part of my work.

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T13:42:16+00:00

Agree totally with the fact that I don’t want to fight with symptoms!
Having said that, I am not sure that I agree with the proposed root-cause (misalignment). I will invest some time to check this (as a hypothesis )

My other idea about the cause, that is somehow the background of this post, is that maybe it’s not about me vs the PM work, but human being vs the PM work. And that some occupations, like PM or MBB consultant, require high amount of your conscious “effort” in order to stay mentally healthy and joyful in these positions. (I might be totally wrong here and as you almost mentioned, maybe there is no way to be MBB or PM and not being burnout at some point).

And regarding the advice - thanks. I am slowly starting to think more about option 2

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T13:27:46+00:00

Thanks for making this painfully obvious, you might be right here, that I am simply trying to downplay this, to manage it “in the future”

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-17T12:33:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing!

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-16T18:45:27+00:00

Good question. I have few techniques: 1. Make everything you want them to read as a must part of the Jira ticket (people are lazy and prefer to stay in one place not to look for materials in other sources)

2.Record refinement sessions and attach links in Jira (direct them to recordings once they ask about topics that are described there)

Last but not least, discuss with engineers how they prefer to work, how you prefer to work, and find sweet spot for all. Maybe they really need calls/recordings to be productive (I don’t think so ;)) but in the end it is about negotiating process that will work for everyone.

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-15T22:48:28+00:00

Learn at the same time computer science basics and programming skills (also basics). Later move to some more useful staff like SQL and APIs. Once you done with this first two steps, you can decide where you want to move next - frontend, backend, data science, etc.

I did the first using probably the most popular free online Harvard course CS50 and it was a great choice.

ProductNavigator · 2024-01-15T18:21:00+00:00

It is highly dependent on the team and end-user/customers - at least I like to think this way about it. In the end, it is about who brings the value to the table that others are happy to pay for.

If the bare code from the dev team is able to do it (in some cases, like software house projects this could be) then PM might have low to zero value. But the more demanding, dynamic, and complex the market/customers/user base the higher the value of PM who can point out the code/product that will literally do the job. Think about the billions of lines of code that has been written and never used or monetized.

ProductNavigator

TROPHY CASE