Writing Through It

I’ve been posting every day on product management as a 100-day writing challenge. I’m inspired by the incredible and inspiring Wenting…

I’ve been posting every day on product management as a 100-day writing challenge. I’m inspired by the incredible and amazing Wenting Zhang who is literally the best at this kind of thing.

With the war in Ukraine and, well, everything else… Everybody will have to make their own decision about what feels right to them. For me it feels right to continue writing. It’s healthy for me and I hope it’s helpful to somebody out there.

I am going to focus more on the “people” side of things for a little while. We should probably all do that. My experience has been that if we focus on people, good product outcomes seem to follow. The reverse, however, does not seem to be true.

Everybody handles stress and trauma differently. Some people want to work through it. Others want to retreat to a safe, quiet place. Either can be healthy; either can be detrimental to your health. One person can not choose the right way for another person to cope.

Let’s try to make extra room for what other people are going through. Trauma and stress look different on everybody. Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Lately I am trying to approach each workday with the assumption that the people on my team are already having a bad day *before* they get to work.

That doesn’t mean we all have to be miserable all the time. Here are some examples of what it means to me:

I am trying to model healthy work-life balance by actively encouraging people to use their time off. And I am taking time off myself.

I am not communicating with the team outside of business hours at all unless it can’t be avoided. In the circumstance where I cause a notification to be generated after hours I am contextualizing it in advance or immediately after so that they understand when I don’t need an immediate response.

I’m trying to minimize unnecessary surprises or disruptions to the flow of their work. Where I can, I’m pushing back assignments or deadlines that are less important. I’m encouraging them to focus on the aspects of the work that are most meaningful and important.

I am far from perfect at this. Some days I feel like we’re doing pretty well, other days it feels awful.

But right now I think that’s what success looks like: Try not to focus too much on yourself. Look out for each other. Focus on what’s important.

My very wise friend Yvette Pasqua once reminded me, “No matter how bad you’ve got it, remember that there’s somebody out there who has it much worse than you.”

And now is a great time for us to be thinking about them.