Protect the Product Manager Burnout

Product Management is hard. Perhaps the hardest part about being a product manager is that it’s pretty easy for other departments to misunderstand your role and perceive your role as not being hard. It’s fun. It’s powerful. It’s strategic. It’s inventive. It’s social. It’s authoritative. You lead and designers and engineers follow!

It’s not facing an onslaught of competing asks from different parties. It’s not saying ‘no’ all the time and being the defensive goalie for your team. It’s not counting your resource pennies to make every sprint count. It’s not keeping a constant lookout for internal biases and assumptions that could lead to costly waste. It’s not about taking a brave stance at holding strong opinions and accepting you can’t please everyone. It’s not about maintaining tabs on your accumulating product and tech debt that take a wearisome toll on your team. It’s not about mastering the power of influential storytelling and harnessing numerous data points to demonstrate your understanding of what’s actually going on. Right?

Getting non-Product folks to empathize with your craft takes a long time and a lot of work, that’s likely best overcome through action over words. But influencing that kind of change management while still fulfilling your duties as a PM requires atypical mental and emotional strength, and PMs are still humans at the end of the day. To preserve the energy and spirits necessary to stay grounded and lead with influence, product leaders and their team of product managers must exercise strong discipline and boundaries to maintain a mentally sustainable work life balance as they power through addressing the organizational and customer needs. Done right, the uncomfortable work can pay off in dividends…

What can you do as a product management leader?

1. Dismantle the dog-eat-dog mentality. Rather than allow or stoke internal competition among your PMs (oftentimes a “survival of the fittest” due to limited resources and team politics), choose to foster a culture of support and empathy among your team. It’s incredibly easy for product management to feel like a lonely profession, so shaping your PM-dedicated team assemblies into a desirable “safe haven” of knowledge sharing and support networks will fuel your PMs with welcomed added strength and spirit to continue to face the daily challenges. Make Aristotle proud and realize the meaning behind “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
2. Start a product book club. Book clubs are a great way for product teams to gather on a recurring basis to take a step back from the company-specific work that fully occupies peoples’ minds and ruminate in the philosophical. Most likely, you’re working with a team of PMs coming from different product upbringings. Book clubs can also help standardize key product management principles, methodologies and frameworks across your team in an inclusive way.
3. Keep track of when the PMs take time off. But not in the way that may come off. Make sure your team takes enough time off to rest and rejuvenate themselves so that they hit the ground running again with fresh energy. With all the critical thinking and people skills necessary to keep teams on the right path each week, it does no party any good if product managers push themselves while running on 25–50% energy. In fact, be the example you’d like to see in their boss if you were in their shoes. Take time off (responsibly) and give your team a heads up when you need to dip out for the afternoon to tend to a family or personal matter. Show them that you expect you all to have lives outside of work. Hopefully you work at a company that offers a healthy amount of paid time off (I’d say at least 15 days of PTO) that makes this possible, else you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands.
4. Craft an empowering environment for product. Invest your time in defining and establishing the right processes and guardrails in which your product managers and their stakeholders will be expected to operate in. Whenever possible, get the buy-in and support from C-level leaders (CPO, CTO, CEO, COO) to reinforce these expectations. When are your PMs expected to check in with business leaders throughout a project lifecycle? Where does an Exec sponsor’s role begin and end with contributing to a project? Who is expected to run each agile ceremony within the cross-functional product pod/squad? Operationalize as much as you can so that you ease some of the planning, communications and stakeholder management burden off of the PM’s shoulders.

What can you do as a product manager?

1. Define next week’s calendar scope. Either on a Friday afternoon or Sunday evening, spend a few minutes looking at next work week’s calendar and see what’s knocking on your door (assuming you haven’t scheduled all of these meetings yourself). Exactly like a product backlog, think about what success looks like if you could only do 1–5 things really well at the cost of everything else for that week. Reschedule, cancel or decline lower priority meetings that don’t support your week’s scope for success, sharing the necessary context to not come off like a jerk.
2. Block time off for sacred heads down time. Knowing that it can easily take 30 minutes to switch gears into deep thinking on a complex subject, try to cluster your in-person and/or Zoom meetings into certain parts of the day or certain days of the week. Strive to block off 2–4 hour chunks from your calendar for the deep strategic planning and problem-solving.
3. Invest in your cross-functional pod relationship. As a product manager, your cross-functional pod — referring to the designers and engineers who you work on the daily with to deliver customer solutions — should be your “first team”. Without the trust and close camaraderie of your designers and engineers, you lose over 75% of your power (exaggeration, but you get the gist) and practically become just another person with ideas like your stakeholders. By overcoming the 5 dysfunctions of a team, a strong relationship with your first team opens up your options to tap fellow team members to help support you on some of the more admin and project manage-y responsibilities (writing user story tickets, following up with a dependent pod, facilitating a team workshop, etc.) when your bandwidth is spread thin.
4. Develop passions outside of your full-time PM job. Spending extracurricular time on leveling up your product manager skills is great now and then, but I highly recommend not living and breathing product management 24/7. I’m a strong believer that one of greatest superpowers in exceptional PMs is their ability to connect with and inspire those around them. Sure, logical reasoning and data matters, but their role is a supporting one to the overall story — not front and center in the spotlight. It’s powerful storytelling that breaths life into the supporting data and maximizes the alignment and buy-in from those around you, and strong storytelling calls for tapping into the passionate side of ourselves.

This certainly doesn’t cover the full spectrum of tactics to preserve and optimize your energies as a product manager. Most likely I’ll spin up a Part 2 post on this soon but, for now, I hope this article helps you take a step back from the hamster wheel and put you back in the driver’s seat. Boundaries and relationships go a long way.

Did you like this post? Follow me now to see more stores like this — including my future article on Product Operations models to help leaders craft an empowering, structured environment for product teams. I constantly seek to learn, so comments and feedback always welcome.