Escaping the boil
Mini-musing #6
I write about the mental side of product, by sharing the mindsets and mental models that I’ve seen lead to durable success in the PM/product leadership role. Today’s essay will focus in on that idea of durability, by addressing the topic of burnout. While burnout is personal and the experiences around it can vary greatly, my hope today is to offer a useful perspective on it - not a prescription.
The tale of the boiling frog is infamous. If a frog is put into hot water, it will escape. But if you put a frog into water, and then bring it to boil, it cannot detect the rising temperature, and never escapes. While the metaphor is grisly, it does capture uniquely the experience of burnout at work. The evidence of this is in the fact that when someone is experiencing burnout, others around them tend to see the signs of it before it is evident to the individual themselves.
We often assume burnout is correlated with workload: the days/nights/weekends we put into our work, the extra burden that comes with increased scope or responsibilities, the need to always be “on” and put your best foot forward with your colleagues, etc. Not to take away from the very real questions about defining sustainable workload, I’ve always found that explanation unsatisfying. From my personal experiences (and those of many others), I found that raw workload wasn’t actually a good predictor of burnout. In fact, in many cases, it was the inverse - my most fulfilling work experiences were often tied to the hip with periods of heavy workload. So, to better understand and explain burnout, I had to redefine it for myself. And this is what I ultimately settled on:
Burnout occurs when you experience poor ROI for the time, effort and emotional capacity you pour into something.
In terms of ROI, the “R” can mean many things. It tends to vary person-to-person, and situation-to-situation. For some, it may be the attainment of a goal, an achievement of a vision, or a realization of the potential of the bet you’re working on. For others, it may be the craving for recognition for the value you’re bringing to your product or organization. For many, there is a specific financial or career outcome (ex: promotion) that represents a meaningful win in their lives. And for others, it may be a more intrinsic motivation to feel like you’re doing great work. There is no single, canonical unit of value we all care about. But we all crave some form of payoff, whatever that means to us.
The “I” in the ROI equation above is also multi-faceted. It is not just the raw mass of workload we carry. It includes all of the mental or physical burden you carry when you work on something meaty. It also includes the duty we feel to others we work with, and the responsibility of collaborating with and influencing them - and thus setting them up for success, not just yourself. But often, the single biggest investment we make is emotional in nature. When we assume ownership for doing impactful, great work, we implicitly want and need a great outcome for it. When the work and the people matter, we can’t help but invest into it. Thus, the desire for the outcome to go well is as human as it gets.
The PM role is structurally designed to absorb as much emotional investment as you’re able or willing to invest into it. You are the steward of the product, the de-facto leader of the team (even without managerial authority), the decision-bearer, and the person everyone looks to for context and clarity. It is hard for the “I” to not be high when you work across all the functions and stakeholders, and are the connective tissue for them, from inception to outcome.
When we talk about burnout, conventional wisdom is to manage the I part of the equation. To invest less of yourself, to draw boundaries so you don’t stretch yourself too thin and to steel yourself by distinguishing between the quality of the outcomes and the quality of the work. Or to hedge, by distributing your investments into a number of different things at the same time, so you have more of a range of investments and a chance that at least some part of your portfolio hits. There can be some wisdom to these approaches, of course. The investment side of the equation is far more controllable. But at a certain point, holding back your personal investment into your work goes against our inner nature. Frankly, it can go against what is asked of us to be excellent at the PM role. At our best, we *want* to pour care into our work because we *want* our work to have meaning and impact. And we want that investment to be deeply focused. This is not a bug; it is a feature. This is not weakness or neediness; it is what great PM-ing demands of us.
In contrast, one of the best things you can do for yourself when you are feeling burnt out - but don't want to or can’t pull back your investment - is to clarify what kind of R you really need to see. And to be open to it coming to you in a variety of ways, not just a single, defined outcome. This is especially worth reflecting on for us as PMs. We are often the flag-bearers for defining the desired outcomes for our products: the desired impact to the business, the shape of our OKRs, the metrics we aim to hit, etc. We pride ourselves on narrowing a range of possibilities into fewer, focused priorities and targets. That’s a useful skill for defining product success, but less useful when it comes to understanding our personal payoff for work.
When it comes to mapping out the R of our work, it actually requires the opposite approach: to be more expansive and imaginative about what it means for our work to be rewarding or fulfilling. The pride you take in the quality of a hard decision or the craft you infused in your team. The growth you unlocked in a struggling teammate. The shift in organizational thinking or culture you influenced. The unique team culture you cultivated carefully with your fellow leads. The way your craft evolved this year over last, and how you understood more about yourself in that process.
Finding the true R in your PM work is deeply personal. It needs some imagination, some self-awareness and some patience to realize. The ability to do this introspection well is itself an invisible ingredient of PM excellence. It is a key element of building the mental fitness and emotional resilience that great PMs - nay, great leaders - need for durably successful careers. It is what ensures you will adapt yourself along the way, find a range of ways for your work to pay off for you, and never let the water in your pot get to boil.
Wrap
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