Thread by @onejasonknight

From mentoring session today - "is it normal for PMs to work 50-60 hours a week? how can I avoid burnout?"

I mean this is obviously a tricky one and a lot of it depends ony why you're so busy, but my biggest piece of advice is.. let go of some stuff! Wait, what?

#prodmgmt

🧵

A few reasons you might be overloaded

• The company / team is understaffed
• You're being made to do stuff that isn't really your job
• You're going down rabbit holes and not giving up

All of these are solvable but they're all difficult to one degree or another

If you're understaffed and stuff needs doing, someone's got to do it right? You could argue you need more staff, or that you need less stuff. I'm always going to be in favour of less stuff because it's easier to make a big impact on fewer things than more things

So here, it's about a frank & open conversation with your leadership team about the number of initiatives you have going, the impact that you believe these initiatives will have, the amount of busywork you're doing that is low impact, and focusing on the essential

Being made to do stuff that isn't your job is a bummer. I saw a PM once being made into first line support because he knew the most about the product & the engineering team didn't want to do it. Spending 10 hours a week answering tickets is helpful, but isn't product management

If you have strong skills in a certain area (former dev for example) the teams may feel tempted to rely on you as proxy expertise if they don't feel confident or empowered enough to take on tasks that are basically their responsibility. You need to say no to this sort of thing

If you're going down rabbit holes & spending too much time on stuff, that's a personal problem and the solution is to start to work out how much of this work is actually high value and how much of it is just busywork. Try to be as ruthless as possible & avoid low value tasks

There are a couple of concrete takeaways from this

• Take some time to map out a week in the life of you & categorise the tasks
• Identify what your unique value is and prioritise that

Unique value? What is the company going to struggle with most if you walk out the door?

Whatever they will miss most is where you need to prioritise 80% of your time. Anything else is almost certainly better covered by someone else, or by hiring. Product management is a high leverage role - you need to apply that leverage to the right efforts!

These are delicate conversations & you'll have to try to affect change incrementally, but you have to protect yourself and prioritise your efforts (and we're all about prioritisation, right?)

It's also worth calling out that some companies won't listen - in which case seriously Consider Your Options ™

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