Product Management and ...Mindfulness?
Shouting “Serenity Now!” as a frustrated Product Manager is not going to work. Let’s figure out together what does.
Is this you, fellow Product Manager?
Or this, oh wearer of many hats, guardian of the backlog, and crusher of fellow PM dreams?
Or perhaps this is you, just after quarterly planning where you got to prioritize nothing that your customers actually want?
The real question is: What do you do about it?
My name is Jeremy. I am not from the government. And I am here to help.
Yikes, that’s going to leave a mark
Product management can be an overwhelming career path that may eventually result in:
Burnout
Disillusionment
Feeling like you’ve lost your way
(Wow, that got dark quickly).
Over the decades in my career in Product, I’ve been all three of those things.
If done obsessively, product management demands can make everything in your life secondary, whether family, friends, interests, or health.
When you live this way, eventually you figure out that, in highly technical medical terms, this blows chunks.
When I experienced difficulty, sometimes I came away from those situations feeling energized and excited to break new ground, as if I’d just learned valuable lessons by doing hard things and was now better equipped for the next level.
Other “forced growth” experiences? They festered, becoming deeper wounds that uncovered some foundational areas in my emotional life that needed attention.
I mean, that and also therapy. LOTS of therapy.
I’ve also worked alongside many senior leaders who were farther down the career path (or up the ladder…up a creek?) of product management. While I have seen a few who figure out the game of a balanced existence, I’ve also seen many divorced/alcoholic/behaving-like-an-asshole Senior Directors who seem like unhappy humans often as a result of the tradeoffs as a human that they made to have a successful career, even while sitting on their growing pile of shiny gold coins1.
So, how do you mitigate the negatives? How do you find clarity to know when you’re on a damaging trajectory? And does it involve renouncing all human connections and joining a cult?
Let’s find out together. Break out the tinfoil hats & incense, and buckle up.
Choosy mothers choose…Mindfulness?
For me, mindfulness has been the key to figuring out those underlying areas of pain, learning to live less in the stories of the past or the imagined machinations of the future, and more within each passing moment.
Think about that for a second.
Imagine being able to harvest the lessons from the past without reopening the hard-fought battle scars.
Imagine getting to experience that sense of peaceful awareness and wisdom right now, without hesitation or worry, instead of doing what you’re doing as you read this…Because if you notice, for the last sentence-ish you were probably imagining a blissful future when you have better balance and equanimity at your disposal, you’ve lost that 10 pounds, and you are magically delicious. (I mean, that’s what I’m hoping you’re thinking because that’s why I wrote that. If not, go ahead and try it now. I’ll wait.)
But not to fear. Thinking about the past and future, well, to quote one of the great philosophers of our modern era:
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Seriously, there’s not.
However, now imagine being able to be fully aware and insightful about what is going on both around you externally and what is bouncing around the cave of hollowness and despair inside you (just me?), in the moment, approaching all situations with curiosity instead of anger, fear, or frustration.
I’ll take that.
The most powerful idea here:
With focused attention and practice, you will develop the ability to deliberately choose to use past, present, and future thoughts without resurrecting the pain or conjuring any imagined future suffering to make you get things done.
When you need it most, choosing to be present allows you to reduce, or even squash altogether, the passing suffering you’re experiencing.
From a professional lens, this helps to make you an incredibly empathetic, intuitive Product Manager who really understands the underlying needs of your customers and stakeholders, who takes action with confidence, and is right more often.
“I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me.” Wait…no. I did choose this life.
With this newsletter I aim to share a unique, beneficial combination of product management best practices and mindfulness. By weaving these ideas together, you can find what seems so elusive to most of us:
Balance, equanimity, and clarity.
Now imagine being able to do that in a professional context in the minefields of corporate jobs and tough customers.
The big topics I’ll be covering along these lines will include:
Product management best practices from industry leaders interlaced with personal experience on what works and what doesn’t.
The benefits of leaning into mindfulness and meditation as a Product person, allowing you to be fully present for yourself, your customers, your engineering teams, and your organization.
Resources to find the right product management, meditation, and mindfulness tools to meet you where you are.
On a personal note, in case it’s not obvious, this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’m excited to have you along on the journey. If you know of others who are of like mind or could use this sort of help, please don’t hesitate to share, and if you want to chat about it, or the membership dues of the cult I’m now founding, or our cult refund policy(I’m kidding! No refunds!), send me a message, and I will most certainly respond. Or I’ll send trained killers to find you. But I’ll probably just respond.
To steal a phrase from Dan Harris, a noted meditator and a big influence on me:
Onward, fellow sufferers!
Welcome to Mindful Product Management.
Jeremy
Founder, Mindful Product Management
If you’re reading this as a Sr. Director, fear not…just the fact that you’re taking time to read something fun means it’s almost certainly not about you. I mean, I’m pretty sure.