0. Oxygen Mask

We're back after an unexpected pause. During a day of back-to-back video calls in December, I decided to go for a walk outside and take the next call on voice. It was raining, I was struggling with the Teams app, descending some wet stairs, and I fell and broke my leg in 3 places. Surgery was successful and now I'm getting back to it, but I have 7 more weeks before I can put any weight on my leg.

There is a message here for PMs - if you are booked back-to-back in meetings, MAYBE you do not have to join every single one? Or, maybe it's safer for you to join late? Take care of your personal health and safety first.

And it feeds nicely into this pattern, which has taken me months to write.

Product Management is often a high-stress job, and there is a thin line between energizing stress and harmful stress. This is a line we need to watch - for ourselves and for our colleagues. All too often we are reaching to action, trying to solve more and more problems, when we actually need to take care of ourselves first.

This should have been the first play, so I'm numbering it 0.

Context

There are a lot of problems. It seems like the organization is going in the wrong direction. Issues are coming up in 1:1s faster than you can address them. You are ending the day with less energy than you started with. Work problems are consuming your nights and weekends. The team can see that you are thrashing and flailing around. Your boss is giving you strange looks.

You might think you're dealing with the stress well, but everyone else can see it. One CEO who led his startup to a successful IPO told me he had learned he had to be careful about the mood he showed up with. If he was frustrated, and shared his feelings too freely, he ended up dragging others down with him. He learned it was better for him to keep some of the negative energy to himself, lest it spread.

It's easy for a small amount of negative behavior to become toxic. In his course on Cleaning Toxic Waste, Jim Benson explains how normal human problems combine with inhumane systems. Toxic behavior in some infects others, who then spread it to others.

And this is super-common in growth companies. There is a ton of pressure on the leadership team, often shared among people who have not been in this kind of roles before. Even when they are trying their best to lead well, the extreme pressure often leads to unhealthy dynamics within that team. Literally every growth company I have worked for has experienced a period of deeply unhealthy behavior inside the executive team.

Three concepts from Jim's course are especially relevant to PMs: Asphyxiation, Live Burial, and Self-Induced Overload. These are intense metaphors because the effect is intense. People die of stress-related illness all the time. Heck, I broke my leg and spent 4 days in the hospital as a result of jet lag, a packed calendar, and a rainy day. You don't need this.

When your stress is high as a product leader, you'll need to diagnose yourself. What is happening that's thrown you out of equilibrium?

Asphyxiation

Jim defines asphyxiation as not having the information or support that you need to act in a professional way. When you are asphyxiating at work, and you try to take action, bad things happen because you are missing critical information. You do something reasonable (sharing the roadmap on a sales call) only to find the CEO had already made different promises you're not aware of. Or you make a reasonable commitment only to find that the CTO has reassigned a team to a different crisis but didn't have a chance to tell you about this.

The solution to asphyxiation is, in the short term, to stop acting. Conserve oxygen for a moment. Then, start to discuss the situation with your colleagues gently (without using the word 'asphyxiation'). You might say to your peers and or boss,

"I find that I don't have enough information about topics A, B, and C to act with confidence in these areas. Are you similarly lacking information about other topics? How can we set up a system where we ALL get more of the information we need?"

Live Burial

Sometimes at work, it feels like every time I get my head above water, I'm getting pushed back down by something new. I sometimes say "I'm drowning".

Jim calls this live burial. This reminds me of the 19th century 'safety coffins'. With many people dying from the cholera epidemic, being buried alive was a real problem, solved by installing a bell. If you woke up buried, you'd ring the bell and people would theoretically dig you back up. Such a bell played a featured role in the Michael Crichton's book The Great Train Robbery:

According to Jim, Live Burial happens when a system overloads competent people because they have shown they can get stuff done.

If you're hired in a growth company, it's normal to have an excess of work as the company transforms and you struggle to hire people to fill new roles that you didn't need 3 months ago.

• In a healthy growth company people are looking out for each other and talking honestly about the workload so that the hiring engine is aimed at the right things.
• In an unhealthy company, everyone is overloaded and nobody has the strength to look out for each other anymore. We're ringing the bell, but nobody is digging us out.

Self-Induced Overload

Sometimes we create the problem ourselves. Jim calls this self-induced overload. This is where, rather than managing your time and workload, you simply start too many tasks with the good intentions of helping others. You end up in an overburdened state where you can no longer help others.

So, what to do about all of this?

Play

Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

Before you take action or applying other plays, ask yourself, "Am I asphyxiating? Am I being buried alive? Am I suffering self-induced overload?"

Just stand up

In southwest Florida, there's a 200 mile kayaking route called the Calusa Blueway trail. I've kayaked a lot inland, but big bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico seems scary to me. In their FAQ, one question is, "What do I do if my boat flips?" The answer is, "Stand up! Most of the intercoastal waterway you follow is just a couple of feet deep."

As a product leader, the first step is yours. Stop thrashing. Stop and look at what's happening. Figure out how to get yourself back into equilibrium as the first priority. This could mean taking time off (a few days, a long weekend, or even just stopping work early for a few days). You need to get your body out of the fight-or-flight mode that you are probably stuck in before you can solve the problem. For me, this means getting away from the message stream and walking in nature. For you it's probably different.

Then, don't jump back into the pool right away. Just because your body has calmed down doesn't mean the problem is solved. Even the HBR admits that you might want to learn to quickly calm down when you get triggered. But this doesn't fix the underlying issue.

Next, visualize your work.

For decades, I used David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' method, managing my tasks in a series of contextual todo lists. I put these in the Apple reminders app which is synced across my devices. The problem with this approach is that as soon as you mark a task 'done', it disappears, so you can't see the patterns of how you are spending your time. Instead, I started using a personal kanban board in Miro, using cards. I copied someone else's format to get started. Kanban is more than a board - it's also about consciously limiting the work in process.

After a few weeks of visualizing my work I realized my personal expectations were totally unrealistic. My board was loaded up with tasks representing more than 5 times my actual capacity. This was a combination of delegation problems, org design problems, and not saying 'no' enough. (Ironic, because I'm pretty good at saying 'no' to features and initiatives in the product portfolio–somehow this didn't extend to my own workload!)

Design your calendar

Our automated calendaring software is designed for one purpose: to help others fill every moment of your calendar with meetings. If you do not design your calendar, your whole week is reactive.

We've talked more about intentional calendar design in the last play, but in short: Decide how you need to spend your weeks, and block out time for those things first. Rather than be open to spontaneous meetings all the time, block out at least 20 hours of each business week for activities you need to do to lead and be productive. Block some hours for yourself to meet with others, but keep control of that time. Leave only 5-10 hours of your business week visibly open for others to book.

Cautions and Caveats

Depending on your personality, you will react to overload in different ways. Under enough stress, we start acting like a different person entirely - often the opposite of our healthy personality. And your peers and boss probably have different personalities and stress responses. Learn the signs that you're in this mode. For me, if I am struggling to book dentist appointments and haircuts, I know that I'm overburdened at work.

When you are overburdened, you make political mistakes that harm the team, your reputation, and your career.

When others are overburdened, they often can't see it either. PMs are in this situation all the time, and often they hope for others to come in and save them. As product leaders, we can hold up a mirror and offer help (more on this in a later post) but only if we are taking care of ourselves first.

This was a tough one to write and post. But this entire playbook is here to help - the HOP playbook, in a way, is a solution to overload.