 Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to everyone who's joining us from around the world. Thank you for choosing to spend this time with me, learning about pursuing joy in product managing. I'm so excited to be here. Let's start with a quick intro. My name is Akila Kiswasami. I'm a product manager at Meta, previously known as Facebook in the Menlo Park headquarters here in California. At Meta, I lead our messaging data privacy teams and have been working on messaging products for about five years now, helping bring billions of people closer together through everyday meaningful interactions. Prior to Meta and Facebook, I was a field engineer, supervisor and management consultant, different roles and different industries. The reason I share this context about the industries and roles I've worked in is because what we'll find is that the insights about finding joy at work that we discuss and learn today will be based on the PM role in tech, but will be applicable more broadly across functions and industries. With that context and framework, let's jump into it. So what will you learn today? The first chapter we will cover is to understand why pursuing joy is so important, especially as a product manager. We'll answer this in two parts. First, we'll talk about aspects of the role that particularly make this a lot more challenging and unintuitive. And then we'll talk about how pursuing joy on a day-to-day basis helps build a strong, lasting, meaningful PM career. With that context, we'll dive into chapter two and here we will review a framework that will help you think about what brings joy in PMing. What we will find here is that pursuing joy is about finding balance. If you want to play in the arena, you can't do it playing safe and sitting on the sidelines, nor can you do it if you're dead. So what's the sweet spot? How does that translate to PM responsibilities? That is the framework that will spend some time on because it's important to build the rest of our lessons on. Once we have that framework in place, our third chapter today will dive into applying that framework into everyday practices that will allow us to prioritize and experience joy at work today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. What we will find here is that pursuing joy is hard work. It's definitely not a shortcut or a quick pill that you can just take. It takes your sometimes to put these lessons in practice, but hopefully you would have enjoyed the journey along the way. That's a lot to cover in one session. So we'll wrap with key insights. I hope you take away from our time together today and apply it to your daily routine to make your work and time more satisfying and joyful. That's the overview of what we will learn today. Buckle your seat belts, let's get started. Chapter one, why is it important for you to pursue joy as a PM? Why are we talking about this today? We'll start with what it is about the PM role that makes this particularly difficult. If you think about what PMing is, you're constantly juggling many different priorities at the same time. You simultaneously feel responsible for your users or customers, your team, your product, and to the dozen or so stakeholders you might be collaborating with on a daily basis. And with so many different priorities to focus on, and while you're making hard trade-offs between them, it might feel selfish or even inefficient to introduce another priority, that of your own joy. What adds another layer of complexity here is that PMs are often viewed as end-to-end outcome owners. And what this might translate to in practice is that PMs, when they identify a gap on their team, often proceed to stretch themselves to somehow fill that gap. Why is this the case? Because we want to be scrappy. We want to make progress quickly. We are sometimes uncomfortable with putting up our hands and escalating the problem and asking for help, especially when we haven't ironed out what that help looks like. And we're also wary of this process just taking longer. We'd rather just quick fix it by spending a few more hours every week. While quick fixing and scrappiness is an absolutely necessary skill for PMs, and we do interview for it, and it can help accelerate progress in some cases, it is not sustainable, especially when confronted with structural challenges that may be outside of your control. And we'll talk about that in a second. And so without objectively taking a step back and evaluating what you should and should not be taking responsibility for, you're almost certainly on an accelerated path to burnout. So how can we turn these challenges around and build a strong, meaningful, lasting PM career? How does pursuing joy help us do that? The first lesson here is that only you know the full picture of what you value and what gives you joy. And therefore you must take the responsibility to ensure that your job works for you, meaning you're getting the work and life satisfaction out of the time you're investing in your career. We spend over 50% of our lives working, and it is absolutely necessary that we enjoy this time and think of it as meaningful. Doing so will make us more resilient when things don't pan out the way we wanted them to. What do I mean by things don't pan out the way we wanted them to? Well, products we put our heart and soul into sometimes never see the light of the day in a user's hands. Sometimes projects get shared or together. Closer to home, sometimes we don't get the projects we wanted, the jobs we wanted, we don't get the promotions we wanted. A more joy focused approach to the journey will make us less dependent on these extensive factors and also more resilient when things don't go well. We want to bounce back more easily and more effectively. When you ask yourself every morning whether you're enjoying your job, you're most likely to get the truest answer on whether to stay or move on from your current role, your current company, or your current industry. Let your own voice and your own joy guide you in this journey. The second lesson here is that self-awareness about what brings you joy and what you value will serve as the anchor for how you prioritize, how you communicate, and how you scale and grow. It becomes second nature to step back and evaluate things you should and should not be taking responsibility for a bit more objectively. It helps you ask for help better and overall creates a better outcome, not just for you, but for your colleagues and for your team as well. Over time, this would replace the feeling of burning out with the feeling of joy, purpose, and continuous learning. So hopefully, I've now convinced you why it is important to pursue joy, especially as a product manager. Now that brings us to chapter two, where we will review a framework to think about what brings joy in PMA. We're not going to reinvent the wheel here today. We're going to use a very well-established theory on what makes people joyful. Flow theory was established in the 1970s by famous psychologist and academic Mihai Robert Chicks and Mihai. The fundamental premise of this theory is that people are happiest when they're in a state of flow. A state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. And this happens when their skill level matches the difficulty of what they're trying to do. All of us have experienced flow at various times in our lives. Sometimes we describe this as being in the zone characterized by deep absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and joy. A litmus test for whether you're finding joy at work is to reflect on how engaged you are on a day-to-day basis. If you're finding out that you're either burning out on most days or that you're feeling checked out, then you're probably not enjoying your work. First you enjoy is ultimately about finding that balance between being too anxious and burning out or being too bored and feeling checked out. And then pushing that boundary or growing over time. All right, we have a theory. Let's put it in practice. How does this translate to PMing and what do we learn from the flow theory? So to recap, what we learned from the previous lesson is that maximizing joy is usually about being trusted with the right level of responsibility for your skill level and being able to push that boundary which is growing over time. We have a simple chart here to illustrate how the joy when experiences grows as a function of the responsibilities one is trusted with initially. But as the responsibilities keep piling on, it can become overwhelming and in fact detrimental to joy. Note that we're all hungry to grow quickly and we constantly push ourselves into the anxiety zone quite voluntarily. The scale on this chart and how you weigh different responsibilities will come down to what brings you joy and what you value. So take a step back to reflect on all the responsibilities you hand in today. Think about specific aspects of your work you find particularly rewarding that score disproportionately higher and adjust your scale accordingly. So what are the typical PM responsibilities? As a junior PM, you're probably investing most in writing clear, high quality product specs that solve specific user problems. You're probably spending time rallying a team on your vision to help build mocks and prototypes. You're doing market research and AP testing in the field to validate your hypothesis and what products and what solutions will solve the problem that you're after. And you're also investing in team health and morale and executing and launching these features. As a more senior PM, you're doing all of these and working on helping more senior leadership prioritize the right outcomes based on what the priorities are and then redistribute funding for those priorities. You're probably taking on managerial and org set of responsibilities beginning to influence company direction. As a director or VP of product, you're taking on a much more active role in org design company and industry leadership. Now, it may be the case that you find none of these responsibilities part joy for you. And you might conclude that PM is not the right career choice for you altogether, and that you might find joy in a different path. And that's okay too. The most important thing here is to honestly assess what sparks joy for you. I fully anticipate that the chart to build for yourself today will no longer be valid a year from now. Why is this, as you spend more time at one level and gain more skills, you will start to become bored in the lab in the space where you once found joy. This is a natural result of growth and learning, which will push you to take on additional responsibilities and keep pushing that boundary with time. One interesting and probably freeing realization about this framework, I hope you noticed is that you don't become any happier if you just become a senior PM. You start handling a different set of responsibilities in the complexity of the space you operate and evolve. Sure, you probably make more money. Maybe that makes you happier. But from a job satisfaction or flow standpoint, what we know is that the level of joy you experience on a day to day basis is more about extending your skills and pushing your boundaries than it is about any specific level. And so your day to day joy isn't really going to change significantly in different ways. Great. Now that we know why pursuing joy is important and a framework to think about what brings us joint PMing. Let's go apply it by diving into chapter three, where we will discuss how to experience joint work and make this all real. Let's start with how to experience joy at your current level. My first suggestion to you here is to focus on problems that you can concretely solve and not be afraid to go deep. What do I mean by this? How do you put this in practice? As a PM, the number one value you will add to your team is to help prioritize the problems you want to solve and build a clear roadmap to solve it. Do this by investing the time to learn about your customers and their preferences. Go on market research trips, invest the time to learn what your team has to suggest. Identify the problems that matter the most and then go solve them. One of the most important killers of joy on the other hand is FOMO, the fear of missing out. It is very easy for the team to get distracted by new market trends, company bets, shiny opportunities. The important thing here is not to be blind to these forces, but be smart about how to react to them. If there is a shiny new company priority, the team will feel existential angst on whether what they're working on is as important. In fact, it is all the more important in that moment to double down on why you're solving the problems you are and continue to build momentum. Otherwise, you will spend your time chasing 10 different problems and solving none. There are of course times when you had to respond to a strategic shift and change your roadmap. Don't let this be an implicit decision. Take the time to work with your team and chalk out the new information. How it affects your priorities and work with your product leadership to explicitly align on accepting the trade-offs that will inevitably come from shifting priorities. This will provide a much more joyful and productive work environment for you and the team instead of feeling like you're being trashed around by priorities outside of your control. Now we'll talk about how to push the boundaries of how you experience joy with time. How do you get to the next level? The most reliable way to push yourself to grow is to challenge yourself to accommodate and learn from new people and perspectives, especially when they bring a skill set and temperament that complements yours. What do I mean by this? And how will you do this in practice? Start with reflecting on your strengths and think about what would complement them. Don't hesitate to ask others for constructive feedback to help reveal your blind spots during this process. Hiring a team with complementary skills and temperament can feel very, very scary in practice. I'd be the first to admit that. So what you should optimize for here is to have a common set of values and higher level principles that you can born, but bring a diverse perspective and approach to getting there. If you're a fast-moving operator, you might want to bring in a designer with deeper user empathy. If you're a scrappy or entrepreneurial PM, thriving in zero-to-one spaces, bootstrapping efforts from scratch, you might want to hire someone who can execute large-scale projects with process and rigor. If someone communicates better, prioritizes better, strategizes better, develops people better, consistently seek out those people and figure out how you can leverage those unique strengths on your team, consistently surrounding yourself with people who are better than you in an important dimension and who complement your skills in significant ways is the number one way to accelerate your growth and find more joy with time. What's more, it will make you more internally secure and nurture your growth mindset. In this final lesson, we'll talk about how to experience lasting joy. For this, my suggestion to you is to develop a strong internal compass and don't over-index on other people's validation of you, whether positive or negative. What does this look like in practice? As you grow as a product leader, people will look to you for clear-headed judgment on what's important, what's working and what's not. Hold a high bar consistently, define what greatness looks like and reward it. At the same time, embrace the failure that comes with people and products. This will help you build great leaders, teams and products over time. You will face an incredible amount of pressure to deliver good news. Don't do it. Always say things as they are. Do not sugarcoat or dramatize to get undue attention. Both of these are examples of things that are very, very hard to do in practice. If someone on your team misses their goals and you don't hold them accountable because you worry that this will make them not like you. Or if you try to paint a shiny picture of something that's not going well to your leadership team because you don't want to explain how it got to where it did, these type of things will burn through your credibility and make you miserable in the long run. So my final lesson to you here is this. Believe in yourself and play the long game. Build an internal compass that can guide you in tough moments and push you to do the difficult but right thing. This will help set you up for long lasting joy and propel your growth into a product executor who's here to create history. That brings us to the end of today's session. Let us recap what we learned. We started this session by saying that although the nature of the PM role makes this particularly challenging, intentionally prioritizing the joy when experiences on a day-to-day basis can help build a strong, meaningful, lasting PM career. We took lessons from the flow theory that pursuing joy is about finding the balance between being too anxious and being too bored and pushing that boundary of growing over time. We explored what this would look like in concrete terms by diving deeper into PM responsibilities and how a more junior or senior PM will experience joy in their work. With that context and framework in mind, we turned to a practical set of tools to apply to actually experience joy at work. We observed that to experience joy at your current level, you must focus on problems that you can concretely solve. Don't be afraid to go deep and don't let yourself or your team fall prey to FOMO. Next, we saw that in order to push the boundaries of how you experience joy over time, you must build a strong team that complements your skill set and temperament. It will challenge you healthily and help you grow. Finally, we found that to make joyful existence a lasting experience, you must develop a strong internal compass and not over-index on external validation, whether positive or negative. That concludes our session today. Thank you so much for engaging and I hope you're able to apply these learnings to make your work and life more satisfying and joyful. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions that you have. My product school instructor page as well as my LinkedIn page are available here. My name is Akhila. I'm a product manager at Metta. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.