 Hi, and thanks a lot for joining us today. My name is Nadia. I'm a senior product manager in Amazon. And today, I'd like to talk to you about product management and mental health. So a bit of a history in my background is I have about 12 years of experience in product management and also have some big family and strengths. So the question of a mental health and maintaining life, working balance is very relevant to me personally. I have done a lot of research and also worked in the therapist to achieve my perfect balance in life. And for today, I just wanted to share with you everything that I've worked on so far. And I hope it could be useful for you guys and also can help actually someone who may be facing the anxiety or burnout of work and just is not sure what to do about it. So today, there are three things I would like to talk to you about. First, what is this burnout in product management? Number two is when to cope with never-ending workloads and safe space environment. And number three is about how to actually rejuvenate, disconnect, and vacation so that you get the best out of it and can continue your performance as a product manager. So let's start with number one. What is actually a burnout in product management? According to the dictionary of psychology, burnout is physical, emotional, mental exhaustion, which is accompanied by decreased motivation, slower performance, and negative attitude towards oneself and others. In short, what is a burnout at work? This is when you as a product manager get irritated easily, get triggered really easily, even the small tasks become burden for you. This is when it means that you're headed towards the actual burnout. So why does it actually happen? Product management role, as you all most likely already know, is not really clearly defined in terms of roles and responsibilities. We are often called CEOs of our products, which puts a lot of ownership and all the pressure on us as a product manager. It requires a lot of multitasking. It really depends on the organization and on the actual company strategy and the way they see their product managers. One story short, product management can actually lead you to a burnout pretty easily. It's not managed and prioritized properly. So Forbes actually published a study of Dell and LMS where they surveyed 1200 people, US employees in tech in 2021, and 72% of those people respond to state that they're going to quit their job in the coming of the next year, and 30% of those reasons were burnout. So let's dig a little bit deeper and explore what are the actual reasons behind the burnout in the product management role. There is a researcher in the University of Berkeley in California, her name is Christina Maslisch. She actually defined the soft six factors that lead to burnout. And number one of those factors is a manageable workload, which everyone is actually aware of, but there are other five factors that are not that visible or not particularly clear at some times when we do not really consciously understand those are actually the factors just about not their manageable workload. So let's talk a little bit more about those. For example, let's talk about lack of autonomy. This is where you as a product manager cannot or not a question make a decision or after the resources that help you to make those decisions. That leads to a lot of frustration, leads to a lot of stress, and also because you're considered an owner of the product ultimately leads to anxiety or an even deeper state of stress. Number three is insufficient rewards. Well, if you do not receive the recognition or adequate feedback to your work, that can build frustrating. However, in a product management role, at least that has been my experience so far, a lot of times you get a lot of feedback in terms of what can be done better, a lot of ideas that potentially could lead you to better ways of doing things for being more efficient. But when you have all of those document reviews, all of those feedback, a lot of times you don't, nobody tells you, oh, look, great job. Like I see a lot of thoughts that you put in there. People jump right away and see the end conclusion. This is also one of the factors that leads to a lot of frustration in a product management role. And if you have been in a lot of leadership reviews, you know what I'm talking about. The other piece is a breakdown of community, which means the teams have difficulties communicating. And in the era of COVID, this has become one of the first factors that led to a lot of burnout. This is where we out of the sudden all became remote. There is no sense of a team in a way. Everyone is focusing on particular goals they're working on. And because there is also lack of communication due to us not being in the office team room and also not being able to just go to someone's desk and have a quick conversation, then a lot lads to disconnect between the teams, between the teammates, and hands also, again, as additional pressure if you're the product manager need to have an impact from the stakeholders who are not directly reporting into you, but you need to convince them to cooperate or work together with you. Again, lead to a lot of additional friction that is leading to anxiety and stress in the end. And the last one is the values of conflict. This is when you identify that the way you operate or the way you personal values are, they do not align with the values of your organization. So basically those six combined lead to frustration and burnout. I'm sure there are much more than those, but those were the top six that the researchers have identified. And personal experience that actually captures the nutshell, the big bucket of the, that contributes to a lot of stress in everyday work as a product manager, personally. So now that we identified the reasons for the burnout and what the burnout actually is, let's talk a little bit more about when do, like when you ask yourself this question, when actually do I still cope with never ending workload in a fast-paced environment? When is it worth it? When do I continue doing it? So in order to answer this question, there are a couple of approaches you can take. For me personally, I work with a therapist to actually help me to take a step back and to understand what are the stressful moments in my workload to help me reflect on my day-to-day and help me actually identify what are those reasons that make me feel burned out or stressed out or anxious or uncomfortable. It depends on what does it mean, I guess contributors for you that are relevant for you. So the first question that is recommended to think about is when you think that should I stay or should I go, should I, I don't like it anymore here. I feel stressed and burned out, I should just quit. For my personal experience, what I would recommend doing instead of drastically changing the environment that you're in, you should really just think about the source of your frustration. I would recommend doing this exercise of recording it, like taking a piece of paper and throughout the week or two, actually recording the moments that bring you stress, anxiety, frustration or feeling uncomfortable, whatever that is for you that makes you think that you would like to quit. Because one thing to consider is that quitting a job does not mean that you're actually resolving the core issue that you might have with the situation. The psychologist recommends to, before quitting, try to improve the existing situation in order to understand the source of your problem and potential try to solve it. Because quitting the job doesn't really mean that it's where you're gonna go, where you're gonna go, the grass is gonna be greener and the tuna's gonna still burn out into place where you're going. So the recommendation here is to record in a journal or piece of paper, whatever it is for you, for about two weeks. The moments that bring you stress discomfort and also bring them. And at the end of the week, you look back and based on those moments, you can identify the main stressors in your working life and based on that, the next step would be to create your wish list. How can you deal with those? And then you could talk to your manager about it. In this case, for example, if you are overwhelmed, that means that there's a potential problem with the workload. So could you get an intern? Could you delegate? Could you potentially deep prioritize those things? And I would encourage you to really be open about it and talk with it about your manager who actually can help you manage that. And maybe that could even solve your problem. And instead of being stressed, you end up actually coming across as more mature professional in getting, I don't know, to the next step in your career. Number three question to ask yourself is, are you doing your basics? Are doing exercise, eating good food and getting enough amount of sleep? Those are the basics that everyone knows about. However, not everyone does it. How many times during the day you need to lunch because there's something more important because there's a meeting and you just don't get up from your desk for a couple of hours or maybe eight hours. However, when your body does not get enough stress, does not degenerate, it potentially leads to even more stress accumulation than if you do, if you continue to do this and then keep your body in balance with the health and life staff. Deloitte did the research in 2022 where they asked millennials and GenC whether they, what are the top three reasons they would want, if they were to leave their job with the top reasons of those. And 40% of GenC's and 24% of millennials said that that would be stress and burnout. So if you're doing your basics, that can help your body to be more resistant to actually avoid the stress because stress and burnout is different things and it's important to differentiate between the two. So once you've done your homework and you identify the reasons that you think leads you to burnout, you could eliminate those by simply eating healthy and getting enough sleep. So trying to do that in parallel to working with your manager on strategies to mitigate the risk factors that lead you to burnout could help you actually to feel heavier at your current job instead of quitting. And the fourth question to answer here about when you make a decision whether you should stay, you should go is to think about the cost of the burnout. Does the burnout translate into the negative emotions when you come home? Does it distract your relationship with your kids, with your loved ones? And if it does, that would be your cost to your burnout. For you personally, that might be something else that might be giving up something on a personal side in order to work more or in order to progress in your career. For everyone, it's very individual. But once you have those four factors, once you answer the four questions that I've just been talking about, that will help you to identify whether coping with never-ending workload in that state environment is actually worth it for you and whether the burnout that you're experiencing is really a burnout or it's just certain factors in your life that you can change. So, we spoke a little bit about the what is worst, whether it's worth to stay in a company or whether it's worth quitting when you feel burnout. Let's talk a little bit about how vacation, how this ability to disconnect and rejuvenate can actually help you to not come to actually the state of burnout. Be a better product manager. How can it help you to feel so happy in your general work and also personal life? There are, when you talk about vacation, a lot of people think that vacation means, you know, going somewhere, leaving somewhere. However, let's talk about vacation in general as a time off from work. It does not matter if it's a vacation, it's just a long weekend. Whatever you pull vacation for yourself, let's keep that from when we talk about vacation. I read certain psychology studies about how different people approach vacation and this slide represents the advice that's collected from several studies that have been around us in the last five years. And on the other hand, there's also, there are also different approaches you can take to help you get disconnected and rejuvenate. So this is just, I'm buying me and send all the therapists, all the psychologists. This is just a result of my research and this is something that works for me and has been working out for two years now. That's why I'm sharing this experience with you right now. Well, first, when you are going on vacation or taking time off, if it's a longer time period, say a week or 10 days or so, instead of just leaving and worrying about what's going to happen, prepare your absence when, what does this mean? Step number one, a couple of days before you go, you identify the main projects you're working on and you also make sure that the stakeholders who are working on those projects are notified beforehand and also know where things to go to in case they have a question and their emergency arises. How do you do this? Very simple. You send one email, copying everyone, ensuring that they know if you stick in contact in case they have an emergency. Well, there may be other methodologies to work. This is something that's very simple to do and something that I use in my personal, sorry, in my professional life. Why prepare your absence when? Very important is not to think about work. So you need to turn on your non-working mindset. How do you do it? It's very tempting to think that I'm just going to answer this just on email or somebody be me on Slack. So I'm just going to go ahead and respond to this one message. And this is very easy because you have your phone always available to you. And what takes the biggest toll on our brain and does not let us relax is actually anticipation of that email or that message. If something can happen, somebody's in a contact with you, so you keep checking your phone. The psychologists have proven that actually that does not let you fool or rejuvenate when you come from vacation. It doesn't matter if you go to Hawaii, you are staying in your room at home and winning a book, but then anticipation of potential stress actually brings the stress on your shoulders back. So you have to ask yourself this question before you go or before you leave on vacation. What is that that I want to achieve with this vacation? Basically, do I want to rejuvenate and disconnect? Do I want to, is it an opportunity for me to perform better as a product manager when I come back? So this is just the idea here is that when you ask yourself a question is that you bring this in top of your mind and you consciously make the decision of disconnecting. That is really important because you might intent, but ultimately, if you end up working or answering emails here and there, what it does to your brain is that it brings the working mode to your brain and that it brings your attention back. And then when your vacation ends, you actually do not get that additional energy or recovery that you're even deadhawks, like technological defects that your brain needs in order to rejuvenate and disconnect. So when you come back, you come back to your workload. And this is absolutely normal. 70% of people are just absolutely worried that they, when they go to come back, they're going to have hundreds of emails and that stresses them so much that they continue to check their email box every day so that just they don't get overloaded with a number of emails. Again, this has to be very conscious and very mindful decision that you want to take before taking your vacation. Number three is get outdoors. Become outdoors junkie. That is the biggest advice that is given by the study that was conducted in 2014. So Carleton University actually conducted the research which proved the relationship between nature has actually direct impact on your feeling connected and happy to your life. So highly encouraged is walks, hike, anything you can do to stay outdoors. It does not really matter what it is. It's your personal choice. But the idea here is, again, is you don't bring your phone with you. This is where you just focus on the moment and get the advice indeed from some, breathing from some fresh air and change your environment from sitting in the office or your home office to actually getting outdoors and getting that outdoor space and sun and wind and water to enjoy and to completely change your mind and set yourself for relaxation. Now, before the advice is to be instantaneous. What does it mean? When we go on international trips or on vacation or anywhere else, really, product managers like the plan. So a lot of front managers, myself included, we create a list of things we want to do on vacation. Especially if we travel a certain destination, we create a list of things that we want to visit or we plan certain events, book tickets. Even though it sounds exciting and so on, if you plan too much, you actually do not get to relax a bit because you again set yourself in a certain schedule and you don't let your brain just wander because you are again in that mode of, I need to go be here, but this time I need to wake up. But this time you get set yourself in a scheduled mode. And even though product managers like to be organized and this makes total sense, especially if you travel abroad or elsewhere for a long period of time, there is a proof in the research that has been conducted and if I believe correctly, in about 2020 where people, about 2,000 people were questioned, sorry, we serve it in terms of how do they felt about the vacation that they took that was planned versus an unplanned vacation and their stress levels after that. And then people were actually just continuously went somewhere without no planning and spent time just enjoying what they were doing in the moment were more rejuvenated and more disconnected from the work and from the stress environment than the people who have planned everything and did enjoy it as well. However, as a result, we did not get that level of relaxation and disconnect from the schedule in the environment like very rigid and scheduled environment and the other group. And the other, I think what's important for me personally advice is don't just plan your going on vacation, plan also your coming back from vacation. That will help you to disconnect and also avoid that stressing out about how you're going to start your first day, avoiding this anxiety before the first day after the vacation. The way you do it or the way that works for me is you block your first day or at least couple of hours to the first day when you come back for just actually coming back. This is when you checked your emails, you built your plan for the week, you checked with yourself if there are other open items you need to follow up on, you make a list that you want to accomplish for the weekend and so forth. So for that, you don't plan any meetings, you don't jump in right away. You give yourself time to mentally set yourself into the working mode again and also give yourself space to plan for the coming week. I tried both ways. When I just returned and right away I went to the meeting and I tried both ways, taking time and planning before going into the meeting and my personal experiences, the letter worked for me much better than the prior because when I was able to plan and when I was able to check on the latest emails, I felt much more confident and I felt much less stressed during the first day versus when I right away picked up where I left off. So I would encourage using that and see how it works for you. And just as a recap, what I would like you to take out from this session is that there's a lot of opportunities for you to maintain your mental health while you have a very stressful multi-tasking product manager job. And here are a couple of things that work for me on daily basis. First, as I already said, you have to know the best of doing this. So one thing is to say I'm burned out or I'm stressed out. The different thing is to actually know what are those factors that affect you every day and what are those particular meetings or projects, a type of project or type of people, whatever it is for you that brings just stress in society or ultimately whatever it is for you that you call burnout. So it's important to track your day to day for a week or so and identify them. Number two is you need to take back that control. When you feel in control, you will not feel anxiety or you will not feel stressed. How do you do that? You keep your, you say your grounds basically. You delegate, you prioritize ruthlessly. When you prioritize something, you ensure that there is data behind the priority. You know the particular feature you're working on has all the customer data baking it up and you know that that is the actual priority instead of just one customer asking you for something and escalating this data's priority. I've been in both type of situations. So once we have data to bake it up, it's okay to say no and there is no one expecting you to do it all. The other piece is also, which is very important is delegate. As a product manager, we take a lot of ownership and we've been held accountable for the performance of our products. So a lot of times we end up picking up everything that has not been done. Yes, this is a really important thing. There's no one who's gonna do it except with you. But also don't be afraid to delegate. Don't be afraid to help other people grow and maybe mentoring someone who is growing into product manager role and who could help you do the task which potentially could help you to solve your stress or anxiety, whatever you experienced in there at work. And number three is about recent piece of firm about those, leave your work at work. Don't, when you finish working, don't spend your time taking shower, thinking about working projects. Think about other things, something that excites you, something that you do on a side. Give that time for your brain to actually collect those ideas. So when you come back to work next day, you are excited because you pull those creative ideas that you would like to implement. And you also had this break between the working mode and the next working day. For me personally, it is important because if I don't switch, if I continue thinking about my project or brainstorm my ideas or talk about work with my friends or spouse, then on the next day, I feel like I never stopped working and that brings frustration because then you do not have time to actually, not that you don't have time, but you then question yourself with my life all the work. So disconnect and be firm about those boundaries that you set. And number four, it always, it is very hard when you get into this race of deliverables and your product performance. Is it hard to remember about those things that really makes you happy? Is it a bathtub or is it in a book? Is it going outdoors in a picnic? Oh, whatever it is for you. Remember those things and do them often. Don't just say it's only for the weekend. Make those weekdays also special for you because that is what actually fills you up. This is something that gives you internal power and courage to maintain your mental health balance and also helps you to beat your stress. There's a level of cortisol in your blood that actually leads to burnout and stress. This is all for today. I hope that was helpful for you. Thank you a lot for your attention. It's been a pleasure sharing my experience with you.