Leveling Up Sustainably
Designing continuous growth attuned to your goals and lifestyle
Product management is a fun, challenging role in that the work you do on two days is never identical and there is always something new to learn—whether it’s about your customers, your strategy, the market at large, the rise of new technologies, or even yourself.
No matter where you are in your career journey, I’m sure you’ve experienced moments where you’ve thought to yourself, “I have so much to learn… where do I start?”
Here is a guide based on my experiences with figuring out where my competency and skill gaps are, as well as how I have gone about or am going about filling them, so you have a starting point against which to reflect on your own learning and development goals.
If you know someone who’s figuring out in which aspects of their development they’d like to work on, consider sharing this post with them!
🤔 Why does continuous development matter to me?
These are the main principles behind why I prioritize growing every day.
💪 I want to perform in my role to the best of my ability and tap into my undiscovered potential. I owe it to my customers, teammates, company, and—above all else—myself to bring my A-game.
❤️ I care a great deal about delivering quality results and positive impact for my customers and users. I’m a big believer in giving my 100% into any pursuit I go after. Otherwise, I might as well not pursue it!
🙏 I believe work is a source for discovering meaning and fulfillment. I want to leave a positive imprint in our world while I’m alive, no matter how small or big it may be. After all, work takes up approximately one-third of our live for at least 40 or so years.
⛰️ Overcoming adversity feels good. I love proving naysayers—including my own self-doubt—wrong, especially when the odds seem stacked against my success.
🌟 Dare to dream big. I feel like I've recently really started to fly at work when I focused on what success looked like and working towards that vision, rather than avoiding the possibility for making mistakes. Bet on and believe in yourself, your knowledge, your skills, and your ability to bring teammates along for the ride!
To kick start your own self-discovery journey, here are some questions to consider:
What do you want to be remembered for? Why?
What matters to you now? How come?
What’s at risk if you don’t prioritize your personal development?
👀 What does continuous development look like for me?
Since the beginning of July 2022, I feel as though I’ve been in a state of having fairly high productivity levels.
Out of curiosity, I performed an inventory of all the professional development-related activities I had going on.
Here is a screenshot of everything I’ve got going on at the moment outside of my day job.
🧠 How did I select these activities?
These are the criteria that I’ve used to select my development activities.
✨ My aspirations. As I’m striving toward my long-term personal vision, I’ve identified a number of short-term, immediate areas I’ll work on in my roadmap to strive towards my vision, such as finding greater self-confidence while giving presentations or responding to ad-hoc questions from stakeholders.
🤗 Having the desire to create genuine connections with folks around the world. It’s amazing how strong the link is between product professionals from all around the world. Within the first couple of minutes of each virtual chat, I feel as though we’ve been friends for years!
💞 Accessibility. The barrier to entry for each activity is relatively low. For example:
A Toastmasters membership comes down to $110 USD for the first year and $90 USD for each annual renewal thereafter.
If you sign up for a local library card, you can gain access to a huge variety of different books and, in some cases, even LinkedIn Learning.
Many product management communities are free to join, such as:
Women in Product group on Facebook
Women in Product community on Slack
#prodmgmt on Twitter
⏳ Time investment. For the bulk of these activities, I can relatively easily dial back or dial up on how much time I dedicate to each of them, depending on my energy levels, slack time, and particular beckoning towards certain areas of focus that naturally fluctuates over time.
😎 My personal rules of thumb for selecting activities
Here are some principles that have helped me to pick activities for personal development.
Figure out what matters to you to work on now and why. Remember that others are entitled to have their opinion about which areas they think you should work on, but at the end of the day, you’re the driver of your career and your life.
Conduct research into what sorts of activities are available in-person, online, or a mix of the two modes.
Talk with your peers and friends to discover what others have tried. Ask them about what they liked, disliked, and overall learned from their particular experience.
Find opportunities to try an activity one-off. For example, with Toastmasters, I had joined two club meetings as a guest before registering with Toastmasters International as a member.
Reflect on the takeaways after the one-off session. Did it meet your expectations? Why or why not? Did you gain anything else unexpected?
Be kind to yourself and be patient. If you are disappointed with the results after trying out an activity, look for something else. Eliminating viable options can be just as valuable as finding a viable and valuable option.
⌚ Making time for your growth
At the end of the day, you have the most skin in the game when it comes to your personal and professional development.
Here are a couple of questions I ask myself to reflect on how I’ve gone about making time for my growth:
What do I think I need to invest time and effort in? What evidence do I have that supports this belief?
For example: 360-degree feedback from my teammates, feedback from my manager in our 1-1s, feedback from my stakeholders after a product review or after other ad-hoc conversation, my last annual performance review.
How much time do I think I need to be investing in an area to see meaningful progress in this skill?
What activities am I comfortable with dropping or putting in less time into, to create more time for prioritizing my growth?
What prevents me from engaging in personal growth activities?
How can I celebrate investing in myself and my development?
📏 Sizing growth methods
Here is a personal list of learning resources for my incremental growth, in the relative order of less amount of time required to more time required.
Read an article or post from a product management blog I’ve bookmarked in my browser.
Scan through my Twitter feed for 10 minutes.
Listen to a segment of a product podcast.
Contribute to a product management community when someone asks for help or advice.
Have a virtual chat with a fellow product professional, and exchange experiences and lessons learned with them (30 minutes).
Work through a module on Reforge for 2-3 hours, in 15-45 minute chunks.
Read a book. This takes me about 1-2 weeks, depending on the specific nature of the content and the length of the book. Each reading session is 20-45 minutes long.
😪 How do I know I’m not overdoing it?
We’re all different, so your mileage will vary.
Here are some things I’ve learned about my body and mind over the years, to be more attuned to the possible onset of burnout.
A feeling of hopelessness that increases in intensity over time, or periods of feeling this way that become increasingly frequent.
Having low levels of energy, despite getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night.
Having a low desire to engage in activities that normally bring me joy.
Wanting to isolate myself and retreat from participating in social events.
An increase in the frequency of asking myself, “What am I doing with my life?”
Getting more easily frustrated with something not working out as I would have liked, or losing my patience with other people or situations more easily.
As a starting point, from my experience, I’d recommend paying attention to the following:
Your appetite
Your sleep hygiene
Physical activity
Your mood
Your thoughts
Your outlook on life
The parts of your body holding tension.
For example, I notice physical tension in my shoulders first.
The type of content you engage with.
For example, are you “doom scrolling,” or consuming negative news, on social media a lot?
🔑 Key takeaways
There is no right or wrong way to make continuous learning a habit—start today, and iterate based on your availability, circumstances, and goals.
Personal development is like as it says on the tin—a very personal, unique choice.
Know your “why” for engaging in your personal development activities of choice.
Make your activities as flexible or modular as possible, so it’s easier to operationalize changes to which you continue pursuing and how much time you dedicate to each when you undergo life changes that impact your mental and tangible capacity.
Develop and refine your self-awareness around what your precursors to experiencing burnout looks, sounds, and feels like.