Weekly reflections of a product manager (2022 edition)

This calendar year, I started a new work practice: journaling at the end of every week. In the one-page handwritten summary of the week, I created three categories: what happened, how I felt about it, and messages to myself. The third category was the most nebulous, but often encompassed one of three things: observations, encouragements, and challenges.

I curated a sentence from this category and tweeted it in recognition that these statements were often universal learnings that others could leverage and benefit, and created a string of personal lessons that I’m summarizing in this post.

Of course, this practice came in handy when it came time to write down my quarterly reflections, a new practice that my company rolled out at the beginning of the year. This practice forced me to go back and page through my journal, reading through and reminding myself of where I’d been in weeks past. But more importantly, this activity helped me to identify trends, both in how my working team and I addressed challenges and adapted, as well as how I felt about the work I was doing.

In retrospect, this tiny activity (which takes about 15 minutes at the end of the week) struck the perfect balance between sustainability and value. I was able to emotionally process the week and recognize my struggles, my successes, my frustrations, and my elation. I could celebrate and mourn, take my emotional temperature, and pivot if necessary.

I do plan to keep up this practice in 2023, and hope to share this with my community regularly going forward.

For those of you who are counting, I did take my sabbatical this year, and there were a couple of weeks I either accidentally or intentionally skipped. But without further ado, here are my career learnings from 2022:

• Keep an eye on boundaries and sustainability.
• There is power and beauty in collaboration. The outcome is stronger due to others’ inputs and shared ownership.
• Career growth means stretching, and stretching can be uncomfortable. Recognize this and celebrate the opportunity.
• You have equal control over the emotional narrative of every meeting and can shape a conversation so that everyone can see where they can win.
• Construct and test your own perspective of the problem to solve, because you’ll be able to better communicate vision if you can.
• There is incredible comfort in performing in a place of emotional safety, and you should not take this for granted. Knowing your leadership is firmly supportive is worth its weight in gold.
• You have learned more than you think you know, but stay humble — there is still much more to learn.
• Managing perception is just as important as actually doing the work.
• Fight as hard as you can against the ‘us against them’ mentality, but don’t accept someone else’s crazy as your responsibility.
• More now than ever, the storytelling aspect of your job will set the tenor of your working relationships. Choose your words carefully, and continue to emphasize the narrative you want everyone to lean into.
• Actively engage other job roles and help them help you — clearly express needs and let the magic happen.
• What you’ve experienced in the past has prepared you for this moment.
• The things you’re learning are valuable to others, and your ability to communicate [these lessons] is helping them along their journeys, even as it is helping you to process your own.
• The value you bring to the organization is the ability to connect the dots across silos.
• Continue to be generous with your time to equip others to take things off your plate.
• The best ideas come through discussion and questions and seeking to understand.
• It’s an incredible blessing to have other people promote your work. Appreciate this and do the same for others.
• You’ve had practice being the bad news bear this week. Get used to it and learn how to do this gracefully. For every clear vision that excites others, there are many disappointments to share.
• Every absence is an opportunity for someone else to shine.
• Remember that discomfort can be a sign of being pushed out of your comfort zone for growth. What might be uncomfortable due to conflict can lead to wisdom for the future.
• Focus work is incredibly valuable. You’ve been in a high-twitch environment for quite some time, and you need to remember to slow down and let the ideas swirl and percolate in order to get the best thinking out of yourself.
• By reviewing your failures, you can see where processes can improve. Sometimes, the point of failure is systemic and not personal…
• Feedback is a gift; take it and increase your output’s impact based on your collaborators’ perspectives.
• Alignment is hard emotional work… it’s okay to feel tired after doing emotional labor most of the day.
• Deep thought is hard work, and you can expect to feel tempted to the high-twitch modes that are the hallmark of everyday PM life.
• Setting healthy work patterns benefits everyone else as well.
• Teams that are friendly, thoughtful, brilliant, and loving are one in a million. Appreciate them for the blessing they are.
• Hold the space for your team to process and express their concerns, then speak where you can.
• Continue to approach your work with curiosity. You have never arrived; you always have something to learn.
• Be confident in your value. Others see it and will lift you up.
• You know yourself the best — how you work, the boundaries you can set, and the way you succeed. Advocate for yourself and ensure you have what you need to be awesome.
• If you have a leader who values your strengths, you’re in an excellent position to both get interesting and challenging work.
• As irritating as it is, pushing to closure and certainty helps your team to execute.
• Don’t feel like you have to live a fast-twitch life to be effective or important.
• Name the source of concerns and bring them to the forefront so that the entire team is aware and can help to address.
• You can prioritize for the right conversations at the right time, and still end up at the right place even if you didn’t get everything done.
• Operational excellence and visionary storytelling are powers you can develop and mature.
• Part of your job as a leader is to help people recognize how far they’ve come.

Read the entire threaded quote tweet here: https://twitter.com/elainecchao/status/1604935693922230272?s=20&t=sB7wHAjGUIocurKgYUCE2A

If I were to summarize the types of career lessons I learned this year, it could be summarized in the following categories: how I do work, how I learn, and which activities benefit my team the most in my current role. Some of these come from successes, some come from failures. But I come back to the simple truth: experiences, positive or negative, are never wasted if you take the time to glean wisdom for the future.

As we turn the page to 2023, I encourage you to take the time to reflect on this past year, process it, and set it on the shelf as we turn the page in a few short weeks into a brand new year. And while these segmentations of time are arbitrary, they do provide an opportunity to recognize the trends in your life so you can change the trajectory if you’d like.

Best wishes to you all for the year to come.

Elaine is a senior product manager at Adobe. You can find her on Twitter at @elainecchao. All statements in this essay are her own and do not reflect the opinions of her employer.

Journal photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash