Ask the Editors: Anxiety + Self-Doubt
Our advice on dealing with anxiety, self-doubt, and stress as a PMM.
Q: How can advocate to my boss and team for better work hours/distribution of work without jeopardizing my professional standing or opportunities for growth?
Maggie Bean: Keeping a healthy workload is one part setting good expectations, one part maintaining boundaries. To set expectations, start with planning out your activities for the month, quarter, or even year. Determine your goals, what initiatives will support them, and the expected impact to the business. If your team doesn’t have a strong planning motion, you can create your own product marketing roadmap to communicate and align on what you’ll be delivering. The most important thing is to ensure these activities are both high-impact and achievable given your time and resources.
Inevitably, things will need to be added to your plan so make sure to leave wiggle room. But when a new larger request comes up and you’re concerned about your workload, it’s time to set boundaries. Lean on your manager or another advocate of your time to help with prioritization. A phrase I use is “I understand this is a high-priority activity. Can we look at the product marketing plan together to see what can deprioritized to make room for this new initiative?” You’re not saying no, you’re communicating that your time is a finite resource that’s already been allocated to something directly tied to business impact. Reframing the conversation this way puts the onus back on your leader to reprioritize, backlog the requested activity, or get more resources–without you having to burn yourself out, which nobody wants.
Q: How do you keep your self-confidence up when job searching? I've been applying for 6 months now and it's been non-stop disappointment, ghostings, and rejections and I've started to take it personally.
Ben Marullo: In Buddhist teachings, there is a famous quote by Dogen Zenji: "A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.” The good times don’t last, and neither do the bad times. We must learn to be a peace with this truth and develop resilience to handle the bad times. Therefore, you must learn to be resilient.
A key differentiator between those who build resilience and those who do not is how an individual responds to failure. In this case, the defining factor is not the event (like being ghosted or rejected from a job application) but how you respond. So, how should you respond to such setbacks?
First, learn to be more mindful of the event. You likely feel like the job you applied for would have been great if it had worked out. But what if it was worse than the last job you had? In this case, you dodged a bullet. Now that this job didn’t work, you have an incredible opportunity to find another, better role. Adopting this mindset of seeing failure as an opportunity will change how you feel when you (inevitably) find yourself plucking weeds instead of smelling flowers.
Second, develop a plan and stick to it. With a strong plan, it’s only a matter of time before you find the right opportunity. It can take six months or even longer. But by adopting the proper process, you can rest assured that success will come, even if you don’t know when.
Q: How do you know when you’ve achieved a good work-life balance?
Maggie Bean: Work-life imbalance isn’t just about working too much. When you’re ruminating about work hours after you close your laptop for the day, it could be a sign that things are out of whack. It’s one thing when you’re brimming with creative ideas that only come to you when you’re walking the dog. It’s another when these are stressful thoughts that are overtaking your waking hours, or even your sleeping ones (thanks, stress dreams).
You need to investigate and address the root cause of whatever is causing this imbalance. This may be perfectionism, people-pleasing, or an inability to set boundaries. In my case, it’s been a persistent struggle of disentagling my work output from my self-worth. I’ve tried to simply care less about work, but I am a passionate and driven person – repressing those parts of myself doesn’t help. Instead, I’ve added more things to my life that bring a sense of purpose. I’ve taken on new challenging hobbies, launched side projects I care about, and spent more time with my family. I’ve traveled, visited friends, and not relied on work as my sole source of social connection or personal fulfillment. You’ll know you've achieved this sense of work-life balance when your work is only a part of who you are, not the basis of your identity.
Q: After getting laid off from my first PMM role I deal pretty constant anxiety about getting fired. How are people handling the stress of working in tech right now when it feels like there's layoffs every other day?
Ben Marullo: It’s impossible to know when a layoff may occur because it’s impossible to predict everything in the future accurately. Spending time thinking about what may happen removes you from the present moment. The only thing that exists for sure is the moment happening right now.
There is an illusion with this thinking. We are often fantastic at looking back at the past, determining what went wrong and what could have prevented bad things from happening. We get frustrated with our past selves for not seeing things as clearly as our future selves. But our past selves never would have been able to see things like this. The same is true for our present selves, thinking about the future.
It’s reasonable to take action now to prepare for a rainy day. In the case of a layoff, I suggest building an emergency fund, networking with your peers in your industry, and documenting your successes at work. Practically, this will help you more easily rebound from a layoff. But to handle anxiety, I suggest thinking about how to live more mindfully in the present. Enjoy what you have now, realizing that dwelling over what might be is futile. And if you do find yourself impacted by a layoff, know that this, too, will not last forever. Remember, you have overcome every terrible thing that has happened to you, and this will be no different.