😰 Coming with the Territory: 4 ways a Product Manager can manage their stress

Product management is one of those rare disciplines that entails huge fulfillment, but not without the stress and pressure that comes with it.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

While I know there are many generic suggestions out there for stress management, such as “understand some things are out of your control,” or “your product success doesn’t define you as a person,” I find that advice in-actionable and lacking real-world value. Who would want to find the same advice their relatives provide in an article online?

So here are 4 pragmatic ways a PM can realistically manage their stress, pressure, and workload 🔥.

⏱ Reset your plate by reviewing everything you’re handling/working on, and prioritizing them all in a list.

I’ve done this multiple times while I was at Microsoft, and have already done it once while here at Planview, leading their AI Copilot project.

When you’re a PM on a growing product, you’re almost certain to crash into chaos, where many things are happening at once. Think about it: stories/epics, strategy documents, new marketing initiatives, announcing releases, contributing to technical operations/strategy, creating onboarding content, product evangelism, sales enablement, and other items that spring up unpredictably. This doesn’t even include the abundant meetings that clog up your schedule (and result in more follow-ups as well).

When this (inevitably) happens, it’s important for PMs to step back and “reset their plate”: reflect on all that’s happening, and jot down a top 10 list of items that are currently happening in a prioritized manner. As you craft this list, it’s important to weigh its value based on ROI and alignment with your own mission as a product manager for the company.

One such list could look like this 👀:

1. Spending time working on the product roadmap for the next quarter. ROI: High, Alignment: High

2. Work on a partner marketing program to get vendors to market our product, ROI: High, Alignment: Med

3. Draft a spec for an internal tool needed to analyze bugs. ROI: Med, Alignment: High

4. Write a new training blog for first-time consumers as part of the onboarding experience. ROI: Low, Alignment: Med

5. Hold weekly meetings with other engineering directors on the new release strategy proposed by management. ROI: Low, Alignment: Low

Reset by jotting everything down, analyzing, and prioritizing.

📆 Start declining unnecessary meetings with justifications, even if you’re relatively new.

The biggest mistake I made within my first few years on the job was essentially accepting every meeting invite sent my way. Meeting had no context? Accepted. Meeting about something we could’ve chatted over Slack/Teams or email about? Accepted. Meeting to chat endlessly about your next dinner recipe? Accepted.

Perhaps it’s that feeling of being too junior to decline meetings. Or — and this happened to me back at Microsoft — a lack of technical/domain knowledge within my first year led me to believe that every meeting was crucial and destined for me to learn something.

Now of course, in your first three to six months, it’s appropriate to accept meetings you vaguely know the context for since the purpose is for you to gain that context. But soon after that six-month mark, you’ll start figuring things out and gain more confidence to reject certain invites that you think are irrelevant to your goals.

If you’re not the “rejection” type of person, the next best alternative is blocking time off your calendar for “focus” time — A.K.A deep work. As a PM, you’ll most definitely encounter shortages of time for you to get your own work done due to the abundance of meetings/calls. Manage things carefully the best way you know how by either rejecting irrelevant invites or blocking hour-long time slots on your calendar to catch up on work.

Manage your time and be conscious about the meeting invites you receive. Are they a top priority based on the top 10 list crafted (introduced above)?

🗒 Draft Personal “PM” KRs.

I know this is the most “PM” thing you’ll ever hear — but c’mon, sometimes you just have to live the stereotype. OKRs are not just an important structural model for business growth, but also for PMs to align their day-to-day jobs with their higher objectives.

What I tend to do is first evaluate my organizational OKRs: the objectives for the product I’m owning, and the corresponding key results which include success metrics/goals that I would need to track. Then, based on those metrics, I self-assign “personal PM” KRs.

An example of how I translate organizational KRs to personal PM KRs:

Organizational KRs for the year:

• Grow the DAU of the platform integration feature by 50%

• Increase customer NPS by 20%

• Grow enterprise and consumer bookings growth by 30%

The personal PM KRs for the year are tied to these:

• Ship the new API for the platform integration to enable 50% DAU growth.

• Dedicate >50% of the entire product roadmap to just customer feedback to grow customer NPS by 20%.

• Conduct 50 demos and 10 training videos as part of the onboarding process to grow bookings growth by 30%

Write a list of KRs for yourself that match the success metrics of your product, and review your weekly workload to ensure your projects align with your KRs or success metrics. It keeps you laser-focused on a core set of priorities out of what otherwise would be a whole chaotic storm of requirements and “things to do.”

🗣 Grow your “storytelling” skill and use it.

And before you claim that this has nothing to do with stress management, my argument is that storytelling drives positive stakeholder management, which is one of the main factors in stress management.

Stress for a PM could potentially stem from leadership pressure or even a strained relationship with your own boss. I believe that bringing clarity to the story of a given tense situation — not just speaking like a robot, but tailoring your story to a particular audience with empathetic elements — can help surface collective understanding 💪.

In my previous article about stakeholder management in PM, I cover the importance of storytelling to bring full end-to-end context and clarity to complex or nuanced situations. This skill applies to numerous scenarios, including prioritization discussions, customer calls, and leadership reporting. Here’s an example involving storytelling:

Product manager: “We’ve missed our DAU target for this quarter by 5%.”

Leadership: “How? And what are the detrimental effects?”

Product manager: “At the beginning of the quarter we were focused on growing DAU and that reflected in our roadmap, which was mainly feature growth-focused. However, halfway through, we suffered retention issues despite strong growth in adoption. This led me to believe that our platform and infrastructure as a whole had major performance issues, and we needed to pivot, otherwise the value of our product would never surface properly and live up to expectations compared to our competitors.”

This is just a simplified example, but as natural storytellers, PMs need to tailor to their audience and aim for collective clarity and understanding.

🔚 Conclusion

Stress comes at so many levels and types for a PM thanks to the boundless sources that drive us into the ground. It comes with the territory; it’s a natural part of the job. But we have room to take responsibility to manage this stress by being resilient and smart. Happy PMing!

About Me

My name is Kasey Fu. I’m passionate about writing, technology, AI, gaming, and storytelling 😁.

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