Reading your essays in order and girl, if you turned this into a mini booklet on Amazon or something, I'd buy it in a heartbeat! Just so I have something tangible to hold on to, to refer back to. I love movie referrals to, I find a lot of wisdom in some of them, and I retain the messaging way better (having something to visualize) than just text alone.
This comment means so much to me. I actually wrote a 300 page mess before starting this substack...so trying to untangle that week by week here. A book is the longer term goal.
I don't know if you've read that book by Jenny Lawson - How to be okay when nothing is okay. She had a little snippet in there that said - someone out there somewhere is writing someone's future favorite book and is having those same doubts.
I love following how you think in your essays and it's so dense with wisdom that I actually have to slow down and really take it in slowly because I refuse to miss any of it.
This made me reflect on my work as a product manager.
In my opinion a lot of the value of a good product manager (IMO) is invisible work; critical thinking & facilitating a happy productive team. A focus on long-term outcomes.
Increasingly I've been coming across the mindset of 'oh we can just use AI to create a roadmap/ PRD / strategy / spin up a prototype / vibe code my latest idea...'. It's so easy to get to outputs which imply a level of thinking and judgement that may not be there.
Definitely! Product manager has tons of invisible work to build a great product. It always has. It's definitely a bigger challenge with AI, it can spit something reasonable out fast... but to get to a really good output you either need to have done a lot of upfront work or you're doing a lot of refining with judgement to get to something that actually makes sense for your specific customers based on your actual product capabilities and where you're heading.
Really well written Katie, and a great film example to illustrate the point. I think this point of invisible work also applies to people switching roles or careers - being able to understand what you have in your background and experience (as well as competence) that means you deserve to be in that room or that job and lean in rather than out when someone cracks the door open.
Absolutely Baz! Career changes are a great example of this in action. And typically in order to make the move you already have transferable skills or have been building them on the side for a while. This is a topic I'll be exploring in depth in a few upcoming series.
Thanks for sharing :) For me it truly got easier when I started accounting for the invisible setup work instead of pretending the task was actually beginning at step one.
Sometimes the freeze or paralysis is not resistance or avoidance to do or start a certain task, but the effort or energy that you will need to put to sort out such internal blockage itself and the waste of energy to actually do it until the end.
That reframe is everything, the task doesn’t begin at step one, it begins with all the invisible work that made step one possible. The freeze isn’t resistance, it’s the real cost of the task being visible before the setup work is.
Great article!! I really like how you pointed out that “things are fine” often just means someone handled everything before it could go wrong—that felt so relatable, especially as women 😊
Exactly! The absence of a crisis is honestly sometimes the biggest win, but it looks like nothing happened. For women I think this has always been a problem, AI is making it a problem for a ton of knowledge workers too, when something looks like it took no work people discount it entirely until a crisis happens or a very poor output goes out and then people realize a lot of work happened to stop the crisis from occurring or the bad output from being shipped.
Reading your essays in order and girl, if you turned this into a mini booklet on Amazon or something, I'd buy it in a heartbeat! Just so I have something tangible to hold on to, to refer back to. I love movie referrals to, I find a lot of wisdom in some of them, and I retain the messaging way better (having something to visualize) than just text alone.
This comment means so much to me. I actually wrote a 300 page mess before starting this substack...so trying to untangle that week by week here. A book is the longer term goal.
I don't know if you've read that book by Jenny Lawson - How to be okay when nothing is okay. She had a little snippet in there that said - someone out there somewhere is writing someone's future favorite book and is having those same doubts.
I love following how you think in your essays and it's so dense with wisdom that I actually have to slow down and really take it in slowly because I refuse to miss any of it.
I haven't read it, but adding it immediately. And that last line, I'm going to be thinking about that for a while. Thank you!
This made me reflect on my work as a product manager.
In my opinion a lot of the value of a good product manager (IMO) is invisible work; critical thinking & facilitating a happy productive team. A focus on long-term outcomes.
Increasingly I've been coming across the mindset of 'oh we can just use AI to create a roadmap/ PRD / strategy / spin up a prototype / vibe code my latest idea...'. It's so easy to get to outputs which imply a level of thinking and judgement that may not be there.
Definitely! Product manager has tons of invisible work to build a great product. It always has. It's definitely a bigger challenge with AI, it can spit something reasonable out fast... but to get to a really good output you either need to have done a lot of upfront work or you're doing a lot of refining with judgement to get to something that actually makes sense for your specific customers based on your actual product capabilities and where you're heading.
Really well written Katie, and a great film example to illustrate the point. I think this point of invisible work also applies to people switching roles or careers - being able to understand what you have in your background and experience (as well as competence) that means you deserve to be in that room or that job and lean in rather than out when someone cracks the door open.
Absolutely Baz! Career changes are a great example of this in action. And typically in order to make the move you already have transferable skills or have been building them on the side for a while. This is a topic I'll be exploring in depth in a few upcoming series.
Thanks for sharing :) For me it truly got easier when I started accounting for the invisible setup work instead of pretending the task was actually beginning at step one.
Sometimes the freeze or paralysis is not resistance or avoidance to do or start a certain task, but the effort or energy that you will need to put to sort out such internal blockage itself and the waste of energy to actually do it until the end.
That reframe is everything, the task doesn’t begin at step one, it begins with all the invisible work that made step one possible. The freeze isn’t resistance, it’s the real cost of the task being visible before the setup work is.
Definitely! That is a daily chalenge for us remote workers :/
Great article!! I really like how you pointed out that “things are fine” often just means someone handled everything before it could go wrong—that felt so relatable, especially as women 😊
Exactly! The absence of a crisis is honestly sometimes the biggest win, but it looks like nothing happened. For women I think this has always been a problem, AI is making it a problem for a ton of knowledge workers too, when something looks like it took no work people discount it entirely until a crisis happens or a very poor output goes out and then people realize a lot of work happened to stop the crisis from occurring or the bad output from being shipped.
A great read! Love the examples you’ve used to illustrate things so many of us experience in different ways 🙏🏽🤍
Thank you so much! I have a new post coming next week that as a new mom and a yoga teacher I think you'll really love.