A product manager left burnout at a tech startup and landed a role at Big Health, a digital-therapeutics company, through Lynne Levy's coaching program. She credits deep self-assessment work, peer support from other product managers, and reframing her interview narrative as the turning point. The program worked because it treated career change as personal alignment, not a checklist.
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I work at a company that does, uh, digital therapeutics for mental health. Uh, they're called Big Health. Um, they focus on, uh, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. So as you guys can see, I have landed a job that really aligns with the story that I have and my perspective on healthcare since they use a ton of data and research to develop their products. Allowing me plenty of room for experimentation and to make the impact that I want with the specialty that I have, which is data.
Where were you before you decided to work with Lynne Levy Levy Levy?
A little bit about my background before I joined the program. I had been working at a tech startup. I was at the director level. I, in a lot of ways, had made my work my life, and I spent a lot of time working. I spent a lot of my off time thinking about work, and it still, it still didn't get me in the place that I wanted to be at the end of the day. I wasn't satisfied. It never felt like it was enough. And I think as a product manager, a lot of people feel that because there's always something new on the horizon, right? There's always more work. And so one of the things that I think was great about the program is it forces you to do a lot level of introspection that can feel uncomfortable. It certainly did for me at first, but ultimately I think it really does allow you to craft a version of yourself that you are so much happier with, that at the end of the day you can put the work down, you can be satisfied in a way that honestly I did not— I never felt satisfied at the end of my 9 to 5. There was always something that I was looking for. There was something else. There was a new goal, a new obstacle, something that I could have done better. There was a lot of self-criticism. It was just so hard to put down. And then I think part of the goodness of the program really allowed me to reframe myself in a way that left me feeling satisfied with myself at the end of the workday as a professional. So then I could focus on my life and my friends and family and the things that I wanted to be doing. And I think that was so much better, honestly, than a resume review and a lot of the maybe more traditional ways of going about the job search and sort of doing a one-on-one coaching session. And I think that was really the key for me.
Did you feel like this was more of a holistic program?
Yeah, it did. I think I came into the program again because I knew that I needed that external help and I knew that I needed it, but I didn't know exactly what I needed. So I think I was really diligent at the checklist and Lynne can check me on that. But I remember trying to go through it and thinking, I can't do some of these things. I can't, I can't ask people to tell me nice stories about myself. I can't write all of this document. There's all these personality personality quizzes and things. And I— Lynne's advice was you just got to keep going through it. You have to actually put in the work. And the more of that type of work that you do that's not necessarily your LinkedIn, your resume, even tell me about yourself to a certain extent, and how you craft these types of traditional job-seeking materials— that's not, that's not going to be very easy and it's not going to be very productive unless you do all of this other work at the same time, and I, I think that was so true, honestly.
Talked about that a little bit, and I'd love to hear a little bit about the community aspect of the program.
Yeah, so as a startup product manager, I have always been either the first hire or a lot of times the sole person that is hired in as the one and only PM and someone who creates the team and hires more folks in but still doesn't have a large peer group at a company. So I knew that one of the things that I was looking for in a coaching program were other people, other product managers that I could talk to and get advice from, not even necessarily who were in healthcare, which is my specialty, but who were product managers at my level that I could bounce ideas off of and start to use as my, my sounding board. And I think I really found that through this program. There's actually people, even though I'm graduated in a way, there's still folks that I, that I talk to and we're still on Slack together. And I think part of what made them so helpful for me is because you realize that you are not alone in some of the issues that you are facing as a product manager. And I think if you are in, if you're in a position where you're trying to move up and you're stalled and you're frustrated, or you have toxic leaders leadership, you start to feel like there is something wrong with you. And maybe that was just my take on my situation, but it started to feel like there is something fundamentally here that I'm not grasping. Either I'm not smart enough or am I not good enough to do this type of work. And I think one of the things that I learned through the IPL and through the community is so many people have these issues. At so many different stages in their career, and it can happen to anyone regardless of personality and tenure and MBA candidacy and whether or not you've been at a FAANG. Everybody experiences this, and I think that was so validating, and it was so nice to have that validated by other people in your peer group.
Talked about kind of the beginning process of finding your story for your interviewing process.
So Lynne is definitely going to laugh at me because I'm, I'm pretty sure I told her constantly throughout our one-on-ones something to the tune of, I can't do that. It wasn't even about if it's good enough or not. It was just, I can't, I can't share that. I can't get that vulnerable in an interview. And I'm happy to do my tell me about yourself now because I do it for everybody. So I, and I just remember, I remember that being sort of my refrain as I came into the program. And I think a lot of that was feeling this sort of toxicity from a former job. And a lot of it was just sort of my own personal comfort level. And I hadn't done the work necessary to do the introspection that I needed to craft that story in a way that felt good and felt genuine to me. But I think I remember one of the exercises that Lynne had me do was, what do you want your ideal job to look like? You know, what are the components of that job? And one of the things I remember was experimentation. I wanted to be a— at a place where as a product manager I could experiment. You know, you could release features and try them out and maybe test them and do research. And I didn't have that opportunity as much as I would like, and it was one of the things I really wanted to. And I remember Lynne saying, if you want to experiment, now's your time. This is something you can experiment with that you have full control over. And I was like, you know what, you are absolutely right. This is something I like experimentation and I like trying to do this. And so I started reframing the work that I was doing towards my story and my tell me about yourself as an experiment. And I would iterate on it just like I would iterate on a product. And I think those exercises in reframing to get yourself past the point of I can't do this to I can do this and I feel very comfortable doing it is so key in terms of shifting your own mindset and being able to go from I can't do something to something I'm very comfortable with and do all the time.
If someone— if you were going to sit down with one of the people in this room and have coffee with them, what would be your best advice to them?
I think my best advice would be if you, if you want a map MapQuest-style set of directions— and maybe I'm dating myself a little bit when I say that— but if you, for those of you who know what MapQuest is, if you want that set of directions, this is probably not the program. But if you want to learn how to navigate, this is where I think you will find a good start to how to do that. And I think if you want to lead and show up to work authentically, because faking it is either literally or figuratively killing you, then this is also— this is your program. And I think it would be very helpful. And that— I think both of those things certainly rang true for me. You know, I didn't want a checkbox. I wanted to do this right by me in a way that felt good for me. And so that's why I went through this. And I think if you show up with that You'll get a ton out of this.
