Remove stress and focus on strategy

It's Lynne Levy from The Inspired Product Manager. I want to talk to you a day, talk to you today about a tool to help reduce some of the stress in the world of product. So the reality is you probably spent months and years waiting to get into the world of product management. You may have even gone back to graduate school, but now that you're a few years into the role, you feel, you feel stuck. You became a product manager because you wanted to innovate. You wanted to create the vision and you wanted to build strategy. But this isn't happening. This is what others seem to get to do. You spend your day on endless Zoom calls working on tactical issues, troubleshooting issues. The problem is you wish you had the energy to focus on strategy. But every night when you're done, you're just wiped out. You're completely exhausted. You know you need to meet with customers. You know you need to spend time looking at the big picture. But you can't because you're so busy on fire drills. So the good news is you, is you may have a new product idea. You've got a presentation to go to your senior leader. You maybe have a couple slides done, but it's nowhere close to being finished. Maybe you spend a couple minutes each week 15 minutes going in and updating it, but you just don't have the time or the energy to think it through. So here's the reality. It doesn't have to be this way, folks. You can start doing strategy and moving into leadership starting today. You need to delegate, build boundaries, and effectively manage your stakeholders. When stakeholders get stressed, the problem is then everything becomes urgent and everything becomes a fire drill. And again, this can be exhausting and overwhelming. All right. So what I want you to do first, I want you to purposely choose what to delegate. Are you really doing things that you should be doing? And in fact, I encourage my clients to look at the fire drills you're, you're you're working on and think, is this something maybe somebody in pre-sales or somebody in customer success or somebody in product marketing can help me on? Let's go back to the coveted product management role. Many people want to get into product management, and by engaging others to help you with some of these fire drills, you're going to be empowering them and also giving them a career path. Second, you need to build boundaries. Many product managers, you're in the weeds with engineering. You're, you're doing system design. You're working on requirements that are so low level. And the problem is this can eat up your entire day. So I want you to look at the level of work you're doing and say, you know, is this really something I should be doing? Can I empower engineering to perhaps look at this level of detail so that you remain focused on the what and not the how. And the third thing to do is empathy, right? Empathy is a superpower of product managers, is to actually have empathy for your stakeholders. Understand what are their concerns and what is their perspective. If you can understand that, you can more effectively manage them and say no in a way that's empowering to them. And if you use all these tools together, you're going to become a mentor and leader to the people in your organization. You're going to get back on that promotion path. Your stress is going to go down and you're going to have that emotional energy you need to work on strategy. So this is These are tools that I teach my clients to use. If you're ready to get unstuck and to start getting your life back and your career back as a product strategist and leader, just set up some time and we'll have a conversation. Go to Lynne Levy, L-Y-N-N-E-L-E-V-Y.com/apply. Everybody have a wonderful day. Thank you so much.