The disappearing article that changed my career
When I started out in product management, I had one article that I kept referring to every review cycle to grow my product management career, “What makes for a good product manager” by Andy Johns. It laid out a detailed structure for how to build skills in User Experience, Tech and Business/Strategy for talented at PMs. For 6 years I followed that structure to go from a Product Manager to Senior Product Manager, to Principal Product Manager, to Director. That article has since been taken down for reasons we’ll get to later.
A little background on Andy. Andy was a product and growth person at Facebook, Twitter, Quora and was next in line to be CEO of Wealthfront. In short, a product leader with a supremely well established record of success. Then he stopped his tech career. He found himself in an emergency room with heart issues, brought on by years of stress building startups.
For the first 4 years of my career working in tech, I was a part of high-growth startups. I understand the “fog of war” Andy talks about experiencing. I was using Andy’s article to push through the fog to grow skills, deliver features and grow the business. It was stressful. I got burnt out, which led to two breakdowns and being laid off twice. That’s when I started to be more intentional about my wellness. I got more rest, set more reasonable goals for myself, prioritized better and learned to go at my own speed rather than the speed of the requests being thrown my way. I still followed Andy’s structure from his article in each of my yearly performance planning but that article became harder to find online until it was completely erased from the web which I was always confused by.
This year I got promoted to Director of Product. That title and responsibility had been my foremost professional goal for the past 6 years ever since I discovered Andy’s article and ironically as soon as I got there, I felt this immense urge that I meant to do something more meaningful which is why I started writing about wellness in product. That same week, I saw Lenny’s Podcast released and episode with Andy. In it, Andy talked about his journey from tech leader to mental health advocate. He explained the need for each person to finding the tools, resources, and methods that help them become the best version of themselves. It felt like my career path had come full circle, inspired from a distance by Andy’s work. That week my career took a shift from following Andy’s structure for Director of Product skillset at high-growth startups to sharing my tools and methods for others to build their product career without sacrificing their wellness.
Thank you Andy for the inspiration and I highly encourage others to follow Andy’s work on https://www.clues.life/.
