A Hot Take On Burnout In Product Management

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Hannah Clark: In this industry, burning out isn’t a matter of ‘if’ as much as a matter of ‘when’. According to Mind the Product, over 80 percent of product managers report experiencing burnout during their careers — and I reckon that number is pretty conservative. As high achievers, we’re prone to pushing our limits beyond the breaking point when it comes to our careers. But even though just about everyone goes through it, burnout can still feel horribly isolating. It can trick us into thinking we’re not trying hard enough, or just not good enough at all.

My guest today is Evie Brockwell, a product expert, consultant, and coach. After learning just how bad burnout was affecting her clients and colleagues, Evie dug in with loads of independent research to understand the problem and how PMs can avoid it, or at the very least, recover from it. Toward the end, we also cover proactive strategies for leaders to protect their teams from feeling the burn. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back to the Product Manager Podcast. I’m here with Evie Brockwell. Thank you so much for joining us today, all the way from the UK today.

Evie Brockwell: I know you’re welcome. I’m like, at least we’re on the internet now, so I don’t have to go anywhere.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. Yeah. Good to have you on. And today we’re going to be talking about burnout in the product space.

So obviously a perennially relevant topic, especially at this time of year, and you’ve conducted a fair amount of research on this recently, which I’m extremely interested to dig into.

So first of all, what led you to pursue the research on burnout?

Evie Brockwell: Yeah, so I feel like Most people in product have got some story to share around burnout.

And I have a story that I always say, Oh, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t have to take time off work and I recovered and it was fine. But I would say that if I actually talk about it, I probably had been at myself, but sometimes we can downplay these things. So I started in that space, but was like, Oh like I was probably just pushing myself too hard.

It probably doesn’t happen to everyone. And then I started coaching people about three years ago. And. Around 50 percent of the people that came to speak to me were going, Oh, I really want some help because I want to be really good at my job, but I’m feeling so stressed, so overwhelmed and I’ve hit burnout and I don’t want that to happen again, how can I do both?

And I was like, this is quite a lot of people, like this is crazy. So I decided to do some research to see if I was just getting the anomalies coming my way, or if it did truly impact loads of people in product. And it turns out it was the latter.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, I’m not surprised at all. And I think it’s possibly even just a widespread component of our current culture, the way that things have shifted working from home, I’m sure has exacerbated that to an extent. But yeah, let’s dig into it.

So first, I think we should define burnout because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about what burnout actually is. It’s just the impact it has on people. So, what is burnout exactly and how serious is it?

Evie Brockwell: Yeah, so it really depends on who you speak to because this got classified by the World Health Organization in 2019 and they classified it as a workplace phenomenon.

And it’s it’s not just work. There’ll be a lot of people, and if you could be a stay at home parent, or you could be on the hunt for a new job, and you could still get yourself to the point of burnout. So, that’s the slight complaint that people have with the official definition, but the way that they describe it is when you’re feeling negative towards your job, if you’re feeling really apathetic, if you are starting to be mentally distant from the work that you’re doing, they’re all indicators and signs that you’re burnt out.

The other way that I look at it from some of the burnout training that I’ve done is that we’ll be really stressed and you can have this hyper stress state, but burnout is when you’ve sat in that place of super high stress for so long that it really starts to take a negative toll on things like your mental health, your physical health, your ability to do your job.

And it’s funny because I think sometimes people would be like, Oh like you might not have been burnt out because. maybe they’re not classing your stress as being high enough. But at the same time, if we’ve got these people that are feeling super stressed all the time, and they’re feeling that way for more than a period of three months, I think that’s enough for people to go, okay, we’ve got a problem here.

We should maybe do something about the amount of people that are feeling this way.

Hannah Clark: I think it’s one of those things that like, no matter what happens in our culture, there will always be burnout. Because like you said, like there’s always factors, including work, outside of work, that are driving us over the edge.

Obviously, burnout has a really significant impact on individuals. Let’s talk about the business impact. Is there any quantitative research on how burnout affects organizations?

Evie Brockwell: Yeah, so primarily I’ve pulled stats from the UK because this is where I’ve been doing most of the work with companies and with individuals to talk about why this is important.

So I’m sure you could extrapolate this out and you probably see even higher numbers in places like the U. S. and maybe even Canada. From the UK side of things, from the research that I did, I found that there’s 12 percent of the people that said that they’d either burnt out or been on the verge of it, quit their jobs due to feeling this way.

So, that’s an indicative number to say, actually, yeah, people are voting with their feet and leaving. Even in environments like this where it feels like, oh I don’t know if I’ll get another job. I’ve still spoken to maybe two or three people, at least this year, that have gone, I don’t care it’s still too much, I’m still going to quit.

So it’s impacting employee retention. And then the other factor is that we see so much in terms of cost of sick days. So in the UK, it’s been reported that there’s about 10 million sick days a year due to burnout. And the cost is estimated at around 28 billion dollars, pounds. So it is huge and I think sometimes we look at it from just thinking about the individual that’s been impacted themselves, but for anyone that’s worked in a team where you have got a person that’s feeling like they’re pushed to the edge or when you have got someone that’s feeling super high stress, you’ll know that also impacts the whole team atmosphere and the work that everyone’s doing around you or that person.

It’s not as easy as just quantifying it in terms of the days that people have off or in terms of the people that quit their jobs. There is actually also these subsequent effects of the impact on the team, the morale, the atmosphere, and therefore the work that actually gets done and the value that’s then created.

Hannah Clark: It makes a lot of sense and definitely have been there as well.

So when we’re talking about this. Obviously, there’s a lot to research. There is a lot of factors to consider when it comes to burnout, the impacts as well as the causes. What have been some of the more surprising findings at a high level from your research?

Evie Brockwell: Yeah. I mean, the highest one was I didn’t expect the amount of people that shared that they’d burnt out or felt that way to be as high as it was. So. When I pulled the stats, it came from over 250 product people and 92 percent of them had either burnt out or said that they’d been on the verge of it. And obviously this is self diagnosis, like we can’t go around and go, Oh, like we’re all just going to go to the doctor and see if I’m burnt out, it, it doesn’t work that way.

But if we’ve got 92 percent of people feeling that way, And I know that when we talk about it in these conversations, we’re like, yeah, it makes sense. But when you go to work, there’s not 92 percent of people having that chat. So when you’re going through it, you think, oh, it’s just me. Maybe I should be able to work harder.

Maybe I should be able to handle this stress. Maybe this is just part of the job and I’m not cut out for it. Whereas, Seeing that number, I was like, okay, this is surprising, but it really shows how much work we need to do here.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, so when we’re talking about, like you said, you don’t really go to the doctor for a diagnosis of burnout.

I’m not really sure if there is an actual medical condition associated with it or if it’s recognized as one, but obviously it’s something that we all identify with. I think everyone has recognized at least some signs of burnout. So let’s get into those like how do we know that we’re approaching burnout and at what point does it get significantly more difficult to recover from it?

Evie Brockwell: So many people probably leave it till it’s too late. It’s at the point where you really are going, I cannot get out of bed and I can’t go to work and I need to call in sick and all of these things. And then there’s some people that still push through that extent, and there’s stories of, especially of people that progress their career super quickly in Silicon Valley that have then had heart attacks in their 30s.

So it really can take its toll on people’s physical well being, because when you’re living in this high state of stress for so long, you’re producing so much cortisol, you’re pushing yourself through all of these barriers that your body’s trying to show to you and eventually causing real internal damage.

So we don’t want to get to that point, we want to recognize it earlier than that. And everyone is slightly different. So I’ve hosted workshops, I’ve done focus groups, I’ve spoken to loads of people that I’ve coached, and some of the signs will be quite similar. So people will start to recognize things first I’m not sleeping as well as I used to, or I’m not doing I’m feeling apathetic towards other activities outside of work that I used to really enjoy.

So it’s not just paying attention to how you feel when you’re doing the job, because sometimes you’re pushing through, it’s paying attention to how you feel when you’re not working. Or even if you’ve got like a short fuse and you’re not, portraying yourself in the way you want to around your family. And we often associate these things with stress, but I’d say if you’re experiencing these for a prolonged period of time, which I would usually say is like three months or more, then that’s when you’re like it’s not just because it was intense this quarter.

It’s not just because I had this one project to get over the line. It’s becoming my normal state. So therefore I should do something about it. One of the best exercises that people can look at and map out themselves is a window of tolerance. And you basically can use that to be like, oh, this is when I feel really calm and this is when I feel in my normal state.

So if you’re meditating all the time and going to yoga and the sunshine and you’re out walking and work’s not that stressful and everything feels great. Then you can have an external window where you start to notice how you feel when some of those things drop or change, and then you have this higher level where you start to realize that you’re really snappy, like not a pleasant person to be around, and Then you’re like, okay what causes those things and how can I start to identify that earlier?

So yeah, there’s some common traits, but it’s really recognizing what that looks like for you as an individual.

Hannah Clark: That’s really sound advice and something I think anyone can just adapt to their own situation.

So once we’ve recognized that we are starting to feel the effects of burnout and we have, you know, done a little bit of self evaluation to see where we’re at with that and how we’re feeling in our bodies, what’s the next steps in terms of being able to recover from it actively?

What I’m thinking is obviously there’s always a temptation to take time off of work or try and take some kind of leave, but that’s just not an option for a lot of folks. in this particular job environment. So how can we like recover on the go?

Evie Brockwell: Yeah. And even one of the things that was huge when I did this research in terms of the surprising things as well was that 72 percent of people experience burnout more than once.

So I think that go to of being like, Oh I’ll just take a couple of weeks off. That doesn’t actually change anything because you come back to the same environment that you were in before. And, yeah, you might have taken a step back, had a bit of recovery, and we all know we need holiday from time to time, but if you haven’t worked on those underlying causes and the root problem, then it’s not going to go away anyway, so, yes, absolutely take time to yourself and take time off where you can, but, like you say, it’s just not possible for a lot of people, so if you’re too far down the line, it can be hard to pull it back and you might need that break for a reset, but for anyone else, if it’s Yeah, like you say, it’s this time of year and everything’s just been intense through the whole of 2024 and you want to start 2025 on the right foot.

It’s about making those micro changes and they exist in two main ways. One is how you actually perceive things and how you think about what goes on around you because If you don’t have the right mindset, no matter what changes you try and implement, they’re going to be hard to keep. Because a lot of the changes that people need to implement are things like setting the right boundaries, which means not attending every meeting on the planet, or it means saying no to some work that comes your way, or it means actually finishing work at 5pm when you’re meant to for your own sanity.

And people go in with the intention it’s 2025, I’m going to set boundaries, I’m going to make sure I go to the gym every day, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And it slowly slips out because they have a conversation with someone and it’s Oh could you please just do this piece of work?

And if you don’t do this, then this project will fail. And then they internalize that and take that upon themselves to go, Oh I’m not doing my job well if I don’t do these things. Or you have people pleasing tendencies or all of these other factors that actually underlie the practical approach of setting a boundary.

So you have to do that mindset work to get comfortable with not being a people pleaser or to get comfortable with feeling like it’s okay if I don’t feel like I’m giving 120 percent to work, nothing bad’s going to happen, I’m still going to get paid, I’m still going to be good at my job, my self worth is still going to be really high, but if you don’t feel like that internally it’s to make the shift.

So, yeah, basically. Mindset work, absolutely necessary, and identifying those changes that will help you, which could be anything from setting boundaries, from attending less meetings, from not being overwhelmed by a task that you have to do because you’ve worked out how to break it down into something smaller.

Or, if you’re working with people, like one of the huge things that came up from the research was that toxic environments, which can be a whole host of things, have a huge impact. And for 59 percent of people that was having an unsupportive boss, and for 57 percent of people it was lacking psychological safety.

So those ones can be harder to change because you’re trying to influence your environment. But sometimes you really have to be that person that sets those boundaries with people or leads those conversations to improve the relationship. Or works out how to navigate your work environment to move into a different space or a different team.

Because again, if you don’t solve that, you can do everything else yourself, but you’re still going to be facing these things that impact you on a daily basis.

Hannah Clark: I really like that two pronged approach, be looking at, you know, looking inward and looking outward and like how you can sort of meet in the middle and find out which balance works the best for you and how you can adjust your mindset and expectations.

And I’m really aligned with that. I found in the past when I felt burnt out and taking time off, oftentimes what I’ve recognized as coming back into work, I just revert to that same stressed situation. I think because of these exact. Causes that you’ve mentioned, it’s you’re right back into that mindset and then suddenly you’re also a week or two weeks behind.

So that doesn’t really help your case as well. So I, yeah, this is really valuable. I think it’s something that a lot of people need to hear. So naturally this is very pervasive. We’re going to switch gears just a little bit.

Let’s talk about proactive measures. I think that, you know, probably the best time to prevent burnout is before you’re actually in the middle of it. So how can we set up our routines or kind of do some of this evaluation proactively so that we’re not in this situation where we’re trying to recover.

Evie Brockwell: Yeah, and honestly, I feel like this is a good time of year to be thinking about it because it’s like everyone ramps themselves up a little bit in January.

It’s let’s get into things. People might go a bit slower. And one of the biggest things, and this is what happened to me, was that I got to the point of going, Oh my God, there’s way too much going on here. I can’t keep showing up like this. I’m not sleeping. I’ve got eczema all over my body. I just keep working more and more hours and it’s not changing anything.

So I was like, right, screw it, I’m taking a whole day off, I’m calling in sick, I’m deleting Slack, I’m closing the emails down and I’m just going to make a list of everything that I’ve got going on and work out how to solve this. So even if you feel like Oh, I can’t, I’ve got too much going on, I can’t take time out of myself.

I highly recommend that off the back of this, at least even just taking a couple of hours to note down what are the things that make me feel like I’m getting close to being high stressed or burnt out, what are those early warning signs, what are the things I can do for myself as an individual that help prevent some of those things, and how can I bake that into my routine and do that on a regular basis.

and reflect on the points over the last year where you really have gone, actually this has been a bit of a trigger for me. When this happened, that’s when I started to feel really stressed or when this person said this thing to me, this is when I started to feel really overwhelmed. And if you can recognize those kind of triggers, you can get a step closer to working out exactly what it is that pushes you a bit further.

And then from that, you then need to work out what can I put in place to change that? So the way that I usually do this when I’m coaching people is that we’ll look at what those triggers might have been, like different events and activities. So it might be that your boss asks you for a report at 5pm that he wants at 9am the next day.

obvious trigger. You had plans that evening, you wanted to spend time with your family, now you feel super stressed. And the problem is that you probably didn’t push back and say no, you decided to take it on and do it anyway. So then we’re like, okay, next time what could you do? How could you practice pushing back and saying no?

These things obviously feel uncomfortable because you’re changing the way you’ve been programmed for years and years in the way that you’ve shown up. But by working out how you can run a few experiments in a few different areas, you can work out how you can take the number of activities that happen in a week that make you feel that way.

lower down and how you can increase the stuff that makes you feel better higher up. And going back to the mindset piece, like you truly have to believe that you know that over time making more and more of those changes will mean that you do better at your job and you can handle everything better. But when you’re on that hamster wheel of trying to get everything done and feeling like there’s no capacity to even do that reflection or change things, That’s what can be so crazy, and it’s cool, if you feel that way, pick those like two or three things off that to do list that will make you feel better, get them out of the way, because then you will clear up some headspace to focus on things.

But we’ll have all seen this, there’s 90 percent of the work that you do that we don’t want to admit to, because we want to feel like we’ve got some purpose, but Your company pivots anyway, or no one does anything with that report you create. So be a bit more pragmatic about the things that you can maybe drop to allow you to accelerate even further as you go through the year.

Hannah Clark: Oh, and then we’re getting into the art of saying no, we could do a whole other episode on that. Maybe we should.

But speaking of relationships with higher leadership, I think that we should also talk a little bit about the leadership piece of this, because you know, within the culture that promotes burnout or where we do feel like there are if we’re ICs and we’re feeling that some of the factors for burnout are out of our control, there is somebody who is purview that is.

So if we’re giving advice to maybe folks who are more of an executive leadership role, I think that’s and have the power to make policies or be aware that these kinds of things are affecting their people. What kinds of policies or strategies should we be considering implementing to reduce the impact of burnout on our people?

Evie Brockwell: Great question. It’s really interesting because like burnout impacts everyone. From the research that I did, ICs are highly impacted, but also a bunch of product leaders are impacted too. And sometimes it then just gets fed down the value chain. And there’s part of it, which is how can we support product leaders so that they don’t feel that way?

And especially people that feel sandwiched between the two, between senior leadership and the board and their team. You’re fighting it from both sides, so it can be a really stressful role to be in. But, like you say, it’s also okay, we’ll You’re still in the driving seat a bit more, so you should still be trying to drive some of those changes.

So A, go and get the support you need so you don’t feel like you’re doing that kind of stuff on your own. B, some of the biggest things that people have said about the reasons why burnout actually happens for them in the product role. are things like having too much ambiguity. So if you’re a product leader, you really want to make sure that people have got the right level of focus and direction and the right level of autonomy.

And one of the best ways to make sure you’re doing that is to constantly be having those two way conversations and make it more of a chat about, Do people feel supported? Do they have direction? Do they need more clarity? And just opening up that space, so it can be a back and forth, can really help, and it can really help people to feel empowered.

Some of the other things that people mentioned were the fact that some of the work that they were doing didn’t feel super valuable because maybe the company pivots or maybe people change direction or they can’t see what it relates to. So always trying to tie things back to the why and show the value of stuff and don’t pivot too often.

Sometimes easier said than done, but that can be huge. Some of the other bits where the teams feel like they spend so much time trying to align with loads of different teams. So again, the more alignment you can create at the leadership level and how clear you can be on priorities and feed those down, that can really help teams with their direction.

So. They’re some of the big bits, some of the other more micro things of managers that I’ve spoken to that have really supported their teams are bringing this conversation in so when you have like your weekly team catch ups or however you do those things, make sure you’re really asking people how they’re feeling and having those kind of health check ins.

In a way that you don’t just take numbers or you don’t just go, Oh, okay, cool. Like you’re feeling stressed. Maybe it’ll change next week. That you really honor how people are feeling, talk to them about it and recognize what you can do to support them and help them. And then the other bit is coaching around a bunch of those things, like how to say no, how to set boundaries, how to change meeting culture.

If you can do some of those bits, that can also really help get into how people are feeling at the root and change some of that.

Hannah Clark: I really appreciate also the call out to the kind of middle management, getting it from both sides. I think that is a really stressful and just a position that we don’t talk about.

enough how difficult it can be to take some autonomy for yourself when you’re in that position. So really great tips there. I really appreciate all this information. Do you have this research published anywhere, Evie?

Evie Brockwell: I do. I should probably put it on my website, but I have, if anyone gets in touch with me directly, you can find me on LinkedIn.

I have it all. I have a huge Canva doc, which I add to all of the time. And I’m also running free workshops, at least one in January and maybe one later on to share this kind of insight with more people. So any of those bits, people can find me on LinkedIn and find all of the insight, find all of the things that I’m up to, and hopefully find more ways to get support in these areas.

Hannah Clark: Okay. Great. We’ll we’ll throw some links into the show notes for folks listening and where can people follow you online? What are they searching to find you online?

Evie Brockwell: I just search my name, search Evie Brockwell. There’s a whole host of things that come up on Google, but LinkedIn is the place to be.

And I’ll add some more of these resources to my website as I go through so that people can access them and download them too.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a very valuable chat and a really great start to the new year.

Evie Brockwell: You’re welcome. Had a lovely chat.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club, wherever you get your podcasts.