Over the last six months, Hannah and I sat down for three 10-minute conversations about the topics I care about most — and frankly, the ones that don’t get talked about enough: what it really feels like to travel for work as a mom, how to keep your head above water when you’re managing a big career and a full life, and how to return to work after parental leave without losing yourself in the process.

Whether you’re in the thick of it or just want to feel less alone in the juggle — these episodes are for you.

🎙️ Listen: My 3-episode series on De-Stress the Nest

Ep. 60 – How to Ditch the Travel Mom Guilt For anyone who has ever texted home from a hotel room at 9pm to check on bedtime. We talk about how to actually let go while you’re away — and why your family can thrive even when you’re not physically there.

Ep. 66 – Top 3 Tips for Working Parents My three most-used strategies for making working parenthood feel sustainable rather than like constant survival mode — including how to implement a weekly night off.

Ep. 73 – Returning to Work After Parental Leave This one is a marathon, not a sprint. I came back from leave twice, and both times it was hard and a relief all at once. If you’re in this season — or supporting someone who is — this episode is for you.

A Plug for Household Management

If you’re at a point where you’re thinking about outsourcing some of the household management mental load, do it. I’ve had both an in-person household manager and a virtual one, and the relief is real. It’s one of the best investments I’ve made in my own sanity as a working parent.

Which is also why I was so excited to be on Hannah’s podcast in the first place. She’s not just a great host — she’s a busy working mom of three who built Heron House Management because she lived this problem herself. If you’re curious about what virtual house management actually looks like, her company is worth a look.

📖 From the Mind the Beet archive — the posts that inspired these conversations

✈️ Work Travel and Mom Guilt

🏡 Building a Modern Village

7️⃣ Seven Pieces of Advice for Parents Returning to the “Office” After Parental Leave

Skyjo

Age range: 7+

This is a simple to play game that allows socializing while playing. It involves a lot of luck with just a bit of skill as you try to improve an array of cards in front of you, turn by turn.

This has been the house favorite for the past three weeks for us.

Strangely not available on Amazon - but was in Target.

Just One

Age range: 7+

This is a fun and hilarious cooperative game where everyone but one person writes one word that describes a given clue. If there are any duplicates, the dupes are removed and whatever remains is used for the odd person out to guess.

For instance, last night we were playing and I got the clues “Titanic” “Plumbing” and “Water.” The answer was “sink.”

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4BFWV2R

Don’t L.L.A.M.A.

Age range: 5+

A fun, simple “get rid of your cards first” game. It’s played out over multiple rounds with a fun mechanic of being able to reduce your score by a lot if you do well in a future round.

Plus, there are cards with llamas on them.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W8ZL5M7

For Sale

Age range: 10+

For slightly older kids and adults, this is a two-phase game. In phase one, you bid in an auction to collect as many high value properties as possible. In phase two, you sell your properties for the highest amount.

A bit of math. A bit of strategy. A bit of bluffing and bidding. It only takes one round of play - about 10 minutes - to get the concept, so the quick cycle time is a great feature.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001PQLNY0

Bonus: For Even Younger Kids

While we’ve aged out of these, for the 4-6 age range it’s worth checking out Sleeping Queens, Yeti in my Spaghetti, and Skip-bo

Extra Bonus: For Adults

With friends, we’ve been playing Antiquity Quest, Listography, and Sheriff of Nottingham.

For about four months, the team has been planning an event that marks the moment, including:

• Public previews of new user experiences and AI enhancements to the product.

• A digital event that recognizes the community & announces these new product enhancements.

• Blogs, demo videos, and website updates to reframe the product for the new era.

• An employee event to celebrate as a team & a smaller founders’ dinner to bring together the original builders with the current leadership.

You can view a recording of the digital event here:

Marking these milestones is an important part of building a resilient product and ecosystem. And launching product and managing digital events is a skill we’ve been building capabilities around for years within my organization, in tight partnership with design and marketing.

Here are 10 tips for any product leader sculpting a product announcement event.

Tip #1: Respect the fans

When we started planning for the event, our first principle was that we didn’t want to turn the event into an ad for our product. There were 25 years of history – careers built, events attended, projects launched on top of our platform – to recognize. And a vibrant community that is embracing new ways of working.

To recognize this, we started our digital event with a huge thank you to the community and showed a preview of a movie we are producing called “Beyond the Code” that gives voice to the community and puts people at the center of the storytelling.

Tip #2: Balance the past and future with intention

We also had a principle that we wanted the moment to look forward – to the next 25 years. After some debate, we landed on a goal of 80% looking forward, 20% recognizing where we’ve been. We baked this into how we thought about the event, for instance with its primary graphic: A tagline all about the future, with some graphics that nod to history and the moment:

We also turned the birthday into an engineering delivery milestone – ensuring new innovations were ready to be announced on the day. This allowed us to lay down a clear vision framework, back it up with new product releases, and generate buzz about what’s new. I was happy to see that attendees anchored on the future in their social recaps:

Tip #3: Show, not tell

People love stories and they love seeing things in action. They don’t love having things described to them. So, another principle we lived by for this event is to “show not tell.” This came out in two flavors.

First, where possible, customers shared their scenarios - in their own words. It was intentional that we closed our live broadcast with customer testimonials.

Second, when we had a choice, we let the product speak for itself vs. telling people about the product. For instance, our design and video production team produced an “Anthem” video, a 2-min tour that shows the product at its best:

Tip #4: Explain your product in basic terms

One thing missing from v1 of our event script that we caught during the review process was a simple restatement of what people hire our product to do. We were so focused on the new product announcements that we didn’t put ourselves in the shoes of the audience enough.

This reminds me of this graphic by John Cutler (who runs a great product Substack called The Beautiful Mess):

Our fix was simple - before getting into the product news on the live broadcast, my design counterpart and I spent the time synthesizing the top 3 major use cases for the product, told through customer examples.

Tip #5: Deliver different content, tuned to various audiences

It was a relatively last-minute decision for us to split our blog strategy into two: My boss would have the byline on a short post on a primary Microsoft blog that was designed to garner some press attention. I would be the assigned author for a long and detailed post designed for our community and current customers. (Fun fact: Those blog posts are written by a team of a dozen of us across marketing, product & design, despite a single byline on the post itself).

This type of audience bifurcation is important to maximize reach – and it also inspires the best content ideas because you aren’t trying to make everything appeal to everyone.

For instance, an engineering leader on the team wrote a technical deep dive on our new AI architecture. The post isn’t for everyone - it’s by a dev for devs to read - but that type of “long tail” content can connect with a reader in a stronger way than the high-level content.

The extended content should relate back to the main points you are trying to get across. In this case, this technical deep dive enabled us to explain that the AI functionality we delivered was only possible because of the latest frontier AI model advancements of the past few months, reinforcing that customers can draft behind the latest advancements by using the product.

Tip #6: Simplify momentum & customer stories

One truth I’ve learned is that the toughest paragraph of the blog post is almost always the first one. There are three goals when deciding how to start a product announcement blog:

• Establish credibility and momentum for the product

• Speak in the language of customers & reference their successes

• Cement the narrative of how the product and the announcements are part of a larger story.

Here’s where we ended up with our most recent launch:

Tip #7: Have clear calls to action (CTAs)

Early on when you are planning an event, write down exactly what you want audience members to do after they attend the show. For instance, our CTAs were:

• Turn on the public previews of the new feature announcements in your Microsoft 365 tenant

• Participate in a hackathon to see what you can build on the platform

• Share your story and history of the product, to recognize the moment

• Join us at the upcoming Microsoft 365 Community Conference in April.

Oftentimes, teams get so caught up in describing the new feature or announcements that they leave CTAs as an afterthought. If you bake it in up front, you can tailor your content strategy. For instance, I mentioned our hackathon is the very first sentence of our detailed blog post. And we held the final version of our community video to premiere at the upcoming conference, allowing us to reinforce the conference during our broadcast.

Tip #8: Establish a quality bar

These product launch events are just like weddings - they can be planned in a day, or they can be planned in a year. They will fill whatever time you give it.

Ensure the workback time is well spent - especially by setting a quality bar, giving clear guidance on how far from the finish line something is, and in general setting a culture of going the extra mile. It’s an important tone to set “from the top” early on in the workback.

I talk about this in my recent essay on how to edit work:

The editing to be done here can be both big & small.

Example of big: I decided a week before the event that our customer testimonials weren’t strong enough, and I asked the team to go hunt for more.

Example of small: I sweated every detail of the blog post, for instance ensuring we never take possessive ownership over the product or customers (i.e. it’s never “our customers” or “our product”). And I ask for a “de-jargon” pass - removing insider terms or non-humanistic language.

Tip #9: Make each member of the cross-functional team feel seen

One of the best things about these events is that it brings every discipline in the product making process together in a way that let’s everyone see others doing their best work - and stresses that so much of enterprise software is more than just the code written. For instance:

• Product: Putting customer scenarios at the center of demos, landing schedules, evangelizing the news

• Marketing: Simplifying the complex, aligning to bigger narratives and missions, attaching to larger funnels.

• Design: Leading how the product is showcased, co-delivering the messages, graphics & swag elevation

• Engineering: Delivering on time, describing the architecture and tech bets.

• Community organizers: Collecting fan feedback, nurturing watch parties, attaching to community events.

• Customer experience PMs: Finding customer case studies, synthesizing statistics from previews

• Data science: Synthesizing evidence to support the message, assessing readiness to launch

• Chief of staff and executive assistants: In person event execution, decorations, logistics, and keeping everything running smoothly

• Event producers: Setting a bar for production quality, owning the workback, preparing on screen talent

• Video producers: Visual narrative, polish, production quality

There is a member of my LT who drove this event as the primary event producer - she’s been in tech for decades but has a degree in film. It was so fun to see her in her element - fully activated by what she loves to do and what she does well.

It’s a great reminder that certain work activities - especially those with a “big day” to lead up to - are fantastic for helping a team bond and celebrate a shared success.

Tip #10: Have fun

It can be so easy to get caught up in the workback, deadlines, unexpected hiccups, and urgent review cycles. It’s important for you as the product leader to navigate through this with a sense of levity, celebration, and gratitude. Breath. Recognize the work. Remind people what a privilege it is to have people who are interested in the product you create. Have fun.

In that vein, I’ll leave you with our blooper reel:

As a Russian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at age 10, I didn’t grow up with Girl Scouts. I did not know what a Thin Mint was until well into adulthood. So when my oldest was in kindergarten, and another mom asked whether she wanted to join a troop, I said yes, mostly out of curiosity — and out of a desire not to miss a piece of Americana.

Six years later, Girl Scouts has become a defining part of our family rhythm. I now lead my younger daughter’s troop and serve as a Service Unit Manager, supporting other troop leaders in our area. I do this because I have learned that:

Girl Scouts isn’t just about badges or cookies. It’s an early, accessible, community-powered leadership lab for girls. Michelle Obama agrees:

Especially immigrant parents often ask me: What do you like about Girl Scouts? Why should I sign my daughter up? And does she really have to sell cookies?

1. Helping Girls Find Their Voice, Confidence and a Sense of Belonging

Leadership begins with voice: knowing you have one, practicing using it, and trusting that it matters.

Girl Scouts creates intentional moments for this:

– A shy girl learning to greet a customer at a cookie booth

– A group of 8-year-olds negotiating who sleeps on which bunk at camp

– A 12-year-old stepping up to facilitate a game for younger girls

These are small, low-stakes interactions, but they accumulate. A troop of same-age girls creates belonging, and an additional circle of friends outside school gives kids a safe space to try on new versions of themselves.

A recent survey found that only 34% of elementary, 45% of middle school, and 42% of high school students report feeling a sense of belonging at school — meaning more than half of students do not feel connected or “at home” in their school community.

One of my favorite parts is the built-in mentorship pipeline. Younger girls look up to older Scouts who help lead meetings; older girls become counselors, program assistants, and role models. Watching a group of 6-year-olds hang on to every word of a 14-year-old facilitator tells you everything about what leadership feels like to a teenager: empowering, respected, and confidence-building.

For many girls, this is their first experience practicing influence — the heart of leadership — without adult pressure or performance expectations.

2. Learning Outdoor Skills and Building Independence

Camps, archery, fire building, climbing walls, knife safety — Girl Scouts offers a unique blend of outdoor skills that many girls simply don’t encounter elsewhere.

My girls have done both day camps and overnights, and the skill-building is noticeable, especially when they are more comfortable with these opportunities in school situations later. My kids have come back a little bit braver, more curious, more capable, and independent each time.

There is something powerful about a girl realizing, “I can do hard things. I can take care of myself. I can try something new.”

As a troop leader, it is an honor to witness, and as a leadership and executive coach, I see these moments as formative for future leaders because they have to first and foremost believe in themselves.

3. A Built-In Culture of Service and Contribution

Every troop I’ve encountered weaves community service into its year: donating cookie proceeds to a food bank, caroling at senior homes, writing cards for the military, organizing drives.

At its core, Girl Scouts teaches:

Leadership is not about authority; it’s about responsibility and impact.

As girls grow older, service awards become more structured (Bronze, Silver, Gold), and these can make a meaningful difference in high school and beyond. But even at age 8 or 9, the idea that my actions can help others is deeply grounding.

My troop of 3rd graders has sung carols at Senior Living facilities, donated food, toured food banks, packed snacks for kids facing food insecurity, and more.

FAQs I Hear Most Often — With My Takeaways

What’s the time commitment?

This varies by troop. Ours meets once a month for 90 minutes, plus one monthly outing or service event.

My take: It’s like any extracurricular — you’ll get the most value if your child attends regularly. When Girl Scouts becomes the “optional add-on,” kids miss context and connection, which makes it less fun.

What do parents have to do?

Most troops have two leaders plus supporting roles like treasurer or cookie parent. Families rotate snacks and occasionally chaperone.

My take: It’s far less demanding than a sports team, but still a community effort. Offering to help, even in small ways, goes a long way.

What does it cost?

There’s a $65 annual membership fee (some troops require parents to join as well as troop helpers). Younger troops typically ask parents to chip in for badges, uniforms, and activities ($150–$200/year). As girls get older, they use fundraising (primarily through cookie sales) to pay for their experiences.

My take: Costs decrease over time as girls take more ownership of troop funding.

Do we have to sell cookies?

Short answer: No — but most troops do because it’s the easiest way to finance activities.

In our area, cookie booths run for about three weekends in late February and early March. Of the $6 per box, around 75–90 cents goes directly to the troop; the rest goes to council programming, camp properties, and statewide initiatives.

My take: I was skeptical at first. But I watched my daughter learn how to greet adults confidently, handle rejection gracefully, set a goal, and celebrate progress. The prizes are gimmicky, but the skills are valuable and transferable.

Link to help my 8-year-old meet her goal (she will deliver if you are in the greater Seattle area, but there is also a shipping option or just a straight donation to our military & Northwest Harvest).

How to Join

1. Check your local council’s website (in Washington: GSWW). Finding an open troop can be hit-or-miss.

2. Ask parents at your school or post in a local Facebook/NextDoor group.

3. Start your own troop — truly not as intimidating as it sounds. Councils love helping new troops launch.

Closing Thoughts

Girl Scouts isn’t perfect, and it isn’t for every family. But for many girls, it offers rare and meaningful practice reps in the very skills we want tomorrow’s women leaders to have: confidence, community, service, voice, and independence.

So if you see a girl selling cookies outside a grocery store this month, stop by — even just to say hello. A kind interaction goes further than you think. You are witnessing the earliest steps of a young leader learning to stand tall, make eye contact, speak clearly, and believe in herself.

And that’s something worth supporting.

Giving feedback with situational awareness and consistency is a complex skill - it’s helpful to have a name for it. I call it embracing an Editor’s Mindset. In a newsroom, journalist writes articles - it’s their name on the byline. Yet the newsroom editor plays a critical role - establishing standards, connecting the big picture, and owning the tiebreaker when necessary.

As 2026 is now at full speed, I’ve found myself needing to be an editor of key work - product strategies, exec presentations, budgets, marketing pillars, conference logistics. It’s got me reflective on what I’m like when I’m at my editorial best. Here’s a few things I try to keep in mind.

Nudge towards a team outcome

Your job as an editor is not to share the right answer - it’s to drive the right behavior so that the team self-owns the path forward. First, decide on the outcome you want - how you want the team to act, the final product success, the alignment among disciplines in the organization. Then, with that outcome in mind, figure out the right feedback that will nudge the team in the right direction.

Example: If I know a cross-team dependency will be tricky, I will ask “Is the other team onboard yet?” and offer to make intros to cross-team leaders. I do this instead of listing all the gotchas I think might exist. The outcome is to build the x-team bonds and let the team discover, own, and work the issues.

Tailor to the receiver

The best feedback is tailored to the people receiving it. How do they like to receive feedback? How blunt do you believe you can be? Does a certain discipline respond better to certain language? This often requires a “stop and pause” moment in yourself - to not only think about the outcome and your insights, but how to phrase them in a way that’ll be best received.

Example: I’ve got colleagues who I know need validation before feedback. I’ve got others who prefer blunt 1:1’s to hash things out, as they believe conflict breeds conviction. Some of my team prefers to be told what I want them to do; others prefer loose operational guidelines. And for new people to the organization, I try to provide more context than normal to frame the rationale behind a suggestion. Rather than one specific example, the point is to go through the editorial process with recognition on how to speak to each person in a way that’ll have the most impact.

Less is more

There is a “Schrodinger’s cat” element to feedback: If you give a second piece of feedback, it impacts and often dilutes the first piece of feedback that you give. Lots of feedback can muddy the water - or leave the most important feedback hidden. Sometimes your role is to leave line-level comments on a document, but don’t let that be the only altitude you work at.

Example: One tactic I use in some situations is to limit myself to two or three top nuggets of feedback. It forces me to prioritize and home in on what I hope will be the biggest unlock.

Uplevel the storytelling

The role of an editor involves giving advice on how to frame and deliver the story. Beyond just the ideas themselves, an editor gives feedback on the way it’s communicated to stakeholders. It’s good to have intentionality on when you are giving feedback about the ideas/plans/goals and when you are giving advice on how to communicate it.

Example: One phase I use often is, “I think we are aligned on the goal - now let me give you some thoughts on how we can best communicate it to stakeholders.” I’ve established a contract on my team that I often rely on them for the best ideas, and they can rely on me to know the dynamics of the company well enough to know the best way to sell it.

Force the team to use first principles

Most meetings jump ahead to focus on the “problem being discussed today” or “to recap last time, now we only have to dig into these remaining issues.” This approach is often efficient and useful.

However, there is another tactic I see used frequently, especially by very senior and busy execs. They intentionally broadcast ignorance about a topic - even if they’ve met on it before - to force the subject matter expert to explain it from first principles. A cousin to the ELI5 communication style (Explain It Like I’m Five Years Old), this forces a presenter to think about the assumptions they are making and do the prep work to be able to communicate the end-to-end picture to someone smart and on their side, but not deep.

Example: We have quarterly strategy reviews with higher management and often I show run them on behalf of the team. Explaining our product and strategy to busy people who have not been in the weeds with us is a gift. Every time, we use it as an opportunity to hone the craft of explaining what our product is hired to do & de-jargonify our presentation style.

Give a grade

Part of the job of the editor is to give clarity on how far away from the finish line the work is. Great editors learn to give a grade that is not about judgment but is rather an empathetic signal to the team about expectations. Many people struggle with this because friends don’t give friends grades. But an editor is not a friend. So, it’s a recognition that you have to use your authority to drive clarity in a way only you can.

Example: I have two methods for this. First, if appropriate, I give letter grades - especially if it’s not about an individual document but rather collective effort (e.g. “Collectively, we’ve done a B+ job of embracing industry standards here.”). If it’s about a particular work product, I use a % complete assessment - “What I saw today feels about 60% complete, you’ll get there once you address X and Y.”).

Use rituals to give feedback early

The most stressful type of feedback is the feedback that comes too late - the type of feedback that is right but costly because it requires the team to unwind things that have already been put in motion.

A “culture of safe, early feedback” is a norm you can set as an editor using rituals and operating rhythms. Official pre-reviews. Core Design Sessions. Repeatable Budget Reviews. Well-run teams don’t hide behind “needing to move fast” to skimp on the feedback forums that set norms.

Example: Our org sets an expectation that important work will need multiple forums to hone the idea. We codify “pre-reviews” and “hot issues” to work something urgent and set expectations that ideas are not final in those forums. Likewise, we have official forums for reviewing final plans, to give that sense of completion and sign off.

Wrapping up

Embracing an editor’s mindset is different than mentorship, as it is fundamentally about being “in the arena” with the team and co-developing strong plans and work product. But it shares a lot of characteristics - often it’s about teaching, not telling, and it involves removing the ego from your communications. It’s one of the most powerful ways you can signal that you care about a culture of high performance.

Give it a try - especially if you catch yourself seagulling.

Establishing this tradition has involved a lot of decisions, tradeoffs, and equipment purchases to ensure it is something the whole family enjoys. Here’s the downlow.

What’s our philosophy?

Young kids don’t always mix well with cold/uncomfortable boots/uncontrolled speed/busy lodges/heavy things to carry. Yes, skiing is a sport - but we prioritized “learning to love skiing” and a positive association with a ski day. We trusted that with more time on the slope, the kids will progress at the right rate - our job was to give them the right structure and importantly do a few things to ensure they are having fun. Here’s a few examples:

• Candy: We always carry chocolate or soft candy (nothing they can choke on) while on the slopes. This is a tradition picked up from my family ski trips when I was young. This bending of the normal rules - candy every time we ski! - was a big motivator to start and helped establish skiing as something special for the family.

• Parents should carry the kids’ skis from the parking lot - for the first year: This is an example of the “progressive disclosure” part of getting kids to enjoy skiing. Some parents seem to take it as a learning moment to force the youngest of kids to carry their own equipment. We got there - but not in the first year. The priority was ensuring the kids had fun, then layer in all the work needed.

• “Fun runs” with parents: Learning is hard work! Yes, practicing linking turns and pizza/french fries is important - but even more important is that run with me where all of us are finding joy like this is a roller coaster.

The key themes: get them hooked first, fill the day with more fun than learning, and trust that over time nothing matters more towards growing a good skier than time on the slopes.

When to start?

Five years old is the ideal age to start skiing in earnest. Any younger and I think the annoyances (temperatures, boot walking, equipment lugging, et cetera) overwhelms. Older is fine too, but five is a great year to ensure its foundational to their concept of winter vs. an add-on. And the older you start, the more likely you are to have other activities on the weekend (birthday parties, other sports, et cetera) that break the routine.

I think it’s great at age 4 to do one or two “test runs.” Pick a sunny day and just get the kids on skis for a half an hour. Even just a run down from the magic carpet between your legs – give them the thrill of moving downhill.

What’s your approach to equipment?

Kids grow fast, so most ski/boots will last a season and a half at most. Seasonal rentals are a good option – although with two kids skiing and the ability to hand down to the younger sister, it’s almost as cost effective for us to buy. We prioritized a good fit - both in boot comfort and length of ski - it makes a big difference, even if it meant a midseason unexpected equipment purchase.

There are a few non-obvious things you may want to acquire:

Ski Backpack & Guide Ropes

This is a must have. First, it has a handle on the back - essential for picking up a small kid once they have fallen. Second, it can function as a pocket for a backup pair of gloves. Third, it has detachable leashes - these are somewhat controversial (takes up a lot of room on the bunny slopes) and we used them sparingly, but it can be a good alternative to between the legs to get the kids comfortable on the snow.

Ski Tip Connector

Attach these to the front of the kid’s skis to help them learn to keep the skis straight. Many instructors will tell you not to use these and that it can develop bad habits. But again, our philosophy is to enhance the “time until fun” stat and these can help kids experience the thrill of a fun downhill run sooner. We phased them out pretty quickly as they moved on to more advanced skills.

Something Distinctive

We found it was very useful to get the kids something to make them stand out and easy to recognize in a crowd. The Crazee Heads Helmet Covers worked for us - plush covering that fits any ski helmet.

Rocky Talkie

The best on-mountain radios are made by Rocky Talkie - and make sure to get the hand mic attachments. Kids both enjoy learning radio protocol and it’s useful in case of separation or a need to ask someone ahead to stop.

There are other radios - especially those with a lot of social media advertising promising hands free magic AI wind noise reduction like Milo Action Communicator - I do not recommend them as they do not work better than a standard handheld mic like cops use.

Seasonal Lockers

Our local ski resort offers a seasonal locker to store onsite our skis and boots. It’s a bit of a luxury, but it makes trips from the parking lot more pleasant - including for parents. And it reduces the stress of finding a great parking spot.

This is especially useful if you plan to sometimes do other things while kids are in classes - like snowshoe or hanging out in the lodge.

Do you enroll the kids in ski school?

We started the first season with a few one-off group classes, graduating in year two to a weekly ski camp. Ski camps are a win for everyone:

• It created a routine and expectation that we’d go every week.

• We got some time on the non-bunny slopes while the kids were in camp.

• Kids learn faster with a non-parent (and frankly, the non-parent is often more willing to push the kid when they need it).

• Kids push themselves when around other kids.

By year four, we began to question the need to enroll in ski camps - kids were close to being able ski on par with parents. Then it’s time to decide whether to graduate to a ski club or racing team.

How do you spend time with the kids on the slopes?

Before the kids are ready to ski independently, we used three methods to practice getting comfortable on the slopes or linking turns:

• Backpack runs: See above for the kid’s harness/backpack, which comes with leashes that extend about 10 ft. Kids ski first, parent do mostly speed control behind them.

• Between the legs: Not easy on the back, but often the most fun for the kids at first. They can get a feel for turns and the snow.

• By the side holding onto a pole: This is the method that feels most like practice/learning. The kid is skiing beside you holding on to one of your poles, which is held vertically. Used to help them link turns together in nice smooth S shapes.

Create Lasting Memories

My iPhone tells me that I’ve taken 563 photos at our local ski resort over the past six years. We’ve established a family tradition that makes the winter - despite the long, dark days - the favorite season for our kids. And we’ve unlocked the ability to take some fun winter trips to ski destinations.

My maternal grandmother passed away last week. She was a force of nature. At 95, the matriarch of our family is survived by two daughters, four granddaughters, and eight great-grandkids. She lived a complex and full life. Born in 1930, at the age of 10, she lost her parents and sister to the Nazis while she was fortuitously vacationing in Moscow. She lost her husband to brain cancer when she was in her mid-40s, and she agreed to move to another country as an immigrant in her 60s to be with her kids and grandkids.

My grandmother taught me lessons my whole life - quietly, steadily, and stoically. Here are the ones I will remember:

1. Stand on your own two feet - she had no choice but to be self-sufficient from an early age. Her lesson to me is to know how to survive independently. She believed in education, in resourcefulness, and in hard work. She was furious that her daughters dissuaded her from getting a car in her late 60s when she moved to the US because that stifled her independence. When needing to choose if she was going to live on the East Coast or the West Coast (having daughters in both places), she chose the East Coast because public transportation was better and she did not want to be overly reliant on others.

2. Prioritize your health - going hand in hand with being self-sufficient, she always reminded me that taking care of yourself is important and no one but me will prioritize that. She was not shy to point out when she thought I wasn’t looking “good” - whether I had black circles under my eyes or gained weight or just looked tired - she always asked. I used to find that obnoxious, but I also knew that she was always watching me and she cared.

3. Always look the part - my grandma was always impeccably dressed - not flashy, but items that flattered her figure, high quality and met the moment. Her hair was always done, her manicure and pedicure in place and her closet complete (not abundant). She complimented me when I dressed well and pointed out when an outfit was not fit for the occasion.

4. Be happy to hear from people - Whenever I called or visited my grandma, she was always happy to hear and see me. No guilt trips, no exclamations of “I wish you called more” or did more. She was just happy to hear my voice. I’ll miss her big enveloping hugs and her booming voice.

5. Give memorable gifts - my grandmother believed that there is nothing more important than education. Throughout her life, she has contributed to her kids' education funds and ensured every great-grandchild had access to a musical instrument. We have a piano in our home because of her, as do the rest of her granddaughters.

6. Foster relationships that matter - She loved it when we got together as a whole family - we are a loud and boisterous bunch and we don’t always all get along. But seeing everyone together brought her joy. Over the years, the family grew and the conversation at the table got mixed - across Russian and English. And yet, she held presence at the head of the table - listening and observing.

7. Know where you come from - my family is Russian Jewish with a long history of surviving persecution as Jews, Soviet-era atrocities and immigration. She carried these things not as a burden but as knowledge of where you’ve been and where you are going. Always striving for a better life and honoring the past.

8. State your truth - my grandma said all sorts of things throughout my life that I did not want to hear. But what I always knew that she said what she meant and meant what she said. No empty platitudes, no empty promises - just things she believed to be true and that needed to be said.

9. Travel - while Soviet Russia did not really allow for travel, after my grandmother came to the US, she traveled as much as she could. Between the ages of 65 and 85, she went to Israel, Europe, China, and South America. She was bummed that she didn’t make it to Australia and New Zealand.

10. Drive your agenda - my grandma always had a goal and she was going to achieve what she wanted. Never a victim of her circumstances but a careful orchestrator of her life and a matriarch of our family. She never gave up, always looked forward to the next thing and had a why behind her actions. True to her last moments - she wanted to die in her own bed, with dignity, surrounded by her family - and that is how exactly what she did.

In the Jewish tradition, people say “may her memory be a blessing.” Her memory is the biggest blessing. I am honored to be her granddaughter and carry her lessons and spirit with me.

Thematically, in 2026, my word of the year is “believe.” I want to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, that I can grow my own business successfully, and I can be the wife, mom, friend, and daughter that I want to be in this season of my life.

I like breaking my list into categories - so this year’s categories are: solopreneurship, home life, health, & time with people.

Drive Success in Solopreneurship

1. Offer 26 goal-setting sessions to my community - As I continue to grow my business, I’m excited to use January as a way to reconnect with people in my network and help set the year up for success. Link here if you want to learn more. The greatest gift you can give me is to spread the word!

2. Invest in additional coaching training - I’m eyeing iEQ9 Integrative Enneagram Accreditation program so I can expand my offerings to leaders I coach

3. Do a professional photo shoot so that I can revamp my website and use images for social content

4. Post on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week and explore video as a medium

5. Attend 6 start-up product community events in 2026

6. Streamline my business expenses - migrate subscriptions to my business credit card, etc.

Invest in Home Improvements

7. Frame theater posters - my oldest daughter has been performing with Studio East and I’d like to help her remember these shows by framing the show posters.

8. Remodel a closet in my home office - I have been investing in my office space so that it is set up for me to work as a coach and advisor with in person as well as remote clients.

9. Buy a full-size mirror - carry over from last year

10. Update picture frames in our house - currently most of them are 7+ years old and don’t reflect what the kids look like

11. Keep 2-3 small house plants alive this year - I admire homes with living plants in them, but my plants usually die. A friend is helping me find the plants that are not too high maintenance so I can give it a try

12. Replace bath towels in our house - we’ve had the same ones for about 10 years and it’s time for a refresh

13. Get a dog trainer and improve Rainier’s recall behavior as well as get him to love his crate again

14. Schedule a regular dog walker 2-3 times a week

Prioritize Health and Hobbies

15. Take a multivitamin every day - immediately after breakfast

16. Drink ~26 oz of water before breakfast every day

17. Get a massage every 6 weeks

18. Learn to create greeting cards with my Cricut and make 6 birthday cards for my family and friends

19. Win 3 tennis matches in a league this year

20. Move at least 26 minutes a day

Spend Time with People

21. Schedule a monthly date night with Adam

22. Always have a new TV show I am watching with Adam

23. Take a trip to a new country as a family - 🇬🇷 Greece this summer!

24. Donate food, clothes, and toys monthly as a family

25. Host 2-3 game nights with friends

26. Plan a girls’ trip with my friends from my legislative fellowship days

Have a wonderful holiday season and enjoy our “drone shot” of this year’s Christmas Village:

Today, a couple years into the AI Era, I feel ready to talk about how I’m leading through what has been an even bigger change to my team and our industry.

For many of us, the current operating environment is a crucible i.e. a severe test. In the past year, we’ve mix shifted resources on the team from 20% on AI to 50%. That’s half the team producing a new type of software that we have never built before! It’s forced us to relearn, rethink, and retool our production function at the same time as we deliver immediate results to compete with high velocity, AI-born competitors. And stay excellent at the traditional web app development that we’ve been world class at! Throw in layoffs and a return to office mandate that is upending the contract between company and employee across the industry - and we have a full cocktail of operating environment changes.

I know many product leaders feel this exact same angst - maybe you do too! What defined mastery in our profession has changed. I don’t feel like an expert yet, but we have missions and mandates that requires us to perform as experts immediately.

If your job as a product leader this year feels extra stressful, tricky, and prone to imposter syndrome, you are not alone. Read on for my approach on how to rethink leadership during times of change.

Fire & Rehire: An Andy Grove-ism.

One of my favorite stories in the history of tech is how Andy Grove at Intel responded to a changing business environment. Intel’s original product was memory chips and Japanese memory companies were dumping cheap chips on the US market. It was clear that Intel’s entire business needed to change, which lead them to pivot to making CPUs.

Andy Grove realized it wasn’t just the business that needed to change - how he showed up as a leader and the entire culture of the company needed to shift in order to transform from low-cost commodity to high performance computing. As this came into focus, he famously fired himself, physically walked out of his office door, and walked back in with intentionally on how he was going to lead differently.

Navigating the Crucible: Eight Behavior Changes

So what’s my version of walking out and walking back in? I’ve had some time to think about and test a few strategies for what this moment calls for - and I’ve landed on eight behavior changes that I’m holding myself accountable to.

I am naming it to tame it.

One of the biggest tensions of this era is that existing systems weren’t designed for the new environment. It’s important to name that - it provides the motivation for non-linear work. For example, at a recent extended leadership team meeting, I spelled out my worry list, the problems requiring my personal energy, and a list of things that need to change. I got more unsolicited praise for that format of XLT meeting than any other I’ve done in 2025 - people are hungry to see leadership name what’s broken.

I am prioritizing mission clarity.

People are scared - they see promises of AI redefining the different categories of software that exist and they are questioning the longevity of their teams and job. So, I’ve leaned in even more than normal into mission clarity - at the macro level, this means writing down our products’ role in a new world and our core thesis for differentiation. At the micro level, this means creating space for more single-threaded “squads” with a clear single mission and mandate.

I’m wading in the river of online news & learnings.

Social media is the “town hall” of product making & AI news right now - engaging online is table stakes for me as a product leader. Contributing to the conversation is a way to practice brevity and synthesis, and consuming enables me to guide the team towards the latest trends. This is one reason why I upped my LinkedIn presence recently - but X, Substack, and tech podcasts are all critical right now.

I am setting expectations that are always slightly out of reach for the old way of doing things.

This one is critical to the transformation of an existing team - either we set the new bar for excellence, or it gets sets by others (execs above us, competitors, other stakeholders). I know my personal trainer at the gym uses the same philosophy because it creates growth. For example, earlier this year, I created a very busy September for a particular part of the team - a series of aggressive strategy and product reviews that in normal times I would have let spans 2-3 months. But I felt it was important to set a new anchor point, inspiring the team to find creative ways to meet the new bar.

I am staying paranoid about what’s not working.

As leaders, we all decide how much time to spend on problem identification vs. problem solving. During times of change, it’s important for senior leaders to shift the spotlight more to problem identification - asking the team to “bring me problems,” injecting the right amount of entropy to see if plans hold up to questioning, and finding comparisons that expose underthinking. Momentum and consistency are much less important now - that’ll come in the growth stage. This works best when you have an LT (like I do!) who can run the team, leaving me to focus on what might be missing vs. reviewing plans. (Think XO and Captain vibes). Another Andy Grove-ism: “Only the paranoid survive.”

I am assembling the new system, piece by piece.

At Microsoft, we are calling the new way of building product the new “production function.” AI-born startups get the luxury of starting from the latest first principles; we have to retool an already at scale system. This has increasingly become more of my job - weekly x-company meetings on AI accelerators, incorporating Applied Science into the mix, ensuring new aspects of product making like vibe coding prototypes and rigorous AI evals are deployed. Systems thinking about the production function here creates a sense of order in the chaos.

I am empowering the next generation.

I distinctly remember in the early days of the cloud transformation a decade ago, my org leader asked me - an up-and-coming frontline manager at the time - to take point on the strategy for continuous delivery of our cloud software (vs. our 3 year on prem release cycles). Crucibles are a great time to reach out to every level of the organization to solicit ideas and empower solution building. It’s not like the top of the hierarchy has it all figured out anyway!

I am managing burnout - in myself and the team.

My pandemic post on leadership framed this balance between boredom and burnout - the COVID crisis saw people on both sides of the spectrum. The AI transformation is overweighted to burnout - look at my list above: naming what’s broken, relentlessly higher expectations, and paranoia around unknown unknowns. So, I’m watching myself and my team - ensuring we get good breaks to recharge, practicing self-care, and doing what I need to ensure I bring my best self to work.

A New Hope: It’s All A Repeating Cycle

The good news about 2025 - we’ve been here before. The industry is a repeating cycle of technical shock, category recreation, product/market fit, and scale. And while the early stages are more stressful than average for existing products, it’s a well-worn path. And it gives me deep purpose to build resilient software that customers can trust, and an operating environment that adapts so people can do career defining work.

Onwards to the new era!

1. Your team won’t all mirror your pace, ambition, or work style. High-performing teams thrive on diversity of strengths, not uniform intensity. Find a way for everyone on your team to be in their optimal state, and embrace that their state will look different from yours.

2. Have the courage to hire people who are better than you - if you can hire for strengths beyond your own, everyone will benefit. To do that, ensure you have awareness of where you excel and where you have room to grow.

3. Your job is to be an editor of your team’s work - when your team comes to you with a problem that they need help with, they don’t actually need you to solve it for them. Ask what they have thought of and have tried already. Offer input and guidance first.

4. Keep your 1:1s sacred and have your direct reports drive the agenda. It is their time - sometimes they may need you to coach them, sometimes to support them, and listen. If you need to work on something on your list, try to schedule a separate meeting for it.

5. Don’t underthink task assignment - as a manager, you have a lot of work to assign - special projects, fire drills, areas of focus. Your job is to be thoughtful in who gets to work on what. Don’t go on autopilot - stay intentional.

6. Remember to give more praise than you think you need to for work well done - genuine and authentic appreciation is the cheapest way to motivate a team.

7. At the same time, don’t reward people for doing the basics - your praise needs to be meaningful, so don’t insult people’s intelligence by thanking them for doing things that are basic expectations of the job and the team

8. One size does not fit all in management - consider what different people on your team need and adjust your management approach. One model I use (invented by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the 1970s) is the Will Skill matrix, as a starting point.

   

9. Be mindful of the team members with whom you spend your time. It’s easy to get bogged down managing low performance, but your high achievers are the ones driving impact for your team. Where you spend your time sends a message to the team on what is most important to you.

10. Avoid being a “helicopter” manager when you’re on vacation or out of the office. Jumping in from afar signals that you don’t trust your team and that disconnecting isn’t truly acceptable. Plus, your input will often be mediocre because you’re weighing in without full context.

If you are looking for more content as a manager, here are some previous Mind the Beet articles:

1. Part 1: Onboarding a Product Manager

2. Part 2: Recognition

3. Part 3: How to Engage and Motivate Product Managers Stuck in a Rut

4. 🎪The Perfect Team Onsite: A Guide

5. 🧐 Product leader’s role in building trust

6. 💎 Advancing from Product Manager to Product Leader

7. How I Lead When The World Is Uncertain

Since I first published this, I’ve developed this post into a 45-min interactive learning session, and it is by far the most popular session that I do with teams at various learning days. (Reach out if you’d like to book me for yours!)

People intrinsically gravitate toward those who are comfortable with their own purpose. And I find discussing purpose helps me lead a team through tough decisions and it builds trust.

So whether you are just starting your journey or looking to refine your convictions, I hope this post inspires you to think about the big question of how you are contributing to the well-being of others. It’s worth it.

“Why are you here?”

With AI forcing us to re-examine our relationship to work, this question has been top of mind in our work life – both for employees seeking motivation and managers retaining and attracting teams.  

Long-time subscribers of Mind The Beet will know that the best framework I know for these questions of motivation is Daniel Pink’s Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.  It’s clear, it resonates, and it makes a complex problem easier:

Folks who are not yet long-time subscribers of Mind The Beet can correct that right here: 😊

This post today is focused on the aspect of Pink’s framing that was most disrupted by changing work patterns: Purpose. If Autonomy is about contracts among systems of people and Mastery looks inwards at improving yourself, Purpose asks how you want your toils to contribute to the wellbeing of others.  

The answer to “Why are you here?” involves all three drivers (along with providing economic security to yourself and loved ones), but today’s focus makes for some of the most interesting personal conversations about motivation.

Are You Ready to Discuss Your Purpose?

Purpose is easy to ignore for the sake of other drivers of motivation, especially when you are earlier in your career or younger in life.    

My own career focused first on chasing mastery and finding a place where “I can do my best work.”   The story I tell myself is that I chose computer science and business economics in college because they were the most difficult classes my freshman year and I thrived on the challenge of it.  

This motivation for mastery – the urge to get better and the worshipping of hard problems – drove the first 10 years or so of my career, which is natural.  I’m establishing myself and at that time being “good at something” is motivating enough.  

Transitioning a career to think more about purpose is a typical evolution many people undertake as they enter their mid-career (or at least it was for me).   You could define mid-life as the transition to deeper purpose – society is clear that you should establish your mastery of something in your 20’s and 30s; it’s less clear what to do with it in your 40’s and 50’s (hence the crisis!).

A Parable About Purpose

Let’s strip away the modern trappings of technology.   Imagine you live in a simple tribe of ancient times and are deciding what to do with your life (or that you are going on a Dungeon & Dragons quest if that’s your jam).    I’ve found in my study of life and literature that there are three things pulling us in different directions: The Explorer in you, asking to see what’s over that next hill.   The Villager, who is driven to stay in the town and contribute meaningfully to the community.  And the Healer, who wants to ensure the most disadvantaged of the tribe are thriving before we move forward.

Let me dig into each animating drive a bit more:

1. The Explorer, rooted in progress. This is the part of us that finds purpose in forward-looking opportunities.   This is the part of our soul rooted in capturing the unknown and is optimistic about applying human potential to unsolved problems.   In modern times, those that optimize here are researchers & astronauts & scientists.  

2. The Villager, rooted in the symbiosis of community. This is the part of us content to be part of the great cycles that define humanity as they repeat themselves.   This spirit is animated most by how our value serves the community.   In modern times, those that optimize here are the teachers, lawyers, politicians, chefs, and athletes.

3. The Healer, rooted in the lifting up of those in need. This is the part of us that finds the most solace in helping the downtrodden.   This area is rooted in a belief that society can’t move forward until the baseline for everyone improves.   In modern times, those that optimize here are doctors, community organizers, and social service workers.

Society needs a healthy balance between all three of these to function and you can argue whether an era needs more of one vs. the others given the challenges of the times.   As an individual, you optimize for your purpose as you tweak the harmony between these three pulls. 

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Applying To Tech Careers

Many jobs naturally gravitate towards one of the three animating drives at the expense of the other two (e.g. it is hard to be a doctor without optimizing for the Healer in you.  It is hard to take an Explorer-first mindset if you are a lawyer). 

Tech jobs, however, provide a lot of flexibility across all three dimensions.  Software is, after all, eating the world – it’s typical that the dominant economic force of our times provides a diversity of purpose.  

This is why I like Daniel Pink’s framing of your career as a “purpose maximizer.”  It implies a less stressful approach to finding your purpose, one rooted in continuous discovery and growth.  It rejects the philosophy that you find your purpose first and then go out hunting for career opportunities that align with it.  

Sometimes your current position that you stumbled into enables you to find a purpose that resonates; other times some burst of inspiration about what animates you enables you to take that next career step.

My Journey with Purpose

Let me share my own journey with these three aspects of purpose.  As I reflected while creating this framework, it became apparent to me that I’ve looked for a healthy balance between all three elements, finding different sources to draw purpose from - some intellectual and some emotional.

🔭 The Explorer: Information Technology at Global Scale

Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing has a great monologue that captures this spirit of the Explorer.  I remember it vividly from when I first watched it in my college days:

This is why I spend days consuming lots of information about where the world is going, reading science fiction, and in particular am fascinated by futurist thinking. 

I’m so thankful to have been lucky enough to be part of the first 0.5% of people connected to the internet, the biggest driver of productivity and economic progress in our generation. This was the launchpad for the Explorer in me and enabled me to be part of the infotech revolution of the past two decades and I’m committed that the next 30 years will be even more beneficial. 

The work I contribute to – helping organizations large and small have the tools to collaborate with one another and improve their written work product – helps the world at large move forward in two important ways:

• Productivity Gains.  “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.” – Paul Krugman.   The information sector – especially enterprise productivity software – is absolutely essential to the productivity gains we are seeing today.  Continuing that trend will prevent war, decrease inequality, and expand the pie for everyone.

• Helping just a tiny bit with every single global problem.   The products and services I’ve worked on have been used by scientists to cure disease, government to mediate conflicts, and researchers to find green solutions to the world’s energy problem.  I go out of my way to share these customer stories with the team when I see them.  This shallow but wide impact on some of the most defining issues of our generation is one of the coolest aspects of working on enterprise tech.  

Much of tech is a cycle, but this Explorer purpose has me seek out the trends of progress and articulate their impact on global well-being.

🏠 The Villager: Building Tech Community

“You are not a platform unless your partners make more money than you do.” – Bill Gates

Creating economic opportunity and a community for others has been an extremely animating part of my work life.   It’s a unique aspect of the job I stumbled into that I’ve come to love.   One in ten developers in the world has written code on top of the platform I work on.  Our partners make 4 times the revenue per year than we do on the product we build.  This part of my job is about stewardship: being predictable so that others can bet on us, cultivating opportunities for an ecosystem, and feeding reinforcing cycles.

A few years ago, I prepared fresh material for a bootcamp for new hires in my organization.   It’s a great excuse to get back to base principles on what we do and why.   I chose to include a 4-minute podcast recording of someone who builds apps on top of our platform.  It told of his journey getting asked to learn this technology, driving hundreds of miles to a local conference to learn more about it, meeting like-minded individuals, and then getting into blogging, podcasting, and speaking.  His best friends are now members of the community built around the products my team delivers.  

I find so much solace and animation in ensuring the continuity of the ecosystem that hundreds of thousands of people depend on to feed their families and grow their careers and skillset.

💖 The Healer: My Role as A Team Leader

Back to West Wing clips (can you tell how seminal the show is for Millennials like me?): Here’s a poignant example of the role managers can play in caring deeply about employees as humans:

In my twenty-year career, I have been a manager for 15 of those years.  Early on in my career, I chose to be part of “management” and carry the burden of responsibility.  

Others might fill up their yearning in this area of purpose by working for an NGO or more directly ensuring their work helps specific forms of inequality.  For me, I’ve fueled this into my work as a manager and ally to others. I define my purpose as creating an environment not only centered on business success but on one where people of all types can thrive.

It’s been a journey over those 15 years as a team leader.  Moving from feeling like a judge of talent into always being a coach.   Honing in on my belief that the future of leadership is about vulnerability, allyship, and empathy.   These pivots were intuitions much before I was able to articulate that my purpose as a manager is to contribute to the wellbeing of the team and champion hidden figures.   

The Explorer in me impacts hundreds of millions.  The Villager, hundreds of thousands.  The Healer in me is focused more locally on deep relationships and empowerment of people I can name and know.

Wrapping up

I wear many hats - tech worker, husband, father, son, writer, and community member - so this is far from a complete picture of my purpose. Mastery and autonomy have also come much more naturally to me - I’ve struggled as I’ve found the need to become more of a purpose maximizer. I’m far from complete on the journey.

Over the last few months, I have had the privilege to witness and help clients, colleagues, and friends who have found themselves impacted by “reductions of force” — especially in tech.

I have seen the full range of emotions: anger, shame, frustration, relief, sadness, and grief to name a few. As someone whose job has defined me for many years, I have deep empathy for everyone who finds themselves without a “job” and the destabilizing effect that can have. It is well known that the loss of a job is a top-five stressor and anxiety inducer in the United States.

Here are the questions I have been asking my clients to help them clarify their next steps.

1️⃣ How much time do you have to find your next job?

When I talk to people who have been laid off, I often see them frantically networking and jumping into interviews for the next role. They’re surrounded by helpful friends and colleagues rushing to make introductions, offering advice on what role they’ll be great at next. If that feels great to you — awesome.

My advice: get the facts. How much time do you really have before you need to be in your next role, and how much of that time do you want to use for a break?

We live in a culture that incentivizes the hustle and the grind. With a layoff, whether you like it or not, you have a break. Most people I’ve spoken to end up realizing that they have more time than they think to take a breath and think about what’s next.

Things to consider:

• Understand your severance package.

• Do the math to understand how long you have (with some buffer) before you need to be working again.

• Factor in a realistic job search timeline — let data, not fear, be your guide. Remember: people who get jobs quickly rarely post about it on LinkedIn.

💡 Bonus reflection: If you knew you had six months before your next job, how would you spend it?

2️⃣ What do you want to remember you did during this time in your personal life?

Remember the pandemic? We experienced shared grief over the loss of in-person connection, and many of us processed it by finding a new hobby to focus on during that time. Some of us nurtured a sourdough starter, others baked cakes, and learned to knit, paint, etc.

The pandemic forced a pause that we were not ready for - and there are similarities with an unplanned layoff-induced pause. So how do you want to use this moment?

Is there a trip you’ve postponed, a book waiting to be read, or a hobby you’ve been curious about? Make this more than “the time you were job-hunting.”

Maybe you want to cook something new, try a sport, or relearn how to play with your kids without reaching for your phone.

Whatever it is, coping with grief will be part of your healing. You will also be a lot more appealing to an employer if you’ve processed the layoff by the time you get to the interview.

💡 Bonus reflection: What story do you want to tell about this chapter a year from now?

3️⃣ How do you want to show up to your kids and colleagues right now?

Real talk — this is a moment of deep vulnerability. Someone told you your role was no longer needed, and it’s jarring. No matter how much betrayal or hurt you feel, know that you will come out on the other side.

If you’re a parent, your kids are watching. You are their model for navigating something difficult.

What do you want them to learn from how you show up right now?

Is it resilience? The ability to ask for help? Finding joy in small things or savoring newly found time together?

Be intentional — for yourself and for those who look up to you.

💡 Bonus reflection: Who are you when you’re not your job title?

4️⃣ What do you want to learn professionally during this time?

Many people I talk to want to learn more about AI - usually entailing taking a course or getting a new certification. I would consider digging deeper on your why and what would be most interesting and impactful to learn for you right now.

If you are looking for a certification because you are hoping it will help you land a new job - remember to check your assumptions. Certifications and degrees matter, but oftentimes experience speaks louder.

If you are a product maker, think about what product play looks like at this time. Whether you are playing with Lovable or vibe coding - make it serve a purpose that you are passionate about.

Consider advising a start-up or getting involved in a non-profit so that you have stories and learnings to share during this time.

💡 Bonus reflection: If you had total creative freedom right now, what would you build, explore, or experiment with?

5️⃣ What’s important in your next phase?

Your next job will mark the beginning of a new chapter. Before you jump in, take a holistic view of what’s important to your whole self.

Ask yourself:

• What do you want to take with you from your previous setup? (e.g., in-person vs. remote, manager vs. IC, type of work, culture, pace, balance)

• What do you want to leave behind?

• What do you want to be true in your next chapter?

💡 Bonus reflection: What did your last job teach you about what energizes you — and what drains you?

Maybe it’s “the year I reclaimed my creativity,” “the year I learned to rest,” or “the year I became braver.” Naming it helps you live into it.

🌱 Closing Thought

A layoff is not the end of your story — it’s an unexpected intermission that will undoubtedly end. Fill it with intention rather than dread. It will help your next act be more fulfilling.

Give yourself permission to rest, rebuild, and reimagine what’s next.

Without further ado, here are some tips on product that all you Swifties out there can relate to.

🎵It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me. 🎵

Enough said. If you are PM, Step 1: Show up. Step 2: Take accountability. Many times, being present & helpful is more useful than being absolutely right.

🎵If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Strategy sets the scene for the tale.🎵

Great PM’s know how to generate energy and drive consensus to quicken decision-making. A product strategy doesn’t answer every product question you’ll have, but it’ll provide the right bounding box for the sandbox you play in.

🎵I had a bad habit of missing lovers past. My brother used to call it “Eating out of the trash.”🎵

AI is creating new categories and disrupting norms. Don’t fall into the bad habit of loving old ideas or failing to question previous assumptions. Lean into the latest trends.

🎵 At least you know exactly who your friends are. They’re the ones with matching scars🎵

Great x-discipline partnerships stem from shared accountability. Ensure your designers and engineers feel responsible for the same outcomes as you do. Celebrate wins together and learn from failure jointly.

🎵I keep my side of the street clean.🎵

Set a quality bar for your own work higher than what’s expected of you. Sweat the details.

🎵 And it’s fine to fake it til you make it. Til you do. Til it’s true. 🎵

Everyone has Imposter Syndrome. Product making is part art, part science, part intuition. Developing that intuition takes time and practice.

🎵 I polish up real nice. 🎵

One of the most magical parts of product management is the art of great synthesis. PM’s transform raw and messy customer input, data and market trends into a coherent product idea that will drive impact.

🎵Get out your map, pick somewhere, and just run.🎵

In product making, if you are standing still, you are falling behind. Analysis paralysis is a real thing. You learn by doing & collecting data.

🎵She needed cold hard proof, so I gave her some. 🎵

Clearly, Taylor goes out of her way to have a great relationship with her Data Science team. Definitely a top tip for any new product manager.

🎵 He wanted it comfortable. I wanted that pain. He stayed the same. All of me changed. 🎵

You can’t develop product intuition without failure, pain, and trying new things. Find a team where it’s ok to fail and learn. View boredom and comfort as signs of needing change.

🎵 Bend when you can. Snap when you have to.🎵

Iterate or pivot? Change is costly, so as Taylor is saying here, always iterate and grind it out when you can, but don’t be afraid to pivot when the data is clear that what you are doing is not working.

🎵Familiarity breeds contempt. 🎵

If you work in software long enough, you know that user experiences age. People worship disruption and sometimes a “new way of doing the same thing” is a feature in itself. Startups by definition need to counterposition against incumbents, so there is a natural tendency to look down upon the current solutions.

🎵 Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room, and every single one of your friends was making fun of you, but fifteen seconds later, they were clapping too? 🎵

Figuring out how to manage a non-consensus bet is an important part of product making. Persistent, differentiated product success often comes from seeing something other people didn’t and capturing it. It takes careful management of your stakeholders to survive through the crucible of judgment before the bet clearly plays off.

🎵 I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this.🎵

You’ll work on many features that end up shipping, but there will be a time when you’ve poured everything in, but the feature needs to get cut. Sometimes not shipping is a feature and that’s ok. You earn your stripes as a PM upon your first failed experiment or cut feature.

🎵If it feels like a trap, you're already in one.🎵

Taylor, were you talking to Clay? If you work in Big Tech, you think about the Innovator’s Dilemma - your current customers will encourage you to iterate on what is perceived as the highest value, only to be disrupted by new entrants who focused on lower-value customers and then iterate to the next big thing. The tough part of this strategic quagmire is that incumbents don’t know they are in this situation until it’s too late.

🎵So what if I told you none of it was accidental. Cause I’m a mastermind.🎵

Yes, you are, Taylor, yes you are.

So, I’ve made it a point to be more active on LinkedIn - last week, my LinkedIn follower count crossed 8,000 - and this post shares my journey so far.

If you’d like to follow along, you can find me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-harmetz/

But First, Why

In ranked order, here’s my purpose for spending time on LinkedIn:

1. Clarifying thoughts. Brevity is in vogue right now. The ritual of crafting 3-5 unique posts - be it product news, AI thought leadership, or product-making tips - has helped me practice being precise as a communicator and keep up with norms in tech.

2. Stewarding tech community. LinkedIn has become the leading home in the post-Twitter world for my product’s social tech community. Listening to feedback and sharing product news now happens on LI.

3. Selling my team. I get to practice how to talk about the virtues of my company & team - and role model the leader I want to be. Yes, I share open job recs when we have them, but more important is the way posting helps me clarify our “aspire to” culture.

4. Learning industry norms. Although there is certainly a vibrant AI community still on X, I find LI is a place where I can keep tabs on best practices for product making, learn what’s trendy, and connect with fellow product makers.

I feel like some people are still stuck in this stigma that LI is only for job hunting - and I’m here to say it’s quite the opposite: LinkedIn has become an essential tool to shape my thoughts.

Stats & Process

Here’s how I approach showing up on the network:

1. 3-5 scheduled posts/week. I prefer to find a quiet 30 minutes on Sunday night or Monday morning to schedule out the week’s post. After some research, I chose Buffer as my tool for doing this - it’s cheap but not free and has a depth of features specifically for LinkedIn.

2. Comment & listen. The key to showing up is not just broadcasting my thoughts, but engaging, commenting and capturing key feedback about my products. For product feedback, I share any interesting hot takes to internal Microsoft Teams channels we have that are dedicated to digesting feedback.

3. Keep up on social & LI trends. I stay curious and do research on content best practices and algorithm hacking - for example, whether hashtags help or hurt, how to get around the tax of having a link in a post, and trends on other networks that might transfer to LI. If nothing else, this makes me a smarter product designer and gives me empathy for more professional content creators.

For the sake of transparency, here are the views & user counts for my posts over the past 365 days. I am not anywhere close to being a Top Voice or hugely influential, and it’s a lot harder for a post to break through on LI now than it was just 1-2 years ago, as the network has matured and preference is given to the bigger influencers. But it is a start, and it’s only been a few months since I’ve gone into higher gear. I also don’t optimize my content for eyeballs; I try to prioritize authenticity and brand building more.

I think about my content in categories of post types - hopefully self-explanatory and I quickly did an analysis of any post with >2K impressions and what category they fell into:

It’s funny - a job posting used to be a guaranteed 20K impression post just 1 year ago, now they rarely break >2K impressions for me. The network has definitely transformed.

My Profile

Header

Lately, I’ve been on a kick to describe my job without using Microsoft’s product brands - which is reflected in my updated tagline on LinkedIn that is more industry-forward.

I decided to put my primary product logos in the banner and also decided to keep the explicit Call to Action (i.e. Follow me) with clear expectations on the type of content someone is opting in to.

About Me

I also recently rewrote the “About Me” section, focusing more on transformation and disruption and less on specific projects:

For 20 years, I’ve built & scaled apps, tools & technologies that help teams work better together and enable people in large organizations to gain expertise and find answers quickly. I’ve operated on the leading edge of every major change in collaboration & knowledge software, including web technologies, mobile, distributed computing, cloud, and AI. I excel at enabling product organizations to stay current with emerging technology, launch new products and line extensions, and grow a healthy tech ecosystem around a product.

Today, I manage a ~100 person team of product managers, data scientists, and customer success experts across the US, Europe, India, and China. We support a multi-thousand person engineering team and deliver a cloud service that serves over one billion users. I sit on Microsoft’s leadership team for collaborative apps & agents - which stewards the product strategy for some of the most iconic and resilient products in our industry, including Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Viva.

I excel at building leadership teams of senior product executives, championing the career of group managers and senior product architects, and sponsoring cultural programs & product discovery processes that prioritize a fast-moving culture that drives growth outcomes using data.

I prioritize giving back to our industry, including as co-author of the Mind The Beet Substack, where we weekly share thoughts on product making & tech careers to 1k+ subscribers.

Follow for thoughts on enterprise adoption of AI, product making best practices, and maximizing tech careers.

Some Key Posts

Here are some key types of posts that have performed well for me.

Using AI

Posts about concrete use cases for AI always pop for me:

How I Work and the AI Transformation

I’ve used posts to uplevel my thinking about the way my team produces results. Here are a few examples:

Career Advice

With my career advice, it’s often a synthesis of the themes we discuss here on Mind the Beet. I try to ensure the career advice posts are novel, quick to digest, and get beyond surface level:

Product Framings

I use LinkedIn to try out tighter ways of describing the products I work on.

And I recently took an internal executive review on a product and upleveled into some industry framing:

A Bit of Lived Experience

A lot of people use LI to share milestones - and it’s always fun to celebrate and see people grow. I try to ensure my milestone posts “add to the conversation” with some insight or memorable take:

Wrapping Up

LinkedIn is far from perfect - it has a problem with bots & there is still a lot of performative and inauthentic content. And I have two big wish list items as a content creator:

• It’s a terrible product for historical knowledge - search is abhorrently subpar and most filters/roll ups are randomly lossy.

• It struggles with real-time events. Its hashtags are mostly meaningless, and it has no feature for onsite community gatherings or to monitor the zeitgeist of a moment like a tech keynote.

If LI invested in these two areas, they could completely corner the tech community market.

Follow me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-harmetz/.

Over the last nine months, I have completed over 50 hours of coaching and learned a methodology that has provided me with a structured approach to help people tackle their most complex challenges. The set of tools I have learned will be invaluable in my toolbox, enabling me to build on my professional and lived experiences.

Throughout the program, I have worked with dozens of clients, helping them navigate career transitions, overcome impostor syndrome, and manage complex matrixed organizations. It has been a privilege to hold space in these moments of ambiguity, which has given me an immense feeling of joy and purpose.

I would love to help more people this fall, so if you or any of your friends are interested in hearing more, please reach out to me (helen@mindthebeet.com) or visit my website: Mind the Beet Coaching

As I have been contemplating my next steps during my sabbatical, I have settled on investing in myself as a leader and pursuing an executive coaching certification via Hudson’s Institute of Coaching. In parallel, I plan to explore fractional product management to keep honing my product craft.

After researching a variety of coaching options, I settled on Hudson because it offers a clear path to the industry-recognized International Federation of Coaching certification, has an in-person weekday experience, and is a well-recognized brand in the world of corporate Learning and Development.

As a first step on this journey, I participated in a week-long LifeForward experience that helped me contemplate shifts I’d like to make as I balance my personal and professional ambitions. Below is the Vision Board that I created that will guide my next chapter.

My Vision Board

Busier than ever - As I reflected on my time since I stepped away from full-time work, I immediately filled my days with “stuff” - kids, house projects, catching up with friends, tennis, and community volunteering. I loved all the things I dove into, but this “new” work swallowed me whole. So, the question that a coach posed to me that I keep coming back to is:

“What does my busyness get in the way of?”

The busyness prevents me from being intentional in how I spend my time, as well as the quality of output that I produce.

So, as I created my board, I kept space on it. I found it uncomfortable and difficult not to fill every inch of white with quotes, pictures, and goals.

Panel 1: My Personal Vision

The board consists of three panels. The first one, on the left, is centered on my purpose and reminders that will propel me forward.

For the purpose of the exercise, I went through 50 cards and identified the key ones that I want to lean into at this phase of my life. I did a lot of work to narrow this down to a manageable number of cards that are both relevant now and I’m not engaging enough in.

• Using my abilities - This is a nod that I intend to keep honing and practicing my craft. This entails product work, coaching teams and individuals, baking, and parenting.

• Staying Healthy - I plan to continue leaning into living a healthy physical lifestyle. I have been playing tennis and lifting weights, and I need to keep working on balancing my diet appropriately, as well as not getting injured as I dive into more physical activity.

• Inner Peace - This is an area of development and a reminder for me to calm the mind, be present and grateful, and have confidence in my own knowing.

• Connecting, Caring - What gives me joy in my life is connecting with people and caring for those I love. So, I want to do more of that.

Personal Vision Statement:

I also got a chance to workshop my personal vision statement - and while I wrote the first draft myself, I found it really helpful to workshop it with a small group of peers that I spent the week

Love myself as I am by living an extraordinary life, caring deeply and unapologetically, and raising good humans.

This statement is anchored around embracing myself as I am, which was a focus of my self-work and reflection. A big premise of coaching is that the answer lies within you. What I found is that the work ahead for me is to quiet my mind enough to be able to decipher a path forward.

Positive Reinforcement

The rest of this panel is all about positive self-talk. I remember coming back to Microsoft after maternity leave and seeing the nursing rooms be covered with stickies of fellow women lifting each other up with words of encouragement.

One of the exercises that I did was to write a letter from “Helen the Sage” (my 80-year-old self) to myself today. I found myself giving so much grace and positivity that I wanted to capture the themes that came up

Panel 2: My Identity:

Panel two of the board is about the key roles that I play: Mom, Leader, Coach.

Mom: With two young kids, being a mom continues to be a central part of my working identity. My kids need me in new ways today compared to when they were younger. So I am prioritizing spending time with them processing their days and emotions, extra study and learning time, as well as helping them focus on activities that give them joy (theater, swimming, and skiing for the older girl, and gymnastics, ice skating, and Girl Scouts for the younger). This is also the area of my life that has taken over in ways I did not intend as I stepped away from work. So I am seeking to rebalance this so that I am spending time where it matters most.

Leader: I am not sure if, in my next career chapter, I will go back in-house to be a product leader in some capacity or start my own practice, but whichever way I go, I know that leading people is a key aspect of my identity. I also know that I don’t have to be in a corporate environment to be a leader - for example, I’ve enjoyed stepping up in my local Girl Scouts organization as a leader.

Coach: I love being a coach and have been formally and informally coaching and mentoring people for many years. This is the role I am actively making more space for as I pursue a coaching certification with Hudson and decide if this is my next career chapter or a set of skills I take in-house to the next organization I serve.

I chose to have only one photo in the middle here, and it’s a ChatGPT creation of our family embracing technology because technology is the thread that pulls through my three identities - whether I am building tech, teaching tech to my kids or using it for my own business and development - it is central to my life.

The Getting Ready circle on the bottom left indicates where I am - which is getting ready for my next professional adventure.

Panel 3: Full Life

The third board is about hobbies that help me live a full and purposeful life centered around 3 things: Couple goals that Adam and I have, giving back to the community and traveling to expand my horizons.

✍🏻 Mind the Beet - Adam and I started Mind the Beet in January of 2021, and it has been an outlet for writing, giving back to our community as well as spending time together as a couple on non-transactional life things.

🍞 Community Loaves and Baking - I picked up baking during the pandemic, but now I bake for our local foodbank - HopeLink, as part of the Community Loaves organization. I love having the house smell of baked goods and helping alleviate food insecurity locally in our neighborhood. This is also an activity I’m able to do with my kids, and it allows me to talk to them about the broader issues at hand.

👧🏻 Girl Scouts - My favorite part about Girl Scouts is the opportunity to mentor and support young girls. So I am leading a Brownie troop for my youngest daughter and volunteering as our Service Unit Manager, leading a growing number of troops in my neighborhood.

🌎 Travel - This is a goal that is becoming more realistic as my daughters get older. For me, travel opens up the aperture on different ways of life, experiences and builds empathy. I’m excited to do more of it and keep focused on this area both as a family and with friends.

I’m excited to be investing in myself for the next 9 months as I pursue the Hudson Coach Certification program. Whether I end up being an executive coach or a Product Leader (or some combination of both), I know that I will learn a lot in the next year and grow. Onwards!

From the Mind the Beet archive, this week delves into some of my favorite smells and the stories behind them.

Roasted Whole Coffee Beans

Inhaling the steam of hot coffee is nice, but for me, nothing beats smelling the roasted whole beans.   Doubly so after the pandemic, as many mornings during that period I lifted up the hopper in the coffee grinder to smell the beans as a sort of “Well, I probably don’t have COVID if I can smell that” test. Funny where new traditions come from.

The smell also reminds me of my coffee origin story.  Like many, it was an acquired taste born from the necessity of needing morning caffeine.  One of my first 9-5 jobs was working as a civilian on a Navy base and I remember thinking I better learn to like coffee.  Being in the Navy, it wasn’t just any coffee – it was strong, black Navy Coffee.   You could follow the tradition all the way back, I’m sure, to what kept Lord Nelson awake at the helm. No, I didn’t ask for cream or sugar.  No one offered. I still drink it black.

The Inside of a Desktop PC

The faint smell of burnt dust. The grease from the articulating CPU clip. The factory-like smell of the motherboard material. All of it brings me back. As a high school student in the United States of the 1990s, building my own desktop PC was the default hobby.   That is what I saved money for.  That is what I used the dial-up modem to do research on.   For me, getting a car was about taking a trip to Fry’s Electronics more than anything else. It was a craft, a hobby, and a social activity: the fun of LAN parties playing Doom and Quake were the fruits of the labor.

Just this past year, I built a new PC with my daughters - it was a fun experience to relive (lots more LED’s lights now a days!).

Tom Yum Soup

Nothing warms me up better than a bowl of this soup as the weather turns in Seattle. It’s one of the few foods where the smell is more distinctive than the taste.   I went down an internet rabbit hole once to find the source of the distinctive aroma, and it comes down to the root Galangal mixed with the lemongrass.

I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with Thailand – although it was the destination of my first extended trip after college before starting my professional life.   These “bookend” moments stick with us as more memorable than average as they mark a turning point in our lives.

Toasted Everything Bagels

The mix of dried onion and garlic warmed via direct heat is an almost overwhelming scent in a morning kitchen.  And it’s the breakfast of choice for my dad.  It’s one where I went from an annoyed teenager at my parents stinking up the kitchen to now something that fondly reminds me of home.  Funny how smells can age.

Baking Illustrated Chocolate Chip Cookies Straight From the Oven

Of course, a dessert cooking in the oven is an easy smell to love, and since Helen picked up baking during the pandemic, our house has been filled with such wonderful scents.

When it comes to my own baking, though, absolutely nothing beats the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven.  My family growing up was not a baking family, so it was a learned art after college as I started living on my own.   Chocolate chip cookies were one of the first things I ever learned to bake.  My recipe of choice was from Baking Illustrated, a book that was gifted to me by a good friend:

As an aside, this is an absolutely fantastic cookbook and a great gift.   It takes a scientific approach to cooking, including narratives on the 5-10 different experiments tried for each recipe to get at the why behind ingredient and method tradeoffs (this is where the extra egg yolk in the recipe comes from, making the cookies stay chewy longer according to their test kitchen).

Movie Theater Popcorn (with Butter)

This one seems like a guilty pleasure to add – as if I’m easily susceptible to the corporate machines.  After all, the whole point of the movie theater popcorn smell is to get you to buy something.  It’s supposed to be addicting.

Yet as I reflected on it, the local movie megaplexes were a large part of my suburban upbringing in the 1990s.  The re-release of Star Wars!  Toy Story!  American Pie!  My best friend worked as a manager at the local chain, too.

You got me right where you wanted me, Hollywood-Food-Industry Complex.

Old Academic Buildings

It’s hard to place the origins of where this smell comes from – a mix of high traffic communal spaces, brick, aged wood, old furniture, and history.   But I love that distinctive smell of an old academic building.   For me, it’s a smell of comfort, safety, and feeling in control and in charge.  My alma mater UCLA was a coming-of-age experience filled with finding out what I wanted to do and making lifelong friends.   One of the things I love about the institution is its connection to history and a sense of traditions, something I never had much of growing up. I suppose they also have a special place in our family, seeing as Helen and I were married inside one:

Share

Wrapping Up

Food, hobbies, family, entertainment: the nose is a gateway to a deeper conversation and history.   Next time you want to have a deep and meaningful convo – ask someone what their favorite smells are.  Who 👃 what you’ll learn. 😊

I have compiled a list of common themes that I wrestled with, shared with women who worked for me and whom I mentored and coached.

If you find this post helpful and you run or are a part of an Employee Resource Group for women or working parents, I would be honored to come speak to your group on this topic.

Building a Foundation at Work

Real talk - I have successfully navigated parenting and working because I have invested in building a high-trust relationship with my manager and team. To achieve this, over the years, I have learned how to communicate effectively and ask for what I need, while maintaining a strong track record of delivering results and demonstrating genuine care for my work, my team, and the company. Because I had this key ingredient, the rest of the journey of balancing pregnancy and returning to work was doable.

Family Planning

Here are the key themes that people ask about: timing of getting pregnant, sharing the news at work, navigating fertility treatment while working full time, and planning maternity leave.

Timing

My timing to start a family was not informed or dictated by my corporate job considerations (promotion timing for example). Because I expect my career to span decades, not years, it was easy to zoom out and understand that whatever short term bumps I’d experience by having kids at an “inconvenient time”, they would even out over the long term.

Instead, the factors that mattered to Adam and me as we contemplated timing were bucket list items that we wanted to accomplish before having kids. Mainly, we wanted to spend a few years being married without having additional responsibilities for other beings (hence we didn’t get a dog either), we wanted to do something epic that would be hard to do with kids, so we climbed Mt. Rainier.

When to share at work that you are pregnant

If you are working in the office, I would find a trusted colleague to share the news with on the earlier side in case you need coverage for meetings because of doctors appointments, etc. I had an office neighbor whom I told about because I needed her to cover an interview, and I was also seen running to the bathroom more often than usual due to morning sickness.

Timing to share with your manager is highly dependent on my original point of having a good relationship with your manager and how much you blend personal life and professional work. I shared early with both of my managers because of the trust and my personality of being open about what’s going on in my life. However, if you would not be comfortable sharing a pregnancy loss or have any concerns about this impacting you at work, then keep the news to yourself until it becomes awkward.

Navigating fertility treatment at work

I have never personally experienced this, but I have had direct reports who have been in this position. As a manager, I deeply appreciated the trust and faith that my direct report had when she shared this information with me and it allowed me to support her. I was able to offer additional resources, as well as step in to cover her work when she needed to be out. I never questioned her commitment—if anything, it gave me more empathy for her full life.

How to transition out to parental leave

Have a strong draft of your transition plan by week 34 and become optional in meetings/projects starting week 36. If your company policy/state laws support it, take the last two weeks before your due date off. Trust me, you do not want to be in the office at 38+ weeks pregnant. Adam also switched his phone ringer to “on” after I hit 36 weeks and assigned me a special ringtone in case I went into labor.

Make sure to inform your manager and team about the type of communication you prefer or don’t want while you are out. For example, I wanted to know if there was going to be a reorganization and I was going to get a new manager, I also wanted to know the results of my annual review.

Returning to work after maternity leave

Having a child is a seismic shift in your life akin to starting college or moving to a new city. When you return to work after something that big, expect things to be different. Also know that what you are going to need will be changing pretty frequently for the first 1-2 years of your life as a parent. But here are a few tips to get you started:

1. When you return, take a moment to assess what has changed and what has remained the same during your absence. Don’t rush to jump into the tactics on day 1. Give yourself a few days to get acclimated.

2. Figure out what your schedule needs to look like to support pumping, childcare pick up, etc. My kids went to sleep at 7:30pm for the first year of their life, so if I got home at 6pm, that meant I only saw them for 90 minutes, and that was not going to work for me. So I left work at 4pm but came back online at 8pm.

3. Make time for yourself - it may feel impossible to prioritize yourself when time at work and at home is going to feel scarce. But savor that cup of coffee alone on your way to work, make a plan to work out, or to periodically go out with a friend.

Here is a longer post I wrote about this - Seven pieces of advice for parents returning to the "office" after parental leave.

Working Mom Life

The key themes here are: what to do when kids get sick, how to manage daytime kid activities when you work 9-5, how to travel for work, and what do you do about morning/evening meetings that inevitably pop up.

Sick kids

Kids get sick. As you prepare for parenthood, take stock of your team culture around this - do people work from home, do many take the full day off, etc. If you are the first person on your team to have a child, discuss with your manager how you will approach and communicate with them when your kids are sick.

When my kids get sick, I go into “calendar crisis mode”: cancel non-urgent meetings, take a breath, and coordinate with my husband on coverage. My husband and I also apply the shift approach:

Also, I want to name that you will need to take time off when your kids get sick unless you have family in town that can cover for you. Day care and schools require 24 hours of being fever free before returning and even most nannies will not come in when your kids are vomiting or have a high fever. I mentally prepare myself for sickness entering the house at the beginning of the school year and during weeks when sickness is most inconvenient.

Daytime conflicts

What happens when your kid is going to be “graduating” from preschool at 1pm on a Tuesday, and it’s 30 minutes away from your workplace? The answer is it depends. If conflicts are planned far enough in advance (2+ weeks), I do my best to clear my calendar and attend. In addition, over the years, I have learned to block parts of certain days so that I can be a mom in moments that matter to me.

1. First day of school - I block the morning so I don’t rush after drop off. I love having extra connection time with fellow parents and reflecting on the years ahead.

2. Kids’ birthdays - frankly, that is as much of a celebration of me as it is of them, so if able, I always try to take half a day off for myself.

3. Halloween - Trick or treating energy is high and we head out around 5/530pm, which means I need to be home no later than 4:30pm. So I plan accordingly.

Work travel

I both love work travel and feel guilty for loving work travel. It’s ok to hold these two conflicting truths. To mitigate, I put in systems that enabled me to travel while knowing that home life was ok. This involved knowing when/how to connect with the kids when I was away, having a plan for when to come back early (if there was sickness), and most importantly, learning how to enjoy the time I had to myself.

Here is a post that gives 10 tips to help minimize “travel guilt.”

Morning/evening meetings

Whether you work across different time zones or deadlines/firedrills creep up, there will be a time when you will need to get on a call in the evening.

For predictable work, such as collaborating with teams in other time zones, I have found success by setting my availability for after-hours calls ahead of time and only having meetings on those evenings. I found doing that 1-2x a week for 1-2 hours was sufficient.

For urgent matters that periodically crept up, parenting taught me to better set boundaries (especially as a leader). I paused and asked questions like “Is this matter really urgent to discuss at 9pm or could it wait until the morning?” If the answer was yes, then I asked if I was critical or if I could send a delegate and catch up by listening to the recording or reading the notes. Sometimes I still have to get on an evening call but I learned to do due diligence and not just say yes.

Summing it up

I decided a long time ago that I wanted to be a working parent. I bring things I learn at work home and vice versa. I firmly believe that doing both helps me live a fulfilling life and brings me the most joy. I also know that this journey is better and easier when you are surrounded by those who are going through the same thing or are slightly ahead of where you are so they can share their path.

If you’re seeking support, I’m running two mentor circles this fall to help parents thrive at work and home and I offer individual coaching for working parents and leaders —drop me a line if you’d like to chat.

Congrats on your job with Microsoft!  What an interesting time to start in tech - you just signed up for Facebook during your last week of final exams at UCLA, Google went public one year ago, and the iPhone will launch in two years. 

You will be in the first 1% of humanity to use the internet, get a smartphone, sign up for a SaaS service, or chat with AI. You will see cloud & mobile go from niche ideas to indispensable worldwide utilities, and the AI era is just starting to usher in another paradigm shift as I write this. The most controversial part of your career is that you stayed with the same company for 20 years, so you rode all these waves while nurturing a resilient home for your work life.

Today, you are a VP of Product & Data Science - responsible for ensuring customers’ success with one of the largest online services in the world. As you constantly adapt to the times, here are 20 lessons you’ll learn in your first 20 years.

Starting Your Career

1. 🏄‍️ Ditch the career ladder. Learn to surf the right waves.

Find something bigger than yourself and attach to it. When it washes out, find a new wave to ride. Repeat. Intentionally choosing the right wave - team, technology, industry trend- will be way more important than any other career tactics.

2. 📈 Drive for 1% improvement every day.

The world’s information will double every 5-8 months, and workplace technology - from search to collaboration to AI - will keep improving to match. This means there are two skills that can and must constantly improve so you can keep up: synthesizing information & communicating your ideas. Practice, try new tech, and hone these a little bit every day.

3.🗞️Get paid to keep current.

Make learning an on-the-job habit - especially keeping up on the industry and a healthy information diet. This knowledge of the broader context of what’s going on around you will get you noticed.

4.🧱Be a finisher.

The tech industry glamorizes the start of new things. You’ll see, though, that it will be more important to find the resilience and grit to finish, to edit, to scale, and to bring customers along.

5. ⏱️ Learn the difference between urgent and important.

Getting the urgent done will foster your credibility on the team. But carving out time for the truly important work is how you will find creative success. Every year you’ll look back and realize that so little of your time - maybe 30% - was spent on that truly important, difference-making work. You’ll learn to trust your gut to identify it.

Sustaining Your Career

It’s not about “work/life balance” - it’s about managing your energy and exploring how what drives you will change over time.

6. ☕ Balance mastery and purpose as you age.

Society wants you to get good at something in your 20’s and early 30’s. It’s much less clear what to do with your now finely-honed skills in your late 30’s and 40’s. Uncovering your purpose - asking “Who am I helping?” - will ensure you avoid feeling trapped by being great at something that no longer gives you as much joy.

7. 🏓 Detect your boredom & burnout early.

“It’s easier to recover from being annoyed than pissed off.” You’ll get bored sometimes. You’ll burn out too. Detect it early - before it snowballs. Stay “in the flow” where job challenges and your skills match.

8. ⛓️‍💥 Fire yourself at the start of each new wave.

“What got you here won’t get you there.” Every time there is a paradigm shift in your industry - cloud, mobile, AI - the cycle restarts and everything gets reset - requiring you to show up differently. Andy Grove at Intel famously fired himself and rehired a new Andy to pivot from memory chips to CPUs - you will need to do the same to adapt to changing times.

9. 🏖️ Take your retirement along the way.

Every few years, you’ll find a way to take an extended time away from work - honeymoon, paternity leaves, sabbatical. The pauses will make you a more interesting person and unlock your understanding of what drives you.

Thriving in the Matrix

At Microsoft, the biggest multiplier to your impact is the scale of working on problems that require thousands of people to properly solve. You will learn to thrive in this matrix, not be a victim of it.

10. 🎁 Be generous.

Your job as a PM is not to own and explain the customer insights, but to teach engineering and design until they know the customer as well as you do. You’ll learn to think about this just like physics or economics - teach the team to run in their own heads a useful synthetic model of the world everyone can use to quicken decision making.

11. 🦝 Be curious.

Cross-team work will be some of the most rewarding projects in your career, but also the most tribal. Your biggest mistakes are when you are too critical too early - you’ll want feedback to be your love language to show you care, but it’ll be misinterpreted as unsupportive. Better instead to take the time to be curious - share context and understand the thoughts, wants, and feelings of the other tribes - before setting goals or evaluating plans.

12. 👟 Walk in your managers’ shoes.

Life is too short to have anything other than a deep, trusting two-way relationship with your boss. You will work to understand the unique ways in which each of your boss’s jobs is harder than yours. You will help them learn the lived experience of members of their teams.

13. 🤗 Find your “First Team.”   

The key to happiness will be to join a “first team” of peers that you can rely on for support.  Find the space where you can be yourself and broker the deep relationships among those who can relate to your struggles. Find people you can laugh with.   Your unhappiest times will be when your own pride makes you resist joining the tribe around you.

Making Great Products

Product Management will professionalize over the course of your career.  It’s part art, part science – and frequently calls for you to make decisions in the face of ambiguity. There will be a lot of noise and temporary trends, but three universal truths will become your grounding ethos on building products:

14. 📈 Champion results over activity.

Five years into your career, the cloud paradigm shift will begin.  This will fundamentally transform your profession – enabling data analysis, experiments, and more hypothesis-driven thinking.   You will learn to ask, “where do we need to be and how do we measure it,” and to help teams moved beyond an activity-focused mindset. Facts not adjectives.

15. 😍 Learn to have product taste.

Your job won’t only be about data and decision-making rubrics. You’ll also need to develop an innate sense of taste for high-craft products that generate user love. My biggest advice for developing this is product play - channeling that inner child as you make a habit of using the products around you. Yes, taste is learnable - not innate.

16. 🤝 Don’t just build products. Build customer trust.

The product itself is just a small part of the lived experience customers will have - you’ll develop a passion for the “around” product work of support, sales, adoption, customer success, and ecosystem stewardship.   As the pace of change accelerates, you will realize how much nurturing the industry around your product matters just as much as building the right product.

Leadership

Motivating and inspiring others and generating the legitimacy to do so will become an increasingly larger part of your job.

17. 🧘‍♂️ Harness the power of calm.

People are attracted to calm leaders. You will learn to tap into patience & optimism and create systems to help others do so as well. Your latest motto: Do hard things in a calm way with me.

18. 🎁 Give each person a unique gift.

Every person you manage will need you to push them to be their best - the trick will be to figure out what they need from you right now. Praise? A nudge to raise the bar? A reframe? Your attention to the gift each person uniquely needs defines how you give people autonomy, yet still show up meaningfully.

19. 🔍 Be intentional with your attention.

A retiring member of your leadership team will give you a big gift on his way out - he’ll say that you should use the phrases “I need” and “I expect” more. You will not need to solve most problems yourself - simply setting expectations on what you care about will let the team know what’s important and what needs to change.

20. 💖 Embrace empathy, vulnerability, and allyship.  

You’ll have friends who lose their jobs due to the disruption your product causes to the industry.  This will have a profound impact on their lives.   What a way to humanize abstract charts on cloud growth rate and disruption to the value chain.   Technology and society are more intertwined than ever.  Leading diverse teams will require showing vulnerability and speaking publicly about allyship.

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Summing It All Up

This newsletter is called Mind The Beet for a reason – it’s a quote from Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume that speaks to the eternal struggle of defining your own reality in the face of processes, pressure, and systems. The first 20 years of your career will be about influencing large systems, not letting them consume you.   Mind the beet.

Learn More

“In many ways, September feels like the busiest time of the year: The kids go back to school, work piles up after the summer’s dog days, and Thanksgiving is suddenly upon us.” ~ Brene Brown

👩‍🏫 Clear the deck

I loved Gretchen Rubin’s recommendation to get ready to return to the usual routine after Labor Day, to do a bunch of small tasks to set yourself up. To prepare, I have booked travel with my mom and sister for our trip to Arizona, organized the calendar with kids activities, defined my work structure (Mondays, I do community work, Tue, Wed and Thursday, I work with clients and Fridays, I catch up on my back office), and Adam and I added a fun trip to look forward to for Octoberfest!

✅ Update and Print Morning Check Lists and Breakfast Menu

We started having a morning checklist a couple of years ago. We have a morning checklist that reminds our girls what is expected of them to get ready for the day. I display this laminated list prominently in our kitchen area, keep markers nearby, and every item gets checked off before we leave for school. Throughout the year, we add/remove items as we agree as a family, but this has been a helpful tool to ensure everyone knows what their job is in the morning.

I have also found that having a debate about breakfast daily is not fun, so we have a breakfast menu to reduce decision-making fatigue in the morning and further streamline weekday mornings. We have agreed as a family on the guardrails for each day of the week for breakfast, with built-in nonnegotiables as well as choices throughout the week. I learned this tip from a fellow mom and it worked great last year so we are continuing it on.

🔟 Remember the Pick 10 Rule to keep the house tidy

A while ago, I learned about the “10 Things Rule” renamed in our household to Pick 10. With a busy family of four, the clutter accumulates fast. So now, as a family, we all pick up 10 things during a transition period - for example, between dinner and the next activity, before leaving the house to go on a fun adventure, after arriving home and starting the next thing. 10 is an arbitrary number - sometimes we do 5 or 15. The main point is to not make this time-based but outcome-based.

👏🏻 Clear and Prep the School Work Boards

We have two large cork boards with each of our kids’ names hanging up by our dining table. This is where our girls get to display any work they are proud of from school. Before the start of the school year and the new year, we clear the boards to make them be ready for the upcoming influx of work that will be coming home. The girls get to decide what goes up on the board and what comes off of it when there is not enough space. Things that don’t make it on the board go into the trash.

First day of school traditions

🍦 Ice cream on the first day of school eve

My family had a tradition of getting ice cream before the first day of school to celebrate the upcoming beginning. Adam and I now do this with our girls. It gives us a moment to ask the kids questions about what they are looking forward to as well as to talk through the upcoming morning of the first day of school (reminder of checklists, time to get up, etc.).

🍎 Take the first day of school morning off

When I chose to be a working parent, I promised myself that on days when I really wanted to be present with my kids or fellow moms, I’d make the time at work to do that. The first day of school is one of those days where I crave connection with other parents so I block off half a day for back to school to be able to walk to school with my kids and hang out with fellow moms for a little bit after. After drop off, I take a walk, get a tea/coffee, and get back to work. This pause gives me a moment of intention-setting for the year and grounds me in the two big jobs I have - being a mom and being a professional.

🥗 Our Favorite Dinner Table Questions

As we head back to school, the routine of family dinners is coming, so I am re-reading this blog on our Family Dinner ritual and, specifically, the repertoire of questions to ask to spur conversation:

“How was your day?” gets a bad rap because it’s not specific - it doesn’t inspire creative thought or show curiosity. We’ve had luck with these questions instead:

What’s something that surprised you today?

This is a good intro question, even for younger kids, which tends to force an answer better than “My day was good.”

What made you smile today?

This question hasn’t been successful with our 6-year-old, but it’s been a gem of insights from our 9- 9-year-old that helps remind her of good things that happened. We’ve learned a lot about friends we didn’t even know she had from this question.

What’s something cool that you learned today?

This question gets better over time when kids see how you react to their answers. I’ve noticed that the more curiosity and attention you show to the response, the more interesting the next day’s answer will be.

Wrapping Up

Whether or not you have kids starting school, going back to school or you are just getting ready for the fall, I hope you feel seen. I look forward to this season as much for the return to routine as well as fall decorations, soups, and football games.

Also, here are more of our parenting posts:

• 👶 Advice on Hiring a Nanny: Practical tips for working parents (Helen and Adam)

• 💪🏻 Brave Parenting: How to show up intentionally with our kids

• 🐎 Seven pieces of advice for parents returning to the "office" after parental leave: How to adjust back to work life (Helen)

• ✈️ Work Travel and Mom Guilt (Helen)

• 👨‍🍼My First Year of Fatherhood: Polished Memories (Adam)