Nikita Miller: preference

Transcript context

…And we could talk about that if you want, but it was more of a segue to work-life balance, which I know you have some strong opinions about. So I don't know, you could take it either direction, but just thoughts on work-life balance/how hard the PM role is. The PM role is really hard. I feel especially now that I'm managing a lot of teams and PMs at a lot of different levels, I do find that periodically I remind them with the core of my being that, "I know this is hard." It is hard. There are a lot of expectations. You're expected to be competent across many areas all the time, you're expected to have an answer and you're expected to keep your calm and not lose your shit, and that's really hard. It just is. It's stressful. So I think I spend quite a bit of time with my team, my PMs, helping them understand that I understand that. And so when we're problem-solving, let's probably not solve for everything. Let's focus on one of many things that are expected. It's really hard. On work-life balance, as I mentioned to you I think about this a lot, I'm currently a mom and as you can imagine, that's a lot to manage at any given time. And so recently, when I think about work-life balance, I don't use the word balance, I use optimization. It's this question of what are you optimizing for right now? Whether it's today or this court or this year, with the understanding that I don't think you can have it all at the same time all the time. And so I'm increasingly coming to peace with that. Where that's been interesting over the course of my career, I was chatting with my husband about this yesterday and was thinking about, early in my career I remember when we had big releases, folks would just work nonstop for a couple of weeks. We would stay in the office late, we would come in early. If it was international, we just probably wouldn't sleep because we wanted to make sure we QA'd everything before we released it, and that was an expected part of the product development life cycle. And that was a lot of my early product years and I just did it and it was very exciting and I quite enjoyed it, but even then, the flip side of it for me was I also was a runner back then, so if I was training for a half marathon or a marathon, then the next week I'd probably do my long run in the morning and not start work until 10:00 AM. That was my version of balance. And I think many of us are lucky enough, especially in tech, that a lot of companies get that form of flexibility. So now fast forward 13 years, it is very similar. I don't do all of the drop-offs and pickups for the kids, but there are some weeks where I'm like, "This is the week I'm going to do all of the drop-offs and pickups," or, "This is the day," and that's felt much healthier for me than this expectation that I'm somehow going to balance it all and everything is going to be equally great or cared for all the time. I think what I'm hearing essentially, which I really like and agree with, is sometimes you're just going to have to go sprint and go hard and work really hard and go long hours and then that doesn't need to last forever. And then when it's not, enjoy that extra time and build and recharge and do the things you got to do.…

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