Hello All,
I’m almost a year into this company as a PM and need your opinion/advice on this. Is telling my manager I feel pressured at work a bad thing? I’m planning to level up in the PM ladder soon. When I talked with my manager about personal/professional goals, I communicated that I wanted to have better work/life balance. Not sure if I screwed up since this can give an impression that I “can’t handle more responsibilities”, which actually is not what I meant. Just worried how to handle this.
Thanks in advance.
4 Likes
Looking at it the wrong way, IMO. You communicated what you need.
If that prevents you from being levelled up into a role that means more work when you’re already feeling tapped out, did you really screw up? Or did you put yourself first?
4 Likes
If you’re in a work environment where you’re feeling pressure already, levelling up may mean more pressure. Work doesn’t need to feel like pressure but it’s likely you will always feel like that in that environment, unless you’re able to change how you feel about it.
To be super duper frank, telling someone you feel under pressure and need more work life balance doesn’t exactly scream ‘put me in a leadership position’ - that being said, if you are able to work with your manager to build a solution where you are equally or more productive, you feel less pressured, and you have a better work/life balance and your manager is happy too then it will reflect really well on you.
The gap between the two is how you go about articulating the problem and designing the solution together.
3 Likes
How well do you know your manager? Guessing what his reaction going to be will be helpful in crafting your communication. And I think this is also depend on work culture in your organisation. Some companies do promote work/life balance to be more sustainable and increase overall productivity. Some others just looking at who stay up to reply email / slack at late night
3 Likes
I’m not sure what your company’s growth is like right now, but one successful way I’ve seen people handle this kind of scenario is by presenting a hiring plan. Put together the roles you think would need to be added to support and grow the product sustainably - whether that means more product managers, or you need some kind of ops role or product marketing, some additional QA solution, etc.
If hiring is a total non-starter in this case, it might not be the best move, but in general I think it shows that you’re thinking strategically about the product, and hopefully also showing how you’re prepared to show some leadership (i.e. if some/all of these new roles would be reporting to you).
2 Likes
Amazing example of proposing a solution ^^ That screams ‘put me in a leadership position’ 
1 Like
Thank you all for taking the time to give your advices. Appreciate.