The journey to be a better product manager or product designer, like most professional careers, is full of comparison. Comparison against others on the same career track, against other product teams and their resourcing or maturity, comparison against other products at other companies (which can be great research!), comparison against other areas of the business and their ability to drive or accomplish work, and the list goes on.
Comparison can often trap us in envy. You do the comparison, find your own lacking, and wish you had the other. This is how some features get put into roadmaps, after all. But looked at slightly larger, the comparisons that make us envious might also have something to teach us - especially if we think about it in terms of personal or professional growth. The twinge of envy is a trigger that we are unhappy or desire to change something. Can we spin that into an action?
A bite-size podcast I often listen to is the Before Breakfast podcast by Laura Vanderkam (episodes are around 5-10 minutes). She had a specific episode called “Understand your Jealousy”, which speaks to this idea of finding meaning in what makes you envious, albeit in a more personal setting. Finding your “pain point” of what makes you envious allows you to do something about it.
STAND-UP EXERCISE
Do whiteboard exercises with your team to kick off a conversation. My team did this exercise over two different stand-ups, but you could combine to one, time-permitting.
The first whiteboard is asking folks what makes them envious. I put it on a scale of personal to professional, so we could spark conversation easily but still dig into the workplace-focused topics. The second whiteboard flips the idea, asking why might others be envious of you? This is meant to open up the understanding of jealousy (that sometimes what you perceive isn’t reality) and that it can also be a real driver for behavior.
What forward steps can we create from where we see our envy? And where can we help others by noticing their envy of us? How do we turn what can be seen as a negative emotion into a call for action?
