GoKawiilThe exhaustion that rest can’t reach
Maya spent over a decade at a healthtech company. She worked her way up from IC to people manager, running her own team, and she was thriving on the director track. Then she stepped back to deal with a health issue.
Now she’s a fractional product leader three days a week for a startup while job-hunting to try and return to enterprise work. That health situation has since resolved. At three days a week, this is the lightest workload she’s had in many, many years. Yet she’s been struggling with feeling burnt out.
The most common advice I see for product leaders facing burnout is to rest. Take PTO. Meditate. Lighten the calendar. When rest doesn’t work, the next piece of advice is to quit and find a different company. In coaching, I’ve watched enough people follow both playbooks to know they don’t always fix the problem. Maya’s story can help show why.
She came to me for coaching after reading a post of mine sharing my experiences with how rest doesn’t always help. That resonated. She came to me to figure out what was going on under the surface.
On our call, she talked about the interview grind. She’d tried not doing too much prep, then tried a lot of rehearsal. No matter what she did, she’d go into the room and bomb it. The offers weren’t coming in.
She ran a hand over her face as she said: “That’s how I feel with burnout, that I’m doing so many things but nothing is ticking or landing.” She blamed the burnout for blocking her ability to be successful in interviews.
With all these job-hunt failures, a different question surfaced in her mind: was she actually not as good a product leader as she thought? She had recently switched to applying to lower-tier roles — less pay, less responsibility — because she thought that was the market signal. But she still wasn’t seeing success.
She knew she was burnt out. What she didn’t know was what kind, or whether other product leaders were going through it, or what she was supposed to do about it. Something beyond needing some more time off was going on here, so we dug in.
Maya on autopilot
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