How are you Dan? :candycute: Its been a

[floral dawn]

Hey! Good to see you! I’ve been wondering how you’re doing since our last chat, too!

I’ve been taking the last 1.5 weeks slow—not because I want to or because it feels nice, but because I recognized the burnout was getting serious, and my health would crash if I didn’t slow down.

I hopefully have some part time work lining up soon, but still under a lot of pressure to find another project or gig to round out my schedule.

[hybrid rain]

Its been ard a month since my new role… hmm still not entirely sure of it tho

Like I think what I would want is more career guidance stuff

Been trying to ask various groups on discord and reddit but to no avail………

Even if its sth generic like “how shd i accelerate my career growth as a product mgr” no one answered :((

Also Im supposed to have gotten sth done w my portfolio

But kept going around in circles lol

Hopefully you managed to rest up well!

[floral dawn]

Thanks! I think I’m going to try getting back into the fray again tomorrow. Definitely feeling the need to get some things done.

[floral dawn]

I’m wondering if people might respond differently if you phrased this a different way. “Career growth” is such a broad topic, but if you scoped the question down to something more specific, I wonder if you’d get more answers?

That said, the folks I’m seeing on the UX side are also super burned out. There’s an AI for UX Slack group I joined, and lots of cool people are there, but almost no one chats. They just drop links to AI articles and then discuss nothing. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I wouldn’t be surprised if product folks are experiencing something similar.

How do you learn new things these days, typically? Some people dig podcasts, some people dig books, some people dig video courses, etc.

[hybrid rain]

I specified that my end-goal is to work in an org where people are passionate about good product experience, prob sth like a series C-D startup

Its more that bc I wrote quite a bit, so I think people cant be bothered to read LOL in spite of writing a tldr

Cus from what I observed, usually the questions like “Do you have examples of AI being used in the government” get answers

[hybrid rain]

Even in here, when we bring up stuff like cost benchmarking to better evaluate stuff being done or proposed, people are just 🙄

[hybrid rain]

Mostly books / podcasts / online articles. But hv been quite busy w current work so I havent taken the time to read extensively yet lol

[floral dawn]

To be fair, my priority for now would be the learning curve with the new job. Earn trust to do the job as best I can. Then start thinking about long term growth again after I’m on a more solid foundation in the day job.

I’ve liked some of the podcasts I’ve heard by Melissa Perri! (Might be misspelling her name tho)

And I’ve liked some of the webinars I’ve been to hosted by Product Tank, too.

Those might help you get immersed in current topics.

But fishing to find people who can get into the weeds on product topics… sounds rough. Sorry to hear! I’ll try to think about you if I see any good places for that!

[hybrid rain]

Hm its also because in my current org we already try to upskill and train people according to their career goals / track from day 1

So I kinda also want to nail down stuff like that

Its also complicated because traditionally in this org, there are so many projects but they are mostly on Ops mode

hence most of the roles are in actuality project management lol

But before I joined this role, I cleared up on how this proj is like so thankfully not misaligned on that yet

But ya its frustrating like I tried to actually pay for a career coach irl (back then it was to ascertain changing from swe to ux)

and even so, the person i was referred to wanted to know like my whole life history to be able to best recommend me :/

[floral dawn]

I feel like that makes sense, though. I have a chat bot I’ve been doing some interactive journaling with about career stuff, and it seems to have more helpful responses if I give it a system prompt that has pretty much my whole career story, too.

[hybrid rain]

ye i have been using gpt to bounce off ideas

but sometimes its better to have human interaction tooo haha

[floral dawn]

Oh, it definitely can’t replace a human. But it can absorb some of my anxiety so that humans don’t need to experience all of that. 😂

That said, it’s been really interesting for me to compare and contrast ChatGPT with Claude and Gemini Flash 2.5.

Like, I feel like ChatGPT’s prose is so punchy. It’s trying to say so much in so little text. Like it’s trying to be meme-able. It kind of feels like it’s trying to trigger a dopamine hit with text and emojis, and compared to Gemini… I feel like ChatGPT is actually trying to addict people. (Because it’s Silicon Valley—of course they’re trying to do that.)

[hybrid rain]

yeee i shd try claude, i keep seeing claude being mentioned by marketing / product folks

(keep hearing)

[floral dawn]

I’ve heard a lot of people say they like Claude Sonnet 3.7 less than 3.5.

It’s actually a premium, paid feature to go back to 3.5.

Which maybe means 3.7 is a leaner model, and 3.5 is better in part because it’s more expensive to run?

[hybrid rain]

what the. premium to use an older model LOL

interesting