Productivity dysmorphia describes the feeling of failing to recognize your accomplishments and wanting to continue doing more, even when you’re running on fumes. It is the intersection of burnout, imposter syndrome, and anxiety. It's possible that a toxic "hustle culture" is pushing people to continue working even though they’re breaking down and desperately need rest.

Productivity Dysmorphia

Highly competitive, <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6822254">work-oriented cultures</a> normalize this constant pursuit of productivity that eats away at other areas of life. In fact, you’re often praised for putting productivity above your well-being. Remember how schools rewarded perfect attendance? Similarly, companies prefer employees who get the maximum work done while taking the fewest possible breaks. Rewards like these reinforce that rest is bad and that being constantly at work is the right thing to do.

Burnout Is Rewarded

This mindset pushes people to force their minds and bodies to work even though they’re breaking down and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721411434979">desperately need rest</a>. The idea is that this mindset encourages people to dedicate their weekends and free time to extra work, skip the family dinners to <a href="https://hbr.org/2021/01/take-your-lunch-break">eat in front of a computer</a>, and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11745398.2016.1178152">take work devices on vacations</a> so they can wrap up a project or two on the plane.

Internalized Capitalism

There’s a difference between enjoying work, working a lot, and feeling compelled to work irrespective of whether you enjoy it. Popular quotes like “if you do what you love, you don’t work a single day in life” may normalize overworking under the assumption that if you’re passionate about something, you won’t ever get tired. Today’s toxic hustle culture may also feed into this narrative, advising people to maintain a side job outside of traditional office hours and utilize weekends to build a blog/channel/business so there’s no space left to take a break.

Hustle Culture and Productivity Dysmorphia

Some writers have even begun describing <a href="https://betterhumans.pub/rest-is-productive-1348b2b7eeb0">rest as productive</a>, as if people should stop relaxing if it doesn’t improve performance in some way. Not only does this mindset make it difficult to view and celebrate your achievements, but it also nudges you to <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/12/what-happens-when-your-career-becomes-your-whole-identity">build your entire life around work</a>. Messaging like this can make you feel guilty for enjoying a weekend doing “nothing” if you’re not hard at work on the two days you get off from work. As <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/employees-seek-personal-value-and-purpose-at-work-be-prepared-to-deliver">people place more and more importance on work</a>, it becomes harder to justify enjoying something if it doesn’t lead to productivity.

Being Productive Is The Only Goal

Productivity dysmorphia describes the feeling of failing to recognize your accomplishments and wanting to continue doing more.

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Productivity

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Feeling unproductive even after working all day? It may be "productivity dysmorphia"

Companies often have difficulty talking with customers about prices and have a legitimate need to reduce “friction” in the transaction. They accomplish this by using tricks such as tweaking price endings to distort perceptions or to signal a bargain. For example, $9.99 is perceived as a whole dollar cheaper than $10. The challenge for purpose-oriented organizations is to be transparent and truthful.

Price challenges

A helpful starting point to improve how organizations present their prices is to accept that price is an integral part of its dialogue with customers. The next step is how to explain it. The field of linguistics gives us four rules to have meaningful dialogue:<ol><li>The rule of quality: Participants ay only what they believe to be accurate.</li><li>The rule of manner: They avoid overly vague, complex, or simplistic expressions.</li><li>The rule of relevance: They only contribute information that is related to the topic.</li><li>The rule of quantity: They give the right amount of information.</li></ol>

How organizations present their prices

Position the price as a component of the company's responsible and ethical intentions. For example, Southwest Airlines price fairness in the name of its approach to service: On its website, the airline describes "Transfarency" as a "philosophy in which customers are treated honestly and fairly, and low fares actually stay low — no unexpected bag fees, change fees, or hidden fees." From a linguistics standpoint, this applies to the rule of relevance:<ul><li>Communicating about the company's ethics.</li><li>Connecting price to that message.</li><li>Hoping the customer makes the connection between the two.</li></ul>

Make price a reflection of your values

Customers often wonder how a price was set or why it has recently changed. This suggestion applies to the linguistic rule of manner by being very clear. Demystifying how prices are set or changed can help establish a trusting relationship with customers. For example, the furniture company Neptune provides extensive detail of its underlying logic for pricing.

Explain the price

Any of the four linguistic rules for dialogue can be broken if done in a lucid way.For example:<ul><li>To show customers just how affordable its furniture is, Saudi Arabia IKEA replaced monetary values printed on price tags with images of coffee cups, pizzas, bananas, and other relatively inexpensive everyday items.</li><li>The Japanese ice cream brand Akagi recently apologised following a 12-cent price hike on some of its products after 25 years without change.</li></ul>

Violate a rule, but do it blatantly

Even if inflation means you have to charge more, don’t try to hide it from your customers.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Talking to Your Customers About Prices

Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.It’s the factory of robots cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program running at night that’s serving other customers. Wealth is money in the bank that is reinvested into other assets and businesses.A house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out; although that’s a less productive use of land than running a commercial enterprise.You want wealth because it buys you the freedom you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck; so you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 a.m. to rush to work and sit in commute traffic.

Seek Wealth Not Money or Status

There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game.Money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems.Many people believe they can’t make it; so they don’t want any wealth creation to happen. They virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise, saying, “Well, making money is evil. You shouldn’t do it.”But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others by saying, “Well, I don’t need money. We don’t want money.”

Status is your rank in the social hierarchy

We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game.Politics is an example of a status game.They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge. But you play them because they’re a necessary evil.To win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person

Status is a very old game and a zero-sum game.

Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody elseEthical wealth creation makes abundance for the world.Most of the wealth in civilization, in fact, all of it, has been created. It got created from somewhere. It got created from people. It got created from technology. It got created from productivity. It got created from hard work. This idea that it’s stolen is this horrible zero-sum game that people who are trying to gain status play.

Make Abundance for the World

We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago.The engine of technology is the science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy.Imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer. If you could go out there, and you could build robots, and computers, and bridges, and program them. Let’s say every human knew how to do that. We would all be then living in massive abundance.

Everyone can be rich

Capitalism is not something we invented. It is in us in every exchange that we have.
When you and I exchange information, I want some information back from you. I give you the information. You give me information. If we weren’t having a good information exchange, you’d go talk to somebody else. So, the notion of exchange, and keeping track of credits and debits, is built into us as flexible social animals.
It is innate to the human species, and we are going to create more and more wealth and abundance for everybody.

Free Markets Are Intrinsic to Humans

There are countries, groups, political parties that overtly despise wealth. In the process to destroy wealth creation, they drag everybody down to their level.Groups that despise it will essentially bring the entire group to that level. If you get too many takers and not enough makers, society falls apart. You end up in a communist country.Another way to think about it is to imagine an organism that has too many parasites. You need a small number of parasites to stay healthy.Any organism can only withstand a small number of parasites. When the parasitic element gets out of control, you die.

Too many takers and not enough makers will plunge society into ruin

<ol><li>Blind Luck: It's where you just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened. That’s fortune, that’s fate.</li><li>Luck from Hustling: When you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, enough energy that luck will find you.</li><li>Luck from preparation: If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. So you become sensitive to luck and that’s through skill and knowledge and work.</li></ol>And the 4th type of luck is...

There are 4 kinds of luck

This is where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, where then luck finds you.Let’s say that you’re the best person in the world at deep-sea underwater diving. You’re known to take on deep-sea underwater dives that nobody else will even attempt to dare.By sheer luck, somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast. They can’t get it. Well, their luck just became your luck, because they’re going to come to you to get that treasure. You’re going to get paid for it. You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck.

Luck from your unique character

It stacks up a little bit, chips at a time. More options, more businesses, more investments, more things that you can do.It’s not like your one piece of work is going to suddenly shower you with riches overnight. It’s going to be a long lifetime of learning, of reading, of creating that’s going to compound.Thanks to the Internet these days, though, opportunities are massively abundant. There are just so many ways to create wealth, to create products, to create businesses, to create opportunities, and to, as a byproduct, get paid by society that I can’t even handle it all.

Wealth stacks up one chip at a time, not all at once

One of the things I think that is important to making money when you want is the kind of reputation that makes people do deals through you.If you’re a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term thinking deal maker, then when other people want to do deals but they don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal or offer you a unique deal just because of the integrity and reputation that you have built up.

Build your character so opportunity finds you.

In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.What that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning.Renting out your time means you are not creating much original for society. And so your set roles can be taught. If they can be taught like in a school, then eventually you’re gonna be competing with someone who’s got more recent knowledge and is coming in to replace you.

You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time

Everybody who really makes money owns a piece of a product, or a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options, working at a tech company. But real wealth is created by starting your own companies, or by even investors.One great engineer can for eg create bitcoin, and create billions of dollars worth of value. And an engineer who is working on the wrong thing can work for an entire year, and every piece of code they ship ends up not getting used.That is an example of a profession where the input and the outputs are disconnected. It’s not the number of hours that you put in

Gain equity and find a career where your inputs don't match your outputs.

People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles just can’t fathom.Once you make a little bit of money, you still want to be living like your old self, so that just the worry goes away. So, don’t run out to upgrade that house, and lifestyle, and all that stuff.

Live Below Your Means for Freedom

The most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary.

Compilation of ideas from Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm on wealth creation in the modern era

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How To Get Rich Naval - Every Episode

Seek Wealth Not Status, build your own luck

The role of the CSM continues to evolve but what has remained is the ambiguity in what it means to be a customer success manager for many CS organizations. A misconception that a CSM should take on the role of a superhero that should do whatever is necessary to make the customer successful is wrong. This Superhero mentality has perpetuated the identity crisis of the CSM. It's causing burnout and team morale issues.

Customer Success Has an Identity Crisis

Speakers from the Pulse event shared their thoughts:<ul><li>Austin Kwon from box mentioned that their CSMs had somewhat of an identity crisis. They re-tooled the team to focus on client outcomes.</li><li>Cassie Young from Sailthru implemented time tracking for the CSM team. Cassie now has a much better grasp of what her team is doing.</li><li>Tim Sedwitz and Lauren Crocett from the Yext team outlined how they retired the CSM Swiss Army knife mentality.</li></ul>

Discipline = Freedom

Allyson White from Insight Venture Partners made it clear that VCs are looking for CS teams to focus on the following key metrics: outcomes, leading indicators (such as adoption data), and efficiency. You can assign a number of goals for the CSM team to complete such as success plans or executive business reviews and never achieve the results that you are looking for.At the end of the day, that small improvement in retention can have a monumental impact in your company’s valuation.

The CS Superhero must die. Sorry, Not Sorry.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Pulse World Tour in NYC that Gainsight presented and it was very clear that there is a common enemy that Customer Success Managers (CSM) around the globe are…

Product-Market Fit, in simple terms, is whether or not your product is needed.When making products, you always have to be solving a problem, making something easier, or making something better. It’s fine if other products do the same thing as yours, if you’re bringing something unique to the table.If no one really needs your product, or they can get the exact same experience from someone else, then you don’t have a Product-Market Fit.

What Exactly is Product-Market Fit?

There are some warning signs:<ul><li>Reduced market size</li><li>Low response from customer base</li><li>Negative press reviews (or no interest from the press)</li><li>Weakening word of mouth</li><li>High visibility, but no engagement.</li></ul>

How Do I Know if I Have No Product-Market Fit?

Product Management is all about finding the answers to questions. To make sure your product won’t completely fail in the market, there are some key questions you have to ask.<ol><li>Does anyone want this product?</li><li>Would they be willing to spend money on it?</li><li>Does it solve a real problem, or add real value?</li><li>Does it offer something different to our competitors?</li></ol>

Product-Market Fit: Questions Product Managers Need to Ask

A lot of information and knowledge comes your way when you’re a new Product Manager. It can be a little overwhelming! But one of the major concepts you absolutely need to get your head around is…

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Understanding Product-Market Fit: A Guide for New Product Managers

<ol><li>Establish your credentials. It builds authority.</li><li>Try and defer the transition until you get up to speed on the client.</li><li>Do your research and go beyond the notes you've gotten from the previous CSM.</li><li>Respond to their first request as if the renewal depends on it</li><li>Call out issues right away, don't hinder it.</li><li>Do an icebreaker. It helps build rapport.</li><li>Focus on what you know, not what you don't.</li><li>Don't lie to your client. Ever.</li><li>Reset expectations. </li><li>Don’t waste a great first impression by falling down on the follow-up.</li></ol>

10 Ways a CSM Can Quickly Build Trust With a New Customer

Taking on new clients shouldn’t be something that CSMs fear. It’s important though to build trust with your clients and to do it early. Don’t dig holes that will take months to get out of. Establish your expertise, be prepared, be responsive, be vulnerable, be honest, set expectations, and do the work.

Why follow the 10 tips

Trust is at the center of the CSM-Client relationship and if you don’t establish it early, you will have an uphill battle to gain it later. Here are 10 things to consider when taking on a new client so you can quickly build trust.

Data analysis should be the backbone for any endeavor in product development. Not only does data analysis tell us the magnitude of the problems we are scoping, but it also turns unknown unknowns into focus areas.Without this skill, PMs often have to “wait in line” and bottleneck at the data team or any other data gatekeepers, despite the fact they could possess the key themselves.&nbsp;

Why does data analysis play such a key role in product development?

Mari Bolton is the Head of Analytics at Skip, and a former Product Manager at Fitbit. She’s also an alum of our Product Management Certification in San Francisco. We caught up with her to catch up on…

Why Analytics Matter in Product — Alumni Stories with Former Fitbit PM

<ul><li>Data gives you important user feedback on your product</li><li>Helps you build the right thing and solve problems quickly</li><li>Is a powerful communication tool between teams and stakeholders</li></ul>

The Importance of Data-Driven Product Managers

No metric in isolation can give you all of the information you need, and there are so many out there which are worth keeping track of. What you keep an eye on will depend on your business strategy, the industry you’re in, and what stage of growth you’re in. Sometimes, metrics will be decided for you, as it’s important to keep your product’s KPIs and OKRs aligned with those of your company.

Metrics That Matter in Product Management

Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU) are a great overview of a digital product’s overall health. If you’re thinking about your long-term growth, these are metrics that you can’t afford to miss. They help to track whether your user base is growing or not, and how ‘sticky’ your product is for end-users.Determining what a DAU is will depend entirely on your product. It’s very rarely as simple as someone who just opens the app and then closes it again. Similarly, how often someone needs to use your product to qualify as an MAU will also vary depending on your offering.

MAUs / DAUs

A low Customer Conversion Rate shows that people are landing on your app/website, and not really finding what they’re expecting, or they’re disappointed.Why does this matter? For starters, it helps you identify key drop-off points for users and features which may not be working. Equally, if you find that only a small percentage of your users find your new feature, but the conversion rate is very high, you know that the fault is not with the feature itself, but discoverability.

Customer Conversion Rate

If you have a high churn rate, it means that your product isn’t delivering what it promises. On the other hand, a low churn rate shows that your user base is loyal, and likes your product at least enough to stick with it.Don’t forget that not all churn is bad! For example, dating apps like Badoo and Tinder are sometimes uninstalled because they’ve served their purpose, and the users are now in relationships.

Churn & Customer Retention Rate

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are great ways to measure the sentiments of your users. <ul><li>Your NPS score, in a nutshell, tells you how well your product is loved by users. It helps you segment your users into 3 categories based on how they rate your product out of 10.</li><li>CSAT is a more simple score and can be used to measure how happy users are with individual processes and features. While NPS is more often used to measure how happy customers are with the entire user journey, CSAT allows you to be more specific.</li></ul>

NPS & CSAT Score

There are a few keys to proper data management that will set you up for success:<ul><li>Centralize your data. When different teams/team members are accessing different data locations, you risk miscommunication.</li><li>Share your data. Empower team members to make good, data-driven decisions by giving them access to the metrics they need.</li><li>Visualize your data. Using tools with data visualization features turns complicated numbers into simple visuals. This makes them easy to understand for all team members, not just those who are well versed in data.</li></ul>

Managing Your Product Data

If you don’t have a background in data science, managing data as a product manager can seem like a daunting task. But it’s something you absolutely need to wrap your head around. That’s because data…

These Are the Metrics Great Product Managers Track

Phone interviews are a common first step of the process. Just because it is over the phone does not mean you should take it lightly. This is an integral step to create a strong first impression and preview of your personality and background.Talk slowly. Nerves will, of course, cause you to speak a bit faster than usual. Taking a deep breath and remembering to speak slowly will help you be heard loud and clear.Summarize your professional, not your personal life.

Searching for Success: The Phone Interview

Be sure to get a list or schedule for the interview by at least the day prior to your interview. This way you can come up with unique questions for each interviewer as well as study up on their LinkedIn profiles before meeting them in person.

Live Interview: Know Who You Talk To

Arrive a few minutes early. 10 minutes is too early: You’ll put unnecessary pressure on your interviewer. That said, a few minutes early will give you time to take a few breaths in the lobby before meeting everyone.Always bring a bottle of water. Having your own water will ensure that you don’t run into an awkward scenario where you must excuse yourself.

Get your act together

Be sure to have unique, pointed questions for each interviewer. Also prepare your notes and answers so you can respond to questions like “Why are you the best candidate for the role?” “Tell us about your greatest successes in your last role.” or “Tell us about a challenging customer and how you dealt with the situation.” Having talking points for these scenarios will help you showcase your ability to prepare and be a few steps ahead of anything the situation calls for.

Prepare questions and answers

It’s standard practice these days to ask candidates to complete some sort of assignment to secure a role. It could be a presentation or a simple writing assignment. Be sure to complete your assignment on time and have it printed out for reference during your onsite interview.

Bring your homework

Be sure to send individualized emails to each interviewer you meet with. This is the polite, professional thing to do, but also another opportunity for you to highlight why you are the right person for the role. It also gives you a chance to combat any opposition or push-back you encountered during the interview.Finally, be yourself! Do your best to channel your nerves into positive energy, and try to have a bit of fun!

Parting Notes

This is Part 2 of an earlier post about how to kick off the process of hunting for a customer success role. This post continues the journey through the interview process. Great work! The effort of…

Searching for Success: Job Hunting Part 2

Habits are gradually formed by doing the same things over and over. It helps us overcome life's daily annoyances and helps us to get better at things, for example, driving. Without them, we would have to think about every little detail of our daily lives. A product design team has to notice all the annoying details about daily life and design solutions that address the problem.

The Process of Habituation

In Apple’s product design teams, they practice ‘staying beginners,’ where they are encouraged to see their products through a new point of view.<ul><li>Look broader: Look at all the steps before and after the problem you’re trying to solve. Are there any steps you can reduce?</li><li>Look closer: The smallest details can make all the difference to a user’s experience.</li><li>Look younger: Sometimes, children ask the smartest questions and notice things that adults don’t. For example, “Why doesn’t the phone tell us who rang?”</li></ul>

How Apple combats habituation

For Google, design is integral to product development from the beginning. You can reach design maturity when you treat your design team as equal partners in the product development process.

Give Design A Seat At The Table

Ivy talked about what makes Apple products, specifically the iPad Pro' magical.' He says the key is taking many incredibly complicated separate pieces of technology and making it look like one simple component. Users don't care how you solved their problem in your digital products, only that you solved it. Apple used this knowledge to build simplicity into the design of its products.

Jony Ive’s Love of Simplicity

Let’s take a break from staring at spreadsheets and boggling at how many Zoom meetings we all have in our calendars, and think about product design for a second. As a product manager, you don’t need…

Feeling unproductive even after working all day? It may be "productivity dysmorphia"

Talking to Your Customers About Prices

Seek Wealth Not Status, build your own luck

Customer Success Has an Identity Crisis

Understanding Product-Market Fit: A Guide for New Product Managers

Kelly Barton