How to Stay Sane Working in Data Product
Lessons my gardening hobby taught me about balancing an ambitious vision for the future while making peace with the imperfect present
I’ve always enjoyed plants, but about a decade ago I got obsessed with gardening. My husband often tells our friends “However much you think Anna gardens, it’s way more than that.” It’s true! Gardening & data make up like 75% of my personality. The biggest reason I’m writing so much right now is we are past first frost and I can’t garden.
So why write about gardening in my data product newsletter? Well, because so many of the lessons I’ve learned in gardening have parallels for success in data product - specifically around the mindset you need to thrive in this career for the long term and not burnout.
Data Product is a Hard Job
When I talk to people about this strange niche profession I’ve found myself in, I consistently tell them it’s not for everyone. I don’t want anyone moving into this with rose colored glasses - it is a very hard (but rewarding!) job.
When I’m hiring I also tell the hiring team - product isn’t an entry level role, we need people with aptitude and some experience to be successful and happy here. This job requires technical literacy (which you can get in school and build up rapidly if you are motivated), but it also requires soft skills and a lot of emotional intelligence to do well—skills that generally are developed over time in a career. Not everyone has that unique mix of technical & soft skills.
Many people also just don’t have the interest in doing this job. It’s very different than technical IC work (analytics, eng, data science). Last year, when I had a former data engineer switch over to product, she spoke regularly about how shocked she was at how dramatically her day to day had changed even though she was on the same team. How much more context switching, stakeholder engagement, feeling pulled in so many directions — ALL. THE. TIME. [Spoiler - she ended up being great at it AND loving it, but many engineers I’ve worked with would be pretty miserable in a PM job.]
Product management’s context switching is so extreme - you have to go wide AND deep all the time. You are focused on long range planning, immediate priority discovery, and monitoring execution on something you finished discovery on weeks ago. It’s a lot to keep in working memory all the time.
Data platforms are also horizontal, which means they have to support nearly every business unit. PMs have to understand all those needs, deeply interrogate them, and prioritize the work against the strategy. You have to say no a lot and someone is always upset with your interpretation of business priorities. The business needs a lot from you and it’s not like it’s 10 projects all from one group. It’s splintered and everyone thinks their project is important.
The data team’s work can feel invisible - enabling others but not getting celebrated often for the final deliverable. PMs have to bridge the narrative gap on the value of the data team. They help the technical teams understand the importance of what they are enabling AND they have to tell the team’s story to leadership so they understand their contributions as well as how the platform is maturing. The ROI has to be clear.
I’m not complaining - I love it. I feel like this is the role I’m built for. But it is hard and my job takes a lot from me. I also always tell my product managers that it never gets less chaotic. You just get better at riding the wave.
So what does it mean to get good at riding the wave? I think mindset is actually a massive part of this. How you perceive the challenge of your role, the progress you are making, how theory meets reality, and the conviction you have in your vision. And those aspects actually remind me so much of gardening. So let’s jump into a few lessons learned and how the difference between thriving amid the chaos and burning out is all about developing the right mindset to navigate them.
Mindset Matters
A lot of things go into avoiding burnout. In product, one key is setting up your mindset for a long journey. Evolving how your organization creates value from data, is not a purely technical endeavor, and that magnifies the complexity greatly. Zhamack Dehghani, a thought leader in the data world, frames data as “sociotechical” problem space; Oxford dictionary defines sociotechnical this way:
A system involving the interaction of hard systems and human beings, in ways that either cannot be separated or are thought to be inappropriate to separate.
So if your role is to transform a data platform, you cannot separate humans and systems. You are sitting at the intersection of messy human behavior and complex rapidly evolving technical systems. It’s going to be a roller coaster. Two steps forward one step back. There will be times you feel like while you were getting one area in shape someone was creating chaos somewhere else - it’s like whack-a-mole - are we making any progress?
If you really aren’t making progress despite your best efforts, maybe it’s time to make a change. But often you are making progress, even though you may feel like you’re pushing a rock uphill and getting nowhere. One day you look back to do a year in review slide for a town hall and you are shocked at how much the team accomplished. That’s the best feeling. Like most hard journeys, it’s worth hanging in there - but how - how do you stay sane when the journey is long and hard?
Lessons from Gardening
You know what else takes a long time? Gardening. There is no immediate payoff. The closest you can get is going to the nursery and spending hundreds of dollars to fill up a garden and even then it takes years to fill in. Trees take years or even decades to establish. There’s a saying in gardening about perennial plants: the first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they LEAP!
It’s true about plants and it’s true about data platforms - you labor a long time before you start to see slow signs of progress, progress creeps along at a slightly faster pace, and ideally eventually things really start clicking. The platform takes time to evolve. People, processes, culture - none of it changes overnight. You can have high standards AND patience - it’s a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true of gardening - I’m a better gardener today than I was 10 years ago when I got serious about it, but also every new garden takes time no matter how experienced you are.
So here’s a few lessons I’ve learned along the way from gardening & their data platform parallels. Hopefully they help you find some zen among the chaos, and when the chaos is too much you can always do what I do - and go rage weed in the actual garden for 10 minutes before you get back to it. 😉
“Right Plant, Right Place” (Right Time)
In gardening timing is everything & so is making the right decisions about what to include in your garden. One of the immutable laws of gardening is that if you put the right plant in the right place it will do infinitely better than if you try to force things. Why do people try to force things - because they have their heart set on a certain plant, they got one for free and tried to make it work, or they just don’t read plant tags, lol.
In gardening you have to think about your climate (is it humid or dry, is your dirt loamy or rock hard clay, does the spot get a lot of sun or is it full shade)? If you buy plants meant for your environment they’ll thrive with little supplemental effort. I live in the Rocky Mountains, this plant below (Desert 4Oclock) will grow from a single plant into a 5’x5’ square with no supplemental water (in the mountain desert!). If I try to grow ferns here - they scorch, are sad, and will struggle even with irrigation and fertilizer - they just aren’t meant for my garden.
In data platforms the environment matters greatly. If I try to force convergence to a single BI tool in a large organization I might have a mutiny on my hands. Some teams are obsessed with Tableau, finance is pushing PowerBI, the marketers are using some niche BI tool that plays nicely with their sources - is it really best to force the whole enterprise into one tool right now? Know your work environment - the org culture, know the power dynamics, strategic priorities - and prioritize accordingly. Work with the environment and things will go much better.
Similarly, technical environment & requirements can be limiting at times, but it’s best to accept them. For example, startups are always creating interesting new tools, but often as a PM working in a regulated space I have to rule out ones that aren’t enterprise ready (stability isn’t there yet, compliance isn’t up to standard for security or legal, etc). That doesn’t mean those are bad tools, they just may not be right for my context right now. Those might be a great tool for a different company, but I have to wait until they grow up a bit before they’ll work here.
No company is perfect - we all work under constraints (budget, staff skill set, legal, regulatory, internal politics, individuals with a lot of influence). All you can do is make the best choice under the constraints you face. That’s your environment. Accept the environment you are in and choose changes that are the “right plant” for your place right now.
Look, my favorite garden style might be English Cottage Garden but I live in a Rocky Mountain desert so some of those plants just can’t happen. And sometimes I can’t have all the things I want on my data platform too. Accept what is and move on.
Normalize Failure: Skilled Gardeners Kill a LOT of Plants
When you are good at gardening people love to say “You have such a green thumb, I’m always killing plants.” And every skilled gardener I know has some corner that is failing, some plant that died for unknown reasons (bugs, street salt, sprinkler failure, nutrient deficiency?) - we kill a lot of plants.
The difference is some novice gardeners have a few failures and say “Oh man, I’m just not good at gardening” and they give up. Great gardeners get curious - they research, ask in FB gardening groups for advice, download garden apps to diagnose and keep experimenting until they solve the problem.
You have to embrace failure as part of learning and not get discouraged. This flower here - I bought a seed packet and the first year they all failed. I researched and learned that echinacea requires cold stratification (mimicking the snow warm/thaw cycles that soften seed coatings to aid in germination - you can fake this with a wet paper towel and a couple weeks in the fridge). The second year I tried this method and SUCCESS! I love this plant, it’s beautiful, but it also was hard to get here.
Data platform product work is the same. There’s emerging ideas (a few books, newsletters, and video content creators), but no mature best practice. No go to “bible” everyone reads and agrees really establishes the fundamentals. We are all figuring it out. That means stumbling is expected.
I started writing on LinkedIn two years ago to share my learnings so far - blending these ideas - because I could find so few people even talking about it. Since then our little community has grown a bit. We all make mistakes. We’re on an individual journey of growth - hopefully our sharing helps others grow faster. Your company is on a journey too - as long as you are all iterating and growing, it’s okay that there are some mistakes, some scrapped work, some abandoned hypotheses. That’s normal, expected even. And when you stumble on something that really works - like my echinacea plants - it’s that much more satisfying.
Notice the Green Shoots: Celebrate Small Victories
I’m someone who has never found mindfulness easy -my mind is racing, yoga does not come naturally. Gardening is busy, but also slow - it’s sneakily mindful. It taught me to pay attention and notice small things in a way I’m not sure I ever did before. One of my favorite things it taught me was to notice small joys. The ladybugs are back, the raspberries are turning red, that plant I thought I killed is miraculously growing again?
My favorite season is spring, after a long cold winter green growth just appears. In my snowy mountains there are suddenly crocus bulbs. It’s so hopeful.
In the long slog of data transformation - it’s a grind. And it’s so important to find and celebrate small wins. The dashboard usage activity that’s ticking up, more teams are logging into the data catalog because there’s actually good metadata there now for some key sources, your incident response process is getting smoother, you were able to refactor an expensive query and cut the cost by 90%.
Minimize Maintenance & Embrace Your Role as a Maintainer
As much as I love gardening, I don’t love some aspects of maintenance. Weeding, watering, and taking care of grass - hard pass. So I’ve ripped out all the grass in my front yard and put plants on drip irrigation and we are aiming to fill in with ground cover to crowd out weeds. So that minimizes the parts I hate.
The rest of maintenance - the annual turnover cutting things back, shaping shrubs, deadheading spent blooms - I find joy in it and satisfaction in a job well done.
In data platforms we want to minimize the worst parts of maintenance. Build pipelines robustly that don't break because no one loves incident response on the weekends and debugging poorly documented code.
And the maintenance that remains - I don’t know - some of it I find oddly satisfying. I love reviewing existing data products, finding what’s unused and killing it. It’s like tidying a pantry - so satisfying. Maintenance is also where inspiration can be found - paying attention to what’s working, what’s not, and thinking about what we might change next to make things better.
As a team focus on continuous improvement - get smarter over time about choosing what’s maintainable, what brings ROI. Kill what’s not working. There’s real joy in maintenance when you’re thoughtful about it.
Remember What The Goal Is — Vision Keeps You Motivated
Some of the best parts of gardening are imagining what’s to come. I literally just made my seed list for next spring and I am so excited about the new tomato I’m planting and a cucumber trellis I’m buying. I’ve spent so many hours with graph paper drawing designs, making plans, doing research and figuring out what’s going to work.
In data, you have to have a vision for the platform. The whole team has to know where we’re headed and see how that connects to the roadmap. That it’s not a pipe dream - things will get better and we have a real plan to move things forward. Both the building of that plan & the solutioning against it are great for building team morale over time while you build the platform.
And as a product manager that creative imagining of how things could be is the most fun - at least for me. The strategizing, then puzzle of user pain points and how we might solve them. The piecing together of all the elements and how you are going to change the data culture alongside the systems - and keep delivering the entire time. It’s some of the most challenging work I’ve done, but seeing the puzzle start to come together is so exciting. Vision is the thing that keeps you energized and hopeful during the long weeks and setbacks.
If You Build It (Right) They Will Come
My main motivation for gardening was aesthetics, but one of the surprising delightful things about planting more blooms and especially natives - is the pollinators showed up in droves. Native bees, hummingbirds, butterflies, ladybugs - you create an environment and they just appear. It is amazing to witness. And as they show up, it just makes you want to keep improving the environment.
The point of building the platform - is for the users (and the business). And over time, as you invest your time and energy into it, and you listen with empathy and use good product practices, you will build the environment the users want & need. And they show up.
Conclusion
I started this article with really emphasizing that this is a very difficult job and it’s easy to fall into burn out. Hopefully, by now you can see that it’s also a really joyful and beautiful one.
The growth mindset in both gardening and data work means holding the tension between ambitious vision and patient acceptance. You can be excited about what you’re building while being at peace with where you are.
Right now it’s past first frost here in Utah. My garden is dormant—which is a fancy way of saying everything looks dead and brown and kind of sad. But I’m focused on planning for next year - ordering seeds, telling my husband to buy me a new squash tunnel trellis for Christmas, making lists of things I want to do better next year. And I’m really excited about another season.
And at work I started a new job this fall - I’m finding my bearings in a new context. I know how to do data product just like I know how to garden, same challenges, new context. The challenges I’m uncovering don’t really phase me - I’m used to them. Every data team has areas of strengths and a long list of things they want to be better. Every single one. Some people in the business are on board, some don’t want to change. Some have a shared vision, others are less sure of what’s coming. Some days are frustrating - but most are exciting. You can do a really hard job like this and thrive and stay sane.
What helps you stay sane when data product work gets overwhelming? Drop it in the comments—I’m always looking for new coping mechanisms that don’t involve buying more plants. I mean I will also be buying more plants…but maybe I could also try yoga again?