At the end of 2018, I resigned from my position as the Product Experience Lead at a small but successful developer tools company in San Francisco, packed up my life, and moved back to the East Coast. I had no idea what I was going to do next.
After mere weeks, I remembered that I tend to go loony when I’m out of work—a rare but reliable truth I’ve experienced over the years. In a panic, I tried to figure out what to work on next.
The problem was, I was burnt out from being a product manager. Whereas the excitement of creating, of collaborating, of composing and distilling ideas into pixels on a screen for people to use used to exhilarate me, I now felt detached and indifferent about the ideas I was trying to bring to life.