#45🎁 Core PM Skills - The Biggest Learnings
A reflection on 22 weeks of discussing the basics of ADHD and product management.
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog that helps navigate the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
Part 22 of the Book of ADHD Product Management, a guide to navigating the basic principles of product management and ADHD.
🐼Connect with me for ADHD and Product Coaching
🌋Takeaways
A table of contents for the entire series.
A list of the greatest learnings of this 22-part series.
⭐Introduction
This post is meant to summarize my favorite learnings of the last 22 weeks. That’s almost half of all my posts to date. Phew.
When I started this series, I wanted to explore what it meant to be a product manager and have ADHD. I wanted to write about the fundamentals of ADHD and product management in hopes that the basics would help those like me.
I started out with the classic mindset of framing ADHD as a superpower and kryptonite. The good versus the bad. Strong versus weak. Classic stuff.
This series showed me that I had the wrong perspective.
ADHD and other forms of neurodiversity are a gift. They’re not inherently positive or negative. They are what you make of them.
At times the gifts are a struggle and we may curse them to the sky. At other times, they allow us to do amazing things that others may not dare.
My ADHD gives me the gift of being able to simultaneously be an ADHD coach, writer, and whiskey company co-founder. It’s not a superpower, it’s fucking hard.
I wouldn’t anyone else to go through the experience of being forced out of a job and being unemployed for a year. It’s also been fun to not have a full-time job for the first time in my adult life.
I wouldn't be where I am today without the gift of that experience. It motivates me to keep trying to create a path that fits my gifts perfectly.
🎁Top Tips and Strategies
ADHD is a gift, not a superpower or a kryptonite.
ADHD is an emotional regulation disorder that can cause intense and unpredictable emotional changes, which often manifest with physical symptoms of inattention, hyperfocus, or a combination of both.
Attention is not the core problem. Attention is the bi-product and physical expression of having dysregulated emotions.
Read more about what it is to have ADHD.
Reframe scattered curiosity as a signal for self-awareness.
Accept that dreams are fluid and ever-evolving, much like the process of product development.
There’s no shame in changing your mind. In fact, it’s encouraged in product management if it means finding an even better answer.
Anxiety and rumination may make the negative voices louder, but they don’t make them any more true.
Your internal voice is often your loudest critic. Letting out those fears by telling others or writing them down diminishes its power over you. Read more about failure.
Connecting with others gives me power, not weaker. Even if my words have been a liability in the past.
Learn strategies on how to connect with partner teams by creating space for others to feel seen, heard, and valued.
Focusing on personal development and happiness is equally important to making the time to find a job when you’ve been laid off.
Learn strategies if you’ve just been laid off.
✨Conclusion
Viewing ADHD and neurodiversity as simply good or bad traits limits our understanding of their diverse abilities and experiences. Being able to embrace them all as gifts has allowed me to become more aware of my feelings and actions.
It’s still hard at times. However, it’s much easier for me to love myself because I no longer carry the burden of seeing a part of me being weak or kryptonite. It’s all me and I get to choose what to do with it.
I’m a product manager with ADHD who hasn’t been able to get a job in a year. I’ve applied to 110+ jobs. I’ve failed 6 interviews, 3 of which I got to the last round.
I’m also a serial entrepreneur with a whiskey company launching in 23 days.
I’ll take the gift of having abundant access to whiskey over a boring job any day.
🐼Want to learn more, talk to me.
⏭️Next Week
The start of the Burnout series. Stories on how to recover from a workplace experience that took your all.