How to productize yourself

✨ Hi, I’m Sara Tortoli and this is the February edition of The Plunge Club, a monthly newsletter dedicated to product and human tinkering.

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🔴 Preamble: this article is the result of a yearlong experiment. It originated from the following questions I asked myself:

If you are curious to know how I did it and the results of the experiment, then keep on reading to find all the details  🔴

Your life is a startup

I read once that “you should treat your personal life as if it was a business and your business as if it was your personal life”.

The word business however sounds too formal and “established” to me. It seems to imply that you have already figured out your life and you can run it more or less as if it was "business as usual".

I rather tend to think that our lives should resemble more a startup than a business, with their chaotic and dynamic nature.

I found out that there are a lot of parallels between one’s personal life and a startup.

Like a startup, after creation, you go through a series of iterations to find "product-market fit", or rather your place in life. Like a founder looks for investors or for employees to help run the company, you look for people that believe and support you. Like a startup, some make it and become successful (whatever success means to you), a few become unicorns, most fail or live a life of regrets.

Welcome to “Your Life Inc.”

If you think of your life as a startup and yourself as the founder, you would probably manage your life differently. I certainly did. I started to ask more questions, strategize more, and be very deliberate in my choices, most of all in the way I spent time and money. For example, for the first time in my life, I started investing and to become conscious of my spending behavior.

It’s strange how we seldom think that the principles we apply to our own product or company, could apply to our own life.

In part, this is because we think that success only comes from hard work and gaining skills and knowledge. However, studies have shown that one of the main predictors of success in different areas is mental resilience and the ability to be in touch with your “inner self”. 

The problem is that we focus only on hard works and gaining skills, while we often forget the “inner self”. And even if it is definitely possible to achieve success and rewards through hard work and by acquiring skills, it often comes with a heavy toll.

I found out that, if you have chaos on the inside, you can only project chaos on the outside.

How to productize yourself: a yearlong experiment (and counting)

First, I should say before starting that this is not an exact science. I have been experimenting with the “productize yourself” framework for the past year. I borrowed techniques from my work as a product manager and from startups and implemented parts of it in my personal life as I saw fit. Like I do for my products, I have been iterating, adding, and discarding elements as needed, in my never-ending quest to find my own “product-market fit”.

This is precisely the key point, the core principle:

The core principle is powerful because it embraces the concept of imperfection and even failure. Most decisions and choices we make are what Jeff Bezos calls “Type 2 decisions”, meaning decisions that “you can reopen the door and go back through.” I have written in detail about how to make decisions in The Blind Game. Here is enough to say that if most decisions are reversible, you can treat them as experiments. You don’t have to be perfect to run an experiment, you just need to be brave enough to do it and to recognize if it is worth pursuing or not.

Besides these core principles, other elements that I borrowed from both startup and product management frameworks to help me "productize myself" are:

• Working backward: starting with a vision and a manifesto of my ideal life and then work my way back to the present

• Deliberately choosing and setting my own values and guiding principles

• Break down my vision in OKRs and set initiatives

• Create a backlog of activities based on initiatives, along with a tracking system

• Run regular retrospectives

In the next section, I will briefly describe each of these points and show what they look like. I used Notion to keep track of this process because I can adapt it to my aesthetic, however, this can be done in any other tool of your choice.

Vision and Manifesto

Every startup starts from a founder's vision. Sometimes this comes with a manifesto, the mission statement of the company, portraying what the company itself stands for.

By running your life as you would a startup, you must know the direction you want to take. Taking the time to write it down and crystalize it as a vision statement and/or a manifesto is a transformative experience. You don’t have to have both, however I would advocate for it as they serve two different purposes.

My vision statement is a one-page document that contains the things I want to experience in the next 5 years. This does not mean that I may not change my mind during this time, but given that the statement is broad and bold enough, it should roughly stay the same. So far, it is.

The manifesto instead represents what I stand for and what I want to represent as a person. It contains my guiding principles and values (more on this below). Where the vision is more action and future-oriented, the manifesto is a declaration of my present and future self, the person who I strive to be.

I can summarize my manifesto with the motto “la Sara che vorrei”, or “the Sara that I would like to be” in English. I borrowed this motto from an Italian influencer and entrepreneur, Chiara Ferragni, because it resonated deeply. To me, it means that every day when I wake up and for every decision I make, I have a choice to ask myself what would “la Sara che vorrei” do?

Values and guiding principles

Values and guiding principles are part of my manifesto. Values are the elements that guide your life and most of all your decision-making process. They orient and help you set the direction you want to take. Guiding principles instead are the motto (and the explanation beyond the motto) that you live by.

Startups usually have values and guiding principles set by the founders. They are chosen consciously and carefully, but somehow we don’t do the same when it comes to our own life.

I have to confess to have never considered the possibility to choose my own values and guiding principles until last year. I thought they were implicit in the teaching I had from my family and from society. And while this might have been true as a child, as adults we have the freedom to define what to live by. If we miss this chance, we outsource a great piece of our internal universe. Consciously choosing my own values and ranking them, has been one of the most transformative experiences. The process I used followed Tony Robbins’ value setting exercise from the book “Awaken the Giant Within”.

Below a snapshot of my personal manifesto, including my guiding principles and values.

Setting Objectives, Key Results (OKR), and Initiatives

OKRs stands for objectives and key results and are a very popular goal-setting methodology in the tech environment.

OKR helps you break down your life vision and to set clear and measurable goals towards its fulfillment. Here is how I go about doing it:

• Based on my vision, I set 5 yearly objectives. I try to make them broad and aspirational, moonshot enough to make me slightly uncomfortable.

• For each objective, I set max 3 quarterly key results. Every quarter I sit down and I ask myself: "what can I do in the next 3 months that can get me closer to achieve my objective?”.

• For each key result, I think about at least one initiative that can help me fulfill it.

Create a backlog

A backlog is a typical element in product development. A backlog“ a list of tasks required to support a larger strategic plan. It contains a prioritized list of items that the team has agreed to work on next.”

Once I established the initiatives I want to pursue, I break them down either into habits that I need to develop or into projects, depending on their nature. In the product management world, you could think of initiatives as epics and of habits and projects as user stories.

Example: launching the Plunge Club

One of my main objectives this year that aligns with my vision and manifesto is to overcome discomforts to create meaning. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and experiment with things I would love to do but lacked the courage to pursue. Launching a newsletter and writing articles such as this one, is definitely an example.

Overcoming discomforts becomes my yearly objective, and launching a newsletter becomes the key result for Q1 2021. I knew wanted to call the newsletter “The Plunge Club”, so this becomes the initiative, and since the launch itself is a one-time action, I associated it with a project, “launching the first issue of The Plunge Club”. I then broke down the project into smaller tasks that I needed to perform to get to the launch. Below is what it looks like:

Retrospectives

Having regular retrospectives and checkpoints has been perhaps the most important transformative element of the “productize yourself” experiment. It has become imperative for me to stop from my busy life and to take some time to reflect on what is going on and what I have learned.

I do a daily retrospective (5 min max at the end of each day in the form of a journal), a weekly one (15 min duration), and a monthly one (between 30 mins and 1-hour duration). I have written about my daily journaling habit and what it looks in this article, in case you want to know what it looks like.

I like to have bigger retrospectives every quarter and at the end of the year. In both instances, I take a few days off and I spend time alone to reflect and to ask myself questions. It is my chance to "reset", to find and reconnect with myself, while I plan what I want to do next.

Lesson learned after one year of “productizing” my life

To “productize” my life and running it as a startup, I had to put a lot of awareness and intentionality into it. In short, I had to put in a lot of work.

It required considerable time and effort and I have often run the risk of over-killing it by organizing too much. On the upside, I have gained much more insights into myself in the past year than ever before. It has helped me to accept my own flaws and failures in a more forgiving way. To run this experiment, I had to put myself at the center, rather than being a marginal thought that gets lost in a busy calendar, and to become intentional in my choices. This alone made it worth the effort and the time I spent on it.

For these reasons I decided to keep running the “productize myself” experiment also in 2021, tweaking things along the way to make it more flexible. I’ll keep you updated on how the experiment progress and feel free to DM me if you want to know more or you have questions.

The “Now” section

🎧 What I am listening to: An old Tim Ferris podcast episode, titled “How to not be evil”. The guest is Dr. Phil Zimbardo, known for being the creator of the famous Stanford prison experiment. It is a very disturbing and powerful episode that reminded me of the Banality of Evil from Hannah Arendt. The key takeaway is that being “evil” does not necessarily mean doing despicable things. Standing-by, while despicable things are being committed, can be also a form of evil. It is surprisingly easy to take the first step into the “evil” side, especially in small things, like ignoring a request for help.

📚 What I am reading: Eat, pray, love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I am really enjoying the quest to find oneself as narrated through the exploration of the senses around the world. I am pondering about doing such a trip myself (maybe a shorter version) when traveling will become possible again.

🥁 What I am doing: I hosted a few rooms on Clubhouse. So far I am running a regular room every two weeks with Product Heroes, and I am thinking about a new format for another room soon. If you speak Italian, join us Tuesday 2nd of March at 7:30 pm CET, we will be talking about product strategy.

🧐 Question I am asking myself:

This question is designed to help me live my life from a place of love instead of being guided (or refrained) by fear. If you are reading this newsletter, chances are I am making a good job and the question is actually useful.

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