The latest rage in software sales is the concept of Product-Led Growth. There is literally an organization called the Product-Led Growth Collective that explains this practice as such:
an outstanding customer experience has always been key to success. Once that experience was owned by sales. If you wanted to buy a new product, you talked to a salesperson. If you were lucky, they were knowledgeable and empathetic and helped you buy the best product for your needs. With the internet came a growing ability for early digital marketers to measure results and to own growth metrics like engagement and acquisition.
But people don’t want to interact with salespeople or marketing campaigns anymore—not at the expense of actually getting to experience the product they’re buying. To keep up with the market and get ahead of the curve, businesses must reshape their marketing, sales, and service strategies and fundamentally rethink the roles of their customer-facing teams.
Effectively, what it means is that what you say is no longer as important as what you do. It’s allegedly more meritocratic and, in the eyes of many software buyers, a smoother experience.
I was thinking about this concept a bit as I wrap up week seven of my parental leave. I’ve been waking up each morning feeling a conflicting sense of anticipation for what our little tot will show us today — whether a smile or a sizeable turd in his diaper — while also feeling anxious and afraid of where my professional life is heading.
In many ways, if I was to superimpose the idea of product-led professional growth right now, I am saying a whole bunch about my professional life but doing exactly squat - and moreover, any attempts to remedy that would diminish the joyful experience of bonding with my kid.
My initial assumption was that, geez, I’m an ass, and I’m the only parent squandering precious mental time I could spend on raising a tiny human while stewing about my career trajectory. Turns out — duh — other parents have experienced this too. One mom wrote this about her leave experience:
Here’s a typical sequence: things start off just fine for ambitious professionals turned infatuated parents. The first days of newborn deliciousness and the adrenaline of having given birth yield a few weeks of immersion, with feelings of deep contentedness and rapture for your tiny offspring.
The intensity of that bond then contributes to a surprising panic about returning to work. Thoughts emerge, like how can I leave this helpless small person in someone else’s care when Iwant to be providing that care? A sort of desperation sets in as you start considering chucking the professional life you worked hard to build to be home with your children
But then a new anxiety surfaces: the anxiety of not having gotten anything done that day. Feeding the baby, doing the laundry, making family meals, and doing drop offs and pick-ups don’t feel productive or energizing if you spent years training to do something else with your brain and body. As Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework.” And even if you don’t feel quite that melodramatic, focusing exclusively on childcare certainly can leave your brain or your creative instinct feeling a tad sluggish.
I think it was around week two when the anxiety of doing nothing set in. I found myself scanning my work email and Slack for the slightest hint that this lack of productivity was causing my team to consider me expendable (this is my own personal fear trigger: being abandoned). And, yes, it meant that no matter whether or not my son fell asleep on my shoulder instead of my partner’s, the sating feeling of professional success wasn’t there…and thus, my day was unfulfilling.
Observing this has been equally revelatory and obvious. For one, this is the longest time I’ve spent away from some form of professional pursuit in twelve years (even between jobs, I’d be actively networking and jotting down thoughts), so there is a flood of anxious thoughts related to my value to Capitalism that have no resolution at the moment.
I’m curious how this will play out as I return back to work in a few weeks — will it be a motivator to find balance in life, or will I be kicking myself for pouring so much negative energy that could have been honed elsewhere?