Designing Your Life
Title Designing Your Life
Authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Quote
“It’s never too late to design the life you love”
Why I like it
I stopped trying to plan the perfect life and started living it.
PMs and product teams are already familiar with the tools this book describes — they just don't usually apply them to their own lives. We talk to customers before jumping to solutions. We prototype before we build. We measure, learn, and adjust. Designing Your Life uses those same tool but now the topic is - You!
But I'll admit: I'm pretty risk-averse. And when it came to my own career decisions, that tendency turned into procrastination. I'd wait until I had more information, more certainty, a clearer picture, and that meant things would move slowly.
However, at work, I'm the opposite — I love generating ideas, exploring possibilities, pushing for creative solutions. That energy comes naturally when solving customer problems. But somehow, when it came to my own goals and life decisions, my fear was holding me back.
Designing Your Life essentially asks: what if you pointed that generative energy at yourself? When a decision is an experiment, not a commitment, the stakes feel manageable. You don't have to be certain. You just have to be curious enough to take the next step.
How I use it
Odyssey Plans as Product Bets on Yourself: Just like you'd never ship without exploring multiple solutions, the book pushes you to map 3 genuinely different 5-year futures. Not variations of the same path but alternative realities. Treat them like competing prototypes. You don't have to pick one — you just have to stop pretending there's only one option ahead of you.
Honestly? I struggled with this. I found it hard to even imagine what alternate paths might look like. But that struggle turned out to be the insight. Instead of 3 clear futures, I reflected on the skills I have and types of work I enjoy and the realized that I should be looking for new ways to apply them. Sometimes the value of the exercise isn't the answer. It's what the blank space tells you.
Reframing Dysfunctional Beliefs as Assumption Busting: In product development, we call out assumptions before we build. In life, we rarely do.
My blocking belief was: "I need to have it all figured out before I can do anything." Sound familiar? For a risk-averse person, that belief feels like wisdom. It's not. It's just a well-dressed excuse to stay still.
The book asks you to treat it like any other untested assumption. What's the evidence for it? What would you do if it were wrong? What's the smallest next step you could take to test it?
Like last fall’s content sprint and running an Open Space, I’m starting to collect any and all ideas that interest me. I don't need the whole plan. I just need the next experiment.
