Managing Energy and Preventing Burnout with Masha Krol
A conversation with Masha Krol, Human-Ai Interaction Designer and Founder.
Hi Grand Fam,
Today's Grand Time is about a topic that is especially critical during these turbulent times — managing your energy and preventing burnout.
It features Masha Krol, who has been a part of The Grand community since our very first Grand Quest. Masha previously led Product and Design at IBM, Kinaxis, Lotus Medical, and Element AI. Masha joined The Grand Quest after feeling burnt out from working at a fast growing startup for 3 years, and went through Quest to find clarity and regain her energy.
Tell us about your career journey.
My academic background is in computer science. I began as a developer, and fairly quickly, I started asking the question, who are we making this stuff for? That's how I found my way into UX design. Then in UX, I asked the next question, why are we making that thing and not this other thing that could be way more helpful? And that's how I found my way into product management.
The theme of my career is trying to figure out how to make really complex things easier for people to understand and interact with.
My most recent gig was at Element AI, I joined the company as employee #17 and within 2 years we grew to 500. It was exciting, but also intense. I was hiring constantly. I grew the Design team, and then created and led the Human-AI Interaction team.
The highlights of my career come from that time, I was able to form one of best teams, we had the kinds of experiences that can only be described as team flow.
How did you foster team flow?
One of my teammates was into improv, and we really adopted that, "yes, and" improv kind of state of mind within the team. That gave us psychological safety, and the ability to build on each other's ideas.
We had a strong shared sense of purpose and mission around facilitating human AI interaction. We also had a rhythm, which we set for ourselves. We had a cadence of shipping every Friday. And no matter what, on Friday, we shipped.
When did you know it was time to leave Element AI? How did you recognize you were feeling burnt out?
One of the big issues with burnout is that it's actually really hard to tell. I finally had the realization when I took a vacation to Squamish, British Columbia. It's a beautiful place with this amazing Lord of the Rings style setting. I was there and looking around, and objectively, I knew it was beautiful, I understood it rationally. But I felt nothing. That was a weird realization to come to as a person who's naturally very emotive and tends to fall in love with places.
There's a misconception that burnout is too much of something. In my experience, burnout is not enough of something, not enough feeling, not enough emotion, not enough energy.
I ended up lying on the couch for a month. Asking myself questions like, what is the point of me? I identified so much with being an early employee and being high energy, high growth. And then when I burned out, it shattered my identity.
Now that you understand what burnout feels like, how do you check in with yourself?
Knowing myself now, I take scheduled checkpoints, where I will remove myself and ask whether the thing I'm doing is still working for me. I've instituted a practice of a weekly review where I do a retrospective on the previous week. Because I'm a nerd, I also have personal OKRs I check in on. I instituted the practice of doing solo retreats on a quarterly basis. I created a structured guide, that includes a retro, my current state, and setting goals for the next quarter. I've been doing that for a year now.
Sometimes it feels really selfish and it's hard to schedule time for yourself, because it takes away from your other commitments. One thing that helped me was thinking about this concept from the polyamory community that says you're essentially always in a polyamorous relationship, even if you're dating one person, because you're always in a relationship with yourself.
That helped me prioritize my relationship with myself, which is an important relationship, and also allows me to show up better for other relationships.
Thank you Masha for sharing your journey candidly and vulnerably with us!
We hope this conversation gave you a method for checking in with yourself or your team, and helped you feel more supported.
We’re always here for you. Meet Masha, and more amazing people from our community by joining the upcoming Grand Quests on Becoming an Effective Manager or Making a Career Transition.
💌 and ⚡️,
Rei