Optimize for joy

There's a whole shelf of books on how to design your life. Almost none of them tell you how to actually get there.

That's the execution gap, and product people know it intimately — it's the difference between a vision deck and a shipped product. We have entire methodologies for crossing that gap at work. We just never point them at our own lives.

In this talk, Christina Wodtke shares how she used Lean experiments, the 4Es, and personal OKRs to climb out of burnout and rebuild a career as a teacher and writer — and how to pick the one metric most of us never specify: what we're actually optimizing for.