# Overcoming Technology FOMO in Business Management

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-04-07

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Ville and Teresa Torres.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, the AI world is moving so ridiculously fast.
I'm exhausted just following the news, let alone trying all the new things.
So I am curious about how you deal with FOMO when it comes to new technology.
Because I knew it was around.
And it was, I was so tempted for weeks and weeks, but it was just like impossible for me to get to it.
And then finally, um mid of December, um, I had again the headspace and the time um to start looking into it, and it felt so good because there oftentimes is so much FOMO felt on my end as well.
Um I frankly speaking, I'm dealing with it as always in my career because it always had been this times of I don't know, when user-generated content came around, uh, it took a while for me to get fully on board and fully understand everything and try everything.
And then there were so many social networks, and I worked for a social network and I wanted to try every social network, and it was a one million social networks.
Um, so I already noticed that sometimes enough is enough, so you need to play with a few things.
I always try to focus on understanding principles.
Um, and I know that I cannot try all the things that are coming out mushrooming basically every day right now with AI.
Um, but still I tried and I try to time box these things.
So I have a decent amount of my week blocked for learning around these topics that I currently think I should be learning about, and I I whatever, AI, whatever is definitely part of that.
So that's how I'm dealing with it.
Whether MISTM struggling and experiencing FOMO, hell yes.
And I heard you have kind of a similar experience, right?
Because of ClawBot.
Tal tell us a bit more about that.
What happened there?
Yeah, by the time this airs, this will have been a couple months ago.
But yeah, maybe um, there was like a weekend where there is a huge storm about ClaudeBot, which got renamed Moltbot, and then got renamed OpenClaw, and who knows what it will be called by the time this airs.
But it's this idea of this agent that runs like perpetually just doing proactively doing stuff for you.
It's very intriguing.
People are raving about it.
Um, but it also has some significant security concerns and a lot of setup time.
And um when I learned about it, I was like, wow, this is really intriguing.
And I also got this like a really overwhelming feeling of like, when am I gonna find time to even play with that?
And then immediately what went in the back of my head, and this is something I'm gonna try to always remember forever, is why do you need that?
And this is something that I feel like this is how I avoid FOMO is I don't just play with technology for the sake of playing with technology.
I know a lot of people argue you should, and this is how you build product sense.
I actually feel like it's very exhausting and it's a recipe for burnout.
Instead, what I do is I look for whenever I encounter friction in anything that I do, I use that as a catalyst for now.
Let's go explore how to get rid of this friction.
And so then it's more tightly bounded.
You might want to think about it as I don't start with solutions, I start with an opportunity.
Right?
So I wait to come as surprise follow us in this now.
Yeah, exactly.
So I wait to have a problem, and then I explore this stuff in the context of that problem.
And I think this is really helpful for a couple reasons.
Like, I'm not just trying out a piece of software and being like, oh neat, what does this do?
I'm trying to solve a specific problem, and that allows me to engage with the solution in a deeper way and like really try it.
And I think this is similar to like people that just read and don't practice and how much they learn versus people who read and practice.
Right.
And so I might try fewer tools, but I feel like I'm going a lot deeper in those tools.
And I'll give an example of this.
I heard about Notebook LM for months and months and months.
People raved about it.
They talk about how it's great for discovery.
I didn't have a need for it, so I ignored it.
And then a couple months ago, I started seeing these infographics that people were creating from Notebook and LM, and I was like, oh, that would be amazing to add to my blog posts.
Okay, now I have a need.
I started to play with Notebook LM.
And now if you go to Product Talk, a lot of our articles have these overview videos.
They're AI generated.
It's obvious it has a notebook LM logo on it.
I have these really detailed infographics.
Both are being generated from my blog content.
And so now like I found a problem that Notebook LM is particularly suited to solve.
That's when I went and played with it.
Same with 11 labs.
Like I was I was hearing amazing things about voice clones and text to um text-to-speech.
What did I need that for?
Well, eventually I rolled out paid subscriptions on product talk, and a very common paid subscription feature is get this blog post as audio.
And as soon as I rolled out paid subscriptions, I was like, oh, I wonder if I could create a voice clone.
And now I use 11 labs to do my podcast, my articles podcasting.
Yeah.
So I uh eventually these tools find find me is the like I'll read about them and do what everybody else does, but like I don't if I just jumped onto 11 labs and like played with it before I had a need, what would be the point?
I'm just like looking at their website, browsing around, giving it random text.
Why?
Yeah, and I, for example, I spend hours and hours a few weeks ago with um context engineering for cloud code.
Because I used it for I would say eight weeks by then.
And it was the first time when I really, as you were saying, Ray, I have real life problems, I'm solving the real life problem.
I find another real life problem, I solve the next real life problem.
And at some point, the repository got too big.
My prompting skills maybe degraded, I don't know.
But I ran in all sorts of okay, I getting weird responses back, it seems to not hold the context anymore.
What happened?
And if I would not have used it extensively for eight weeks, I would not have run into these issues, and I would have not discovered these issues if I would not be familiar with the stuff that I have put into it.
So and I therefore knew, ah, why is it not retrieving this or that particular blog post?
Because that's obvious that it's there.
It's it's basically an MD file sitting around somewhere with a in the context briefing, even.
And then I realized, oh, okay, the context holding is too big, the context engineering was not well enough, and then I did a lot of context um debugging and reorganizing and all these kind of things.
And I would have, if I only would have installed cloud code and looked at it, that I would have never run into this problem, and I wouldn't have learned about um that particular challenge and how to tackle it.
So I totally agree with you.
But Teresa, you still get FOMO, and how does this happen?
So it is it because you read on it online?
What is the source for the FOMO then?
Is it trusted people in your network that start talking about it?
And that is kind of so is it more the social proof?
Maybe a mix of both.
Like I read pretty broadly, I read a lot of blogs, I read a lot on social media.
So maybe like a seed gets planted, like with the ClaudeBot weekend.
It was all over social media like very suddenly.
Very suddenly.
And people were raving about it.
And I'm actually glad I didn't jump on it because within a few more days, people started talking about spending $300 a day on tokens.
People started talking about how many credentials had been leaked, like all the security stuff started to come out.
And so like I was actually relieved I didn't play with it on day one.
Yeah.
Um I I mean, like everybody, I'm on all the social media channels and I read a million things and I see things pop up.
I follow the foundation lab lab's blogs.
Actually, Lenny's community has a really great AI channel where a lot of this stuff gets posted.
And I have to um, you know what?
It's when I was when I coach product teams, we talk a lot about whether dashboards, this is gonna be a weird segue, but I'm gonna bring it back.
Whether dashboards are um interesting versus actionable.
Yeah.
So it's really easy to design metrics that are interesting, but you don't know how to act on them.
And it's a waste of your time to look at interesting metrics that are not actionable.
Yeah.
You really want to design your dashboards to be actionable.
And so I try to apply this as I read stuff, right?
Like, oh, that looks really interesting.
I want to play with it.
Is it actionable?
What does it do for me right now?
If I can't find a purpose for it, it's interesting.
And like maybe I'll archive it for later.
Maybe it'll just percolate in the back of my head.
I like taking in all these inputs so I'm aware of what's out there so that when I do encounter a problem, I'm aware of the solution space and what what potential solutions might be.
But I don't have to dig into those solutions until I have a need.
Yeah.
It's so funny that you say this because I have um slash command in Cloud Code, which is called Feierabend, which is the German word for calling it a day.
Um, and I fire this every evening when I close the session.
And it it's basically what it does is it looks at my overall current priorities and goals.
So that's more my personal business goals and overall quarterly priorities.
And it compares the tasks that I was working in for the entire day.
And does a mini assessment of Petra.
You played with a lot of things, but none of that was relevant to the goals that you're currently having.
It's a bit of my friendly reminder to keeping me on track.
So that seems to be a similar approach to yours.
Yeah, you know what's funny is I was just talking to Rick um last night at dinner.
Rick is my husband, for people that don't know.
Glad you introduced him.
Hi, Rick.
I was telling him that like I spend all day like co-working with Claude.
That like I have more focus and and on task time than I think I ever have in my career.
That like by the time we get to dinner, I'm fried.
And I don't recognize it when I'm I don't recognize it when I'm working.
Like my work is very enjoyable.
Right.
And like it's it's like I feel like I'm in flow all day long.
But then at the end of the day, we're sitting and having dinner, and I'm like, wow, I could go to sleep right now.
Yeah.
So like that's a personal thing I gotta work on of like taking more breaks and whatnot.
But my point is I don't really have time for FOMO.
Like, no, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I agree.
I agree.
You know, like one of the things that's nice about, and I know engineers talk about this, like when they're new to pair programming with another human, and I'm I know this is the case with coding agents, like it's so cognitively intensive, you're just in flow the whole time.
I think that's good.
Like, I think we do our best work when we're in flow, but I also think we're probably gonna have to learn new habits about taking more breaks and maybe setting alarms to do that and like going outside and things like that.
But I think for me, it actually really helps with the FOMO because I don't do this during my workday.
Like all that reading I talked about, and even on Slack, like I'm not doing that in my workday.
Yeah, I do that in the evening as my like get ready to go to sleep time.
It's like my reading time is my decompression time.
Um, and so I think it actually helps to separate those because like I read on my phone, which I know is crazy, but it's what works for me.
And um I'm not gonna like go play with a new tool on my phone.
So it also kind of creates a boundary, right?
Like I'm just reading.
By the way, just that people don't have too much FOMO now after you're saying that you're reading all these business-related articles prior to bedtime.
I watch Bridgerton these days, just that people know.
Um, I'm not reading anything prior to bedtime.
And I mean, I watch a lot of hockey before bedtime too.
It's not like I'm just doing reading work all the time.
Little reality confusion here.
Well, but when I read a lot, um, that's while I'm traveling.
Because I hate to work while I'm traveling, so I cannot be on calls.
It's for me, it's really it's impossible.
I need to focus on, for example, when I'm at a conference, I'm at this conference with the people that are at this conference.
But what I can do is while I'm traveling there, there's a lot of waiting times in green rooms when you're doing conferences and stuff like that.
Even if I do client engagements, there's a lot of waiting times.
Um, so that's my reading time and how I make sure to get um a lot of reading time.
Yeah, so hopefully everybody finds a bit of reading time that is not kind of an unhealthy habit over time.
I for me, the reason why it's evening is because if I have a day where I have a lot of calls, I'm pretty introverted and I literally lose the ability to like take in more stimulation.
Yeah, so I can't, even TV feels like too much on some days.
Whereas reading doesn't fit that category for me.
Reading is like very energizing and decompress, like it's decompressing and like refills the tank.
Um, so especially on like Mondays, I always have calls all day long.
That's like my meeting day.
Um it's really hard for me to then be like, oh, let's watch a TV show.
Because it's like more people talking at me.
I want to just sit and read.
I loved it.
And I didn't know that about you.
I loved it.
Yeah, so for me, it's more watching TV.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hockey is a little different because people aren't really talking at you when you're watching sports.
I mean, there's the announcers, but I can't.
So sports come out.
There's times where Rick will be like, Do you agree with what they just said?
I'm like, I didn't hear what they just said.
I'm just watching the game.
Yeah, I can totally relate.
For me, it's sometimes at the end of a day where I had a lot of calls, I'm basically losing my capability to speak English at some point.
It's just like brain is not braining anymore, then.
Um, and then a German TV show does it, or Bridget and in German would work as well.
Dubbed the dubbed version.
Teresa.
So it's a little insight.
Yeah.
Thank you for that episode.
Thanks, Petra.