Hello!
As I write this I’m 37 weeks’ pregnant, and my baby has shown no signs of being ready to leave his amniotic aquarium. No Braxton-Hicks contractions. No “dropping.” January has come and gone, and unless the baby is literally glued to the womb, odds are good that he’ll make his debut in February.
Any time between 2 and 4 weeks from now is fair game for delivery—both very far away and not far away at all.1
Do you have a name yet? The middle name is confirmed, and the first name is down to two options. We’ll make a game-time decision at delivery.
How are you feeling? Imagine a fish tank—at an aquarium, a friend’s house, or at your favorite kind of restaurant that has a fish tank. Think about a Nemo-sized fish in the fish tank: a cute, minute, lone fish with wispy flippers and plenty of room to swim and frolic throughout its little watery world. Now imagine the fish growing week over week and, whether due to its curiosity or its increasing size, it begins knocking against the glass of the tank, the fish testing the limits of its container. The tank doesn’t break, but the knocking gets stronger, louder, and harder to ignore as the fish bones get bigger and harder week over week. This is how I’d describe what it’s like to be late in a pregnancy and “about to pop.”
Have you gotten a nesting instinct? Not in the traditional sense with cleaning the living room, organizing the nursery, or tidying surfaces. Instead, “getting my house in order” has looked like consolidating accounts and rolling over 401Ks and HSAs across all my jobs over the last ten years. Imminent childbirth has also turned out to be a strong forcing function for near-term tax season readiness and long-term financial planning.2
Creating and socializing my maternity leave plan has been the most mentally-taxing element of my pregnancy. The main output of that plan—a written coverage document—has gotten as much strategic thinking and effort as a document for any other months-long project I’ve worked on in the last ten years.3
Below, you’ll find reflections and tactics involving
Why writing a coverage plan for a maternity leave is hard for any mom who intends to return to work postpartum
Why I personally struggled with writing a parental leave plan given my role, industry, and professional history
How I finally created my leave plan
This post will be most relevant to those in the lines of work as I am: software product management in a fairly volatile sector.
For working moms-to-be or professionals who come across this piece seeking guidance on maternity leave planning: at best, I hope you find a few principles you can use to structure your own coverage plans. If nothing else, I hope what you read makes you feel less alone.
For others who read this Substack and aren’t deeply in tech-land or pregnancy-land
Jiu-jitsu people: there’s definitely a cross-over between my mindset for maternity leave planning and my mindset around competition game planning. How you prepare for unpredictable circumstances and how you balance intention-setting against the need to adapt and be flexible in real time is something that both experiences have in common. I had this topic as part of the initial concept of this post, but it got too lengthy. If of interest, I’ll revisit it in the future.
Everyone else: I don’t know what you’ll take from this, but I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll let me know what you think!
Let’s dive in.
I have my perfectionistic quirks and control freak tendencies, but even if I didn’t and even I cared about my job in a more balanced manner, professional leave planning is hard for a few key reasons:
Postpartum life is inherently uncertain—and that’s just within the domestic domain. Relatively speaking, what happens at home is more within your control than what happens at the office. Even so, it’s hard to make a plan for how your personal life will be impacted in the months following pregnancy. Things like sleep quality, postpartum recovery timeline, childcare circumstances, quantity of partner support, and baby temperament possess a fair amount of variability even as they’re “close to home.”
Any coverage plan you create is completely dependent upon the people covering for you—over whom you are unlikely to have any meaningful control.
If it’s impossible to predict how leave will impact your life, it’s both impossible and foolish to predict how your leave will impact your colleagues. They’ve got their own lives, priorities, and needs, both at and outside of work. Your maternity leave is only as important to them as it is directly impactful to them.
Also, any sort of plan you create for coverage with these colleagues requires some scenario-based thinking (e.g. what if this person goes on vacation, what if this project gets delayed, what if someone new joins the team, etc.) and there’s no way you can address every single possible scenario that can affect them at work when you are away.
If you care about the people you work with or take pride in your professional performance in an above-average way, it’s hard to divest and detach in the process of preparing for leave.
If you care about or expect anything from the people impacted by your coverage plan, it can feel like you’re letting people down by not “doing enough” to prepare them for your leave or doing a “good enough job” in tying things off before you go.
Even if you don’t particularly care about the people you work with, it can be hard to not feel responsible or stressed about what might happen when you’re out and what it might mean for you upon return. Personally, I’ve suffered from the fear of, “If I don’t set the team up for success, it’ll impact impact my team’s results or individual performance reviews when I finally come back.”4
Without getting too deep into the details of what a Product Manager is, writing a leave plan is difficult because of the nature of the role:5 no matter how much you plan, something is bound to change. The real question is “How big a blast will this change leave in its wake?”
What changes tend to look like in my specific line of work—software development for monitoring and servicing solar systems on thousands of customers’ homes—is something like this:
Small-scale changes (impact tends to be in days to weeks): Engineering team members get pulled away from their planned work to work on ad hoc, critical issues (e.g. login not working on a website) or augment another team across the finish line on a project broadly considered important.
Medium-scale changes (impact tends to be in weeks to months): A key business partner or internal sponsor changes their mind on order of requests or adds something new to their list of requests.6
Large-scale (impact tends to be in months to year): A big business opportunity or regulatory change that comes out of nowhere causes anywhere between a month’s or a year’s worth of planned projects to be thrown out the window.
In the next three months that I am out of office, any number of small, medium, and large changes could happen. While I can anticipate a few of them, there’s not much I can do to stop them.7
I’ve been floating in and around the solar energy sector since mid-2022, and the only thing I can say with confidence about the industry is that it fully earns its reputation of being “the solar coaster.”
The roller coaster joke comes from the fact that the performance of a solar energy-based business tends to be heavily tied to the favorability of regulatory policy and availability of tax incentives.8
In my last three or four years of working in the solar space:
When state- or federal-level policy changes occur (domestic content, NEM 3.0, IRA tax credits, FEOC), they tend to hit hard, fast, and in such a way that they can either send a company to the moon or put it completely out of business.9
In my last company, unexpected solar policy changes in places like California, Texas, and Illinois upended a quarter or two’s worth of projects.
At my current company, most of H1 2025 was spent trying to hedge against possible outcomes with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
I’m somewhat insulated from these changes since my focus within the residential solar business is on operating and maintaining already-installed systems rather than on selling and installing new systems. Even so, doing my job well amid the uncertainty of the solar industry was hard enough when I didn’t have a three-month leave on deck.
I mention this in a piece I wrote a few months ago, but it’s worth restating here: I’ve been at a loss for visible, timely, relevant role models of people going on leave throughout my career, and the following circumstances have made my leave planning more complicated.
I work in a male-dominated field
Technology as an industry skews male: according to a Gartner study in 2022, women accounted for 26% of IT roles. Solar also skews male: women only account for 29% of solar jobs according to a 2024 report from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Anecdotally, women—especially women in leadership with children—aren’t exactly abundant.
I work in a male-dominated business unit within my organization.
My company is family-friendly and has a lot of support for working parents, but almost all of the business partners I work with directly are male. Some of the business partners are married and a few have children—I figure those men, in particular, will be sympathetic to what I’ll be going through in the coming year(s), but none will be able to empathize. Mostly, I’m concerned about perceptions of underperformance and whether my leave and transition into motherhood will by seen as "disengagement” and “lack of investment.”
I’ve never worked closely with a high-performing, first-time mom who successfully navigated leaving and coming back to work in the post-2020 era.10
Back when I worked most closely with ambitious, first-time moms, it was pre-pandemic and I wasn’t sure I wanted kids. Lacking personal curiosity around parenting at the time, I didn’t ask these women much about their leave and return process. Also, when I worked with these women, the dynamics of leaving and returning to work were very different due to in-office work being the norm.
I’ve had two managers go on parental leave before, but they aren’t ideal examples for me to emulate as I begin my leave in a few weeks:
The male manager didn’t seem to value his paternity leave, period, and ostensibly tried to get out of taking his leave until his own manager forced him to do so.11
The female manager had already gone on parental leave twice before and made going on leave for her third child look suspiciously easy due to her preexisting systems and experience—and because I’d only started working at the company three weeks before her due date, I wasn’t tasked with anything on the coverage plan for her team.
Every person whose parental leave plan has impacted me in the past has been a people manager, not an individual contributor.
People managers don’t have it easy in most regards: in my opinion, managing people’s career growth is harder than directly managing a project. As an individual contributor in my current role, I don’t have obvious one-for-one replacements or more junior points of delegation to whom I can seamlessly hand things off. One thing that people managers do have as an advantage is being able to use their reporting structure to dole out their work cleanly while on leave.
There’s a bit of “unreality” to my pregnancy and leave as a whole due to the nature of remote work. The people I work with are distributed across California, Ohio, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, New Jersey, and Colorado. Our relationships have been built over screens. We engage with one another strictly from the shoulders, up. It’s easy for people to forget that I’m pregnant and going on leave at all unless I address it directly—and repetitively—with them.
Even with the challenges of my role, my industry, and my personal circumstances, I still had to write a plan for my work that “worked.”
But how?
I considered using the AI to draft my leave plan, but decided against it. I figured that if my brain is already going to be mush, I might as well use my critical thinking muscles while I can.12
With what little time I had left with a pre- “mom brain,” here’s what I did to generate a leave plan that I feel good about:
I took the only guidance I could find on the internet that seemed somewhat relevant to my role and tried to apply it to my personal circumstances.
The most important things I took from the guide lined above on Lenny’s Newsletter were some pieces of structure for my leave plan, specificall:
The key dates associated with my leave and return
A summary of in-flight and upcoming projects, including relevant documentation, people who care about the projects, and people best equipped to move the projects forward
The schedule, governance, and expectations associated with the meetings I typically run and attend
I adopted a certain kind of mindset when structuring the plan: focusing on empowering the team and treating it more as a statement of intentions for coverage than a comprehensive solution for coverage.
I fully believe that my team is more than capable to execute against the plan I wrote. I invested a lot in the culture of my team over the last year, and it has a strong sense of ownership, responsibility, trust, and accountability. Everyone knows they’re going to have to flex, step up, and fill gaps while I’m gone and is willing to.
I tried to assign out tasks that played to individual strengths and asked for volunteers to take on the things that didn’t organically fit a single team member’s scope of responsibility (e.g. it was easy to delegate a refinement meeting to my business analyst, who does most of the work for it anyway, but less easy to delegate my main business meeting that has a wider-ranging remit)
At the same time, I didn’t want people to feel constrained by things I wrote in January when the landscape of the work is likely to change by March or April. I also can’t control overarching organizational changes or staffing changes that might happen while I’m away or in preparation for the new Fiscal Year (which starts a month after I return).
When socializing my plan, I’ve tried to impart the philosophy to teammates as follows:
This plan is a statement of intention, not a prescription or steo-by step-guide.
A lot of things within it are subject to change.
It’s focused on giving you some structure for what to do when I’m out, but also trusts you with the flexibility and creativity for how to do it.
I created and socialized the plan incrementally throughout my third trimester
I drafted the plan two months out from my leave date. using the holiday lull at work to make the most progress on it.13
Between two and one month out, I started vetting it with people most directly impacted and solicited feedback, gaps, and points of additional clarity
By one month before my due date, I had finalized and socialized the plan with anyone who would be impacted by my leave
In my final month pre-delivery, I’m reinforcing the plan, making tweaks, and updating details where needed. But if I went into labor tomorrow, everyone who needs the plan has seen it and has what they need to use it.
I gave myself some grace with the plan: The most important thing after actually writing the plan was giving myself permission to chill regarding the outcomes of the plan by rememebering the following:
Nothing I’m writing is enforceable, legally binding, or really serious in such a way that people must stick to it, or else. The plan is a resource, a brain in a jar, a helpful statement of intent, not a series of binding doctrines.
The plan is the best guidance I can give with what I know in this particular moment: about myself, my team, my company, my industry, etc. The moment is fleeting. The only constant is change. I did the best that I could do in the moment and for a moment—and that’s all I could do.
There are still plenty of things that I haven’t done as I sign off in three weeks for the next three months. I haven’t done my out-of-office email reply. I haven’t shifted ownership of all the meetings I own. There’s a longer list of things I need to do and longer list of things I’ve probably forgotten—and I can only hope that I remember to do the things that are actually important.
At this point, the thing that concerns me most about my leave is the thing I’m least able to plan: the process of coming back.14 I’ve been warned that I’ll feel ineffectual when I come back after three months of the team operating without me. I’m scared of meeting others’ and my own expectations regarding how quickly I’ll be able to “bounce back” to perform at the same level that I did before I had the baby.
It’s too soon to worry about any of that.
For now, what matters most is this:
I did what I had to do for my corporate job.
Now I can focus on preparing for the most important job of the rest of my life.
See you next time,
EZ
PS: If you’re reading this and would benefit from seeing an actual version of my leave plan, shoot me a message. I’ve considered making my plan into a (sanitized, company-information-free) template if there’s adequate interest.
Will he be a Snake or a Fire horse? An Aquarius or a Pisces? Who knows! I’m sure there’s someone out there with more fame and more of a gambling addiction putting baby birth odds onto a prediction market like Kalshi.
This accounting exercise was long overdue. I’ve worked at six different places in the last ten years, and at each place I worked, I had a minimum of two accounts that were still active in some way. HSAs, in particular, are a terrific pain to roll over and close. I’ve done a fair bit of rotting on the couch in the home stretch of pregnancy, but at least I’m practicing financial hygiene!
Did I have to work so hard on my leave plan? Probably not, and I might have felt differently about the coverage planning process if I cared less about my work. For the moment, I still prioritize about my identity as a professional and want to have a job I could come back to, so I’ve put in effort that matches my degree of care for my role.
I shouldn’t have things held against me or my team for how they fared when I was out, especially when things move quickly and memories are short. But I know other women who have gone out on leave and been met with feedback from their bosses to the tune of, “You haven’t seemed as engaged lately,” especially when their leave comes close to their performance reviews (mine, unfortunately, will).
Unofficial definition of a product manager. 1. A sexy-sounding job to many MBA students. 2. An “email job” to most other people in which most of the work involves being online, attending meetings, and sending messages of some kind (via email, chat, or some other means).
Not all organizations are customer-centric with product managers being measured on customer revenue, and even if they are, what gets valued depends on who’s in charge, and “shiny object syndrome” is real. Marketing-driven rebrand projects (hard to quantify value, but these still get greenlit, for worse or “worse-er”) and anything with the hint of “just add AI” (dubiously valuable and highly distracting when it’s AI for the sake of AI–and it often is) are good examples of these types of projects.
My maternity leave is 12 weeks long. My best guess is that my team will get hit with at least one small change every two weeks, one medium change every four weeks, and one large change over the course of my entire leave.
As you might imagine, renewable energy policy approach has differed a lot between Biden and Trump. The Biden administration kept solar profitable and growing, but many businesses were built on the premise that the tax credits incentivizing solar demand would last forever. While the Trump administration gets a rap for being against renewables, one good thing about OBBBA is that it did force some discipline on the residential side of the solar industry. Go on Reddit, read about unhappy customers, and you’ll see stories of salespeople running away with the bank while putting glass on people’s roofs and saddling them with debt over 25-year contracts.
A number of leading companies went out of business or filed for bankruptcy in the last two years (SunPower, Sunnova, Posigen to name a few). Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) wrecked any solar company whose profitability hinged too strongly on the continued existence of Biden-era tax credits.
I can think of maybe one or two exceptions from a previous role where a manager on a different team and a peer on a different team appeared to navigate their returns well.
One of many reasons why this person was the worst manager I have ever had.
Also, the work-sanctioned AI we have is Microsoft Copilot and I find that Copilot is the worst and most useless of the AI tools out there.
Aside from two months out being a good time period to start drafting a leave plan, in general, it helped that I had a fair bit of quiet and downtime because two months out from my due date was late December. In previous roles, this December period would be a nightmare because it’s when annual planning and budgeting get finalized at many publicly-held companies. Working at a privately-held company where the fiscal year starts in July, my December was especially quiet and well suited for writing the leave plan.
I negotiated a part-time schedule for the first few weeks as I regain my bearings, but have no idea how I’ll return “gracefully” to the workforce.
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