Morning Brew - 🏆 Building a legacy

Time-saving tools and products we’re really into rn.

  Squeeze a month’s worth of vacations fits (for that long weekend) into this light, compact carry-on this summer. Need a cheaper, environmentally sustainable alternative? Try this.

Start! That! Business! Tailor Brands is a one stop shop to create all the branding assets you need. Those cornballers aren’t going to sell themselves.

Master the secrets of the most important thing you own: your iPhone. These hacks will take you to expert level…because with iOS 16 on the horizon, you shouldn’t be struggling with iOS 14 updates.

“I joke a lot that surfing and life have a lot of parallels. A lot of the things that I’m working on in surfing, like committing, conquering my fears, [and] believing in myself, are things that also apply in my real life.”

Bio: Naomi Gleit is vice president of product at Meta, formerly Facebook, and was one of the company’s first employees. She’s worked on nearly every major initiative at the company and today leads the product team, overseeing the growth of Facebook's core app, creating new tools that empower people to do good, and overseeing the group working to keep people safe on and off Meta technologies.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kickoff: “I have a standing meeting at 7:30am every single day. And so that gets me up and at ’em. And I’m usually in meetings back to back until like, five. That’s why it’s so important to me that I get to have my musties: working out, eating, [and] sleeping. And I’m an introvert so I really need alone time.”

Staying active: “I love yoga. I love training in the gym, and I love surfing. Those are my three favorite physical activities. Surfing is a whole thing. It’s a new skill that I tried to learn later in life, which is really humbling because I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. So I’m definitely not used to being in the ocean. It was really daunting. [That’s an] exercise goal: I want to be able to get barreled in a wave.”

Managing priorities: “The thing they say about email is, it’s not necessarily your to-do list. It’s other people’s to-do lists. It’s what’s important to them, not what’s important to you. So while I’m going through my meetings, while I’m responding to emails, I try every day to have [my] priorities for this week, so I don’t lose sight of that.”

A better way to manage: “I thought I personally had to be on top of people. It was like, ‘Did you do the task? What’s the deadline for that?’ That’s not sustainable. And that’s not scalable. I can’t go around asking thousands of people if they did their task, you know. And so we just want to create processes that hold people accountable for doing their own work that don’t require me. It’s like a ship that sails without me.”

Learning on the job: “There’s no school to go to to learn how to be a product manager. So I created kind of like a PM University. And I wrote down all of my advice. They’re called Naomi-isms. It’s on naomi.com. As a product manager, so much of my job is like firefighting, or it’s prioritization; things change all the time. The only constant is change. And so being able to handle change, being able to do really good change management is a really important superpower.”

Being a long hauler: “People ask me all the time, ‘Why are you still there?’ It’s not normal, I think, for someone to be at a company for so long. This was my first job out of college. Over time, we’ve seen so much change in technology, so much change in the company, [and] so much change in priorities. So I feel like, yes, I’ve been at the same company, but it has been 17 different jobs.”

Early days: “In the beginning of my career, I did not have work-life balance, because we had just graduated from college. A lot of us were college students building a product for college kids. And it was like a college dorm; I would sleep in the office. It was like work, social life, office, all these things just started blending together. I was 21 years old when I joined Facebook. So yeah, I just worked all the time…You can’t sustain that level of energy for that long. I remember I was the only product manager on growth. And now we have 80 product managers doing the job that back then [only I was doing].”—MW

Your punch list for when you punch out.

Read: If you’ve ever fantasized about leaving your job to travel and eat your way through Europe or Asia, you may want to read this Atlantic article that makes a convincing case for work sabbaticals.

Listen: This recent episode of The Big Story podcast answers the question, “How is Uber still not profitable?” It takes a hard look at Uber’s business model and also provides context for other surprisingly unprofitable companies like Peloton and Blue Apron.

Drink: For the seasoned home bartender who’s mastered their way through margaritas and martinis, here’s a mojito that features brown sugar, roasted pineapple, and fresh vanilla bean. I’m not drooling, you are.

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Release your inner child this summer with activities that’ll take you back to simpler days. Spend some time outdoors, try something new, and create Polaroid-worthy memories with Sidekick’s summer bucket list.

Burning questions of our time.

Your thoughts on the employer-provided health insurance quandary:

In my experience, my employer (3 different ones in a 40-year career) paid 80%–100% of my health insurance premium, and 50%–80% of my spouse’s and children’s health insurance premiums. If I had to buy health insurance as an individual early in my career, or under the ACA more recently, the economic impact would have been significant. So keeping health insurance tied to the employer makes economic sense from my point of view. Sure, an employer could still grant an insurance stipend if health insurance were decoupled from employment, but that would be the same as employer-provided health insurance, just with different bookkeeping.—Rick

Separating health insurance from employment is the ethically and morally right option. Having single-payer health insurance would remove all the middlemen that make finding a doctor hard, expensive, and frustrating. If health insurance were separated from employment, there would also be a better security net than we currently have for people who separate from their employers (or get laid off or fired). The current COBRA system is extremely expensive, and therefore highly inaccessible to many people who lose their jobs. Health care is a human right; we shouldn’t have to pay to be healthy.—Emily

The time sheet debate:

Remote work has upended so many workplace traditions, like in-person banter and knowing how tall your coworkers are. But an unexpected perk of remote work has been cutting back on the hours we spend commuting to the office. We’ve reclaimed that time to dedicate to family and other personal matters. But as companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs push a return to the office, employees once again face the threat of losing that time to sitting in traffic or squeezing themselves into a crowded subway car. This raises the question: When does the job clock really start? Should companies compensate you for your commute? And if they did, would that convince you to come into the office? Hit Reply and let us know your thoughts in the Inbox.—SS