the essential skeleton is an invariant of a degeneration that appears in both berkovich geometry and minimal model theory. i will show that for degenerations with a semistable model, the essential skeleton of a product of degenerations is the product of their skeleta. as an application, we are able to describe the homeomorphism type of some degenerations of hyperkähler varieties, both for a hilbert scheme of degenerating k3 surfaces and for a kummer variety associated to a degeneration of an abelian surface. this is joint work with enrica mazzon.