Leaving BuzzFeed
To be honest, this isn’t a post I thought I would ever write. Not because I thought I’d never leave BuzzFeed, but because I always thought there were enough “I’m leaving my company” Medium posts out there in the world. However, as I’ve gone through the process of telling people I care about that I’m moving on from the company — my team, close friends, parents — all the same questions kept coming up. And it occurred to me that the reason people find goodbye posts interesting is because they know that, someday, they will be faced with the calculus of whether or not to leave their job. When is it the right time? How do you figure out what’s next? So, I figured I’d try my best to lay out the answers to a couple of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten as I’ve gone through my transition (hopefully it’s useful to someone out there pondering their own future):
Why are you leaving?
So many times in my career, the answer was that I became too frustrated with the state of affairs and saw no way to influence the way things were or the outcomes I was seeing. Certainly part of leaving Etsy for BuzzFeed was my desire to be in a role where I could more directly be responsible for the health of the entire Product Design team and not being able to do so was a real source of frustration for me as a Design Manager there.
What’s interesting about leaving BuzzFeed is that this is the first time in my life that I can honestly say I, even now, really love my job, my team, and my manager. After I gave notice to my manager, Dao, I’d wake up every other day and think, What the hell am I doing, this is crazy! I’ve never had a job that not only allowed me to stretch myself, but actively encouraged me to meddle with parts of the company I’d normally have no business being involved in. At BuzzFeed I’ve been able to manage a variety of teams — from Product Design, to our IT team for nearly two years, to our Branded Operations team — testing my theory about management being a generalizable skill. Getting to know those teams, their role in the company, as well as help them through difficult times and transitions was one of the most special things about working for BuzzFeed.
So why leave? The short answer is that I fell in love with helping different functions organize themselves well, define their roles and build strong relationships and collaborations with other departments. The parts of my job that get me the most excited are the parts where I’m helping all our teams get aligned, define shared goals that reflect our business priorities and operate with confidence and empathy for each other. While BuzzFeed gave me a ton of operational experience, I want a role where I can think about and solve operational problems all the time, across a lot of different disciplines. That role doesn’t exist for me at BuzzFeed, and that’s okay! But it means that to be happy and fulfilled, I need to pursue something new.
Why now?
My main motivator is that BuzzFeed is at an important transition point as a company. Unlike past years, we now have leaders owning entire business verticals, which will give our Tech teams a lot more clarity about what’s important. While that’s an exciting improvement for our teams, having strong business leaders means that my role in strategy and planning for our products is less critical than ever before. And while I’m positive that, as usual, BuzzFeed would find new, fun ways for me to help the company, if I’m going to make a change and pursue something else, now is the best time.
What will happen to Product Design at BuzzFeed?
I can say this with zero hesitation: the Product Design team at BuzzFeed is one of the strongest, most thoughtful teams out there. I’ve always been so impressed by how everyone on the team supports one another, gives candid feedback when discussing their work and come together to achieve outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Any time I’ve described our team, their skills and how they work together, I always get envious replies from other design leaders. Designers who leave BuzzFeed have told me later that they miss many things about our team: the candid critique, designers not only coding but being *allowed* to code, the lack of competition and ego within the team, etc. It’s a special group of people with a unique way of working that I am certain I’ll also miss when I’m gone.
And the honest truth of it is, the team is as strong as it was before I left and while obviously some things will change when I leave (like things change when anyone leaves), there is only opportunity ahead of them. Whatever I had to do with instilling values into the team early on has now grown into something almost entirely their own.
The other reason I’m so confident in their future success is because the managers we’ve hired are some of the best I’ve ever worked with. Kelsey Scherer, Caylee Betts and Sofia Millares have really made the team their own, and over the past few months have led it more than I have. In my place, I am promoting Kelsey to lead the entire team moving forward, and she is easily one of the smartest, most thoughtful managers I’ve had the opportunity to work with. It’s easy, for me at least, to see why the team won’t only be fine in the future, but will evolve in new and exciting ways as Kelsey brings her unique point of view and way of thinking to the entire team, our Tech org and BuzzFeed.
Does this mean you’ll write more again?
I’ve gotten this question almost every time I’ve told someone about my plans. The answer, I think, is yes! I have a lot of ideas for posts that I just haven’t had the time or energy to work on. I plan on documenting parts of my own job search (to address the “How will you decide what to do?” question I’ve gotten), as well as covering a few managerial and culture topics I’ve been batting around lately.
A quick note of thanks
I would be remiss if I didn’t really double-down on how amazing my manager, Dao Nguyen, has been for me. She’s helped me grow in more ways than I can count. She taught me the value of balancing practical and pragmatic decision-making with how people would feel (the latter of which was my default guiding-light, and a real blind spot for me as a manager coming into BuzzFeed). She recognized early (before I did) my passion for helping people and teams work better together, understand their role in the company and aligning them with their sibling departments. She was always on the lookout for responsibilities I could take on, or interesting challenges. When she took on managing a substantial portion of our Business org, she brought me along to meetings, letting me listen in, asking for my point of view, and explaining to me how she was thinking.
There’s a lot of talk right now in our industry about the difference between mentorship and sponsorship. Dao did both for me and I can only try to live up to that for others I’m in a position to help in the future.
What’s next?
I have absolutely no idea (hence my frequent, What the hell am I doing? moments). The truth is that I didn’t see a way to actively shift career paths and still actively do my day-to-day job of running our Product Design and Branded Operations team, as well as the cultural programs I’ve started like Manager Dens, or our Midyear and Annual Review formats.
If you’re reading this and are at a company that needs help with any of the following things (either full-time or on contract!), shoot me an email and let’s chat:
- Organizational change and transformation
- Goal-setting and alignment of teams and their work
Creating conditions for strong collaboration - Recruiting best practices
- Management, leadership and company culture
- Product Development practices (including, but not limited to, Product Design)
I’m looking for a company that values operational excellence (and doesn’t feel they’ve achieved it yet in some areas), cares about their employees, and can provide interesting growth and ops challenges. I’d love to work alongside a senior operations person to learn all the parts of the job I don’t know (though I’m open to giving it a whirl solo with the right founder and company size). I’m really looking for the right company, the right people and the right role that will allow me to be as impactful as possible, while still learning a lot from the folks around me.
So if you’d like to work together, definitely reach out!. I’d love to tell you about all the crazy things I’ve been up to at BuzzFeed these last 3.5 years and hear about you, your company and teams, and how I can help. :)
