Why I left consulting for Tech
And the advice that led me to head up VR product at YouTube
The story I want to talk about is how I made a transition from management consulting into tech. I went to business school with the intention of working in consulting.
90 days into my dream job of management consulting, I was devastated when I realized that the position that I was in wouldn’t lead to a clear path of me being able to achieve my long term vision.
I felt stuck —
I felt like I was no longer passionate about the role and I just really didn’t know what to do. So I reached out to a mentor of mine and described the situation. His response was really a turning point for my career. He responded with a very thoughtful framework which has really influenced every career decision I’ve made to date.
He told me that —
I should aim to be at the intersection of the thing that I am really good, the things I’m passionate about, and the areas where I’ll feel in demand.
So the first thing is where I have a unique skill set and historically have excelled beyond my peers.
The second is that I should be working in an area where I am tremendously passionate, meaning that
— it’s something that I would do in my free time.
Or when I think about things that keep me up at night or things where I have a natural level of curiosity or gravitational pull.
And then the third thing is it should be an area where I would feel like I was in demand. That demand could manifest itself in terms of being compensated, or just feeling valued in some sort of way.
So I thought about the intersection of these 3 things:
— where I was skilled, passionate, and where there is a demand.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on this and trying to back into what career that would mean. I put every hypothesis I had about different options and put it through this framework and
— the clear answer to me was was to go into tech.
So let me explain why.
For the reason that I knew that this was an area where I naturally excelled beyond my peers, I went back to a time when I was a freshman in college. I remember freshman year I was enrolled in a computer science course, and
I didn’t even know what a programming language was so I was woefully behind my peers.
I spent a lot of time coming up the learning curve and over the course of that semester
I actually excelled and got an A+ on the course, so that was a big turning point for me
…and in a lot of ways that course helped me to understand the extent to which I naturally had an ability that was potentially above and beyond that of my peers.
When I thought about how I spent my free time,
I always had a natural curiosity around all things internet consumer facing and somewhat of a critical eye.
So I felt like, yeah, it checks the passion box.
And then in terms of demand, because I had computer science degree and because I had a business degree as well, I knew that my educational background and the skills that I had would be in demand in this sector.
So that checked all the the boxes, so I decided to pursue a career in tech. I began interviewing at a variety of jobs at Silicon Valley companies, and
— fast forward to today I’m now leading the VR product team at Youtube!
Erin joined Google recently as the product lead for YouTube’s virtual reality group. Prior to her role at YouTube, Erin oversaw the team of engineers at Yahoo focused on user experience and management of products such as Flickr and Tumblr. She was raised in Detroit, studied computer engineering at Michigan (where she was the only Black woman in her department and graduating class) and received her MBA from Harvard University.
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