A UX Researcher Quit Her Job at Google to Work at Yammer. You’ll Never Believe What She Found Out.
Priya Nayak
A lot has already been said about the advantages of leaving a big, well-established company for a startup. Stephen Cohen, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, said it best when he commented on the tendency to “massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence” and the inevitable ennui of staying at one of these big companies for too long, especially at the start of your career. He cautions,
“You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall.”
The point of Cohen’s message is that startups and smaller companies can offer young professionals much more than the tangible luxuries of larger and more entrenched companies: a faster pace, constantly changing work, less red tape blocking you from getting work done, more freedom, and that intrinsic motivation of knowing that unless you hustle to stay ahead of your competitors, you might be out of a job.
After five years at Google, I was ready for all of these things. I was no longer inspired by the work my team was doing, I didn’t feel like we were pushing ourselves towards new goals, and I felt weighed down by some core aspects of my job, like participant recruiting and writing formal research reports. Even worse, I felt powerless to influence the culture of my team. I’d gotten so depressed that I didn’t even think switching product teams within Google could persuade me to stay; it would still feel like Google, which I had come to associate with complacency and bureaucracy.
This is what led me to Yammer eight months ago. A friend of mine was working for their Marketing team and mentioned they were looking for User Researchers. At the time I didn’t know anything about Yammer, but the less I knew, the better. I wanted to work somewhere where I was really needed, somewhere I’d have to think hard about big problems that would determine the company’s larger strategy and success.
Happily, I got all those things I was looking for in a smaller company: lots of freedom, a focus on getting research done fast, little-to-no red tape, a ton of support from peers and managers, and that common understanding of what’s at stake if we don’t figure our shit out. (And yes, Yammer is owned by Microsoft, a company that’s even bigger than Google. But from our office in San Francisco we still operate like a smaller, 300-person outfit.) But the things that really made me appreciate Yammer, the things that keep me coming back to work every day, became obvious in my first weeks here. These are the things I hadn’t realized would make a difference, but found while working at Yammer:
Working with more women. For all the this talk of “leaning in,” most tech companies are still largely boy’s clubs. The women that are in tech tend to be in primarily female-driven roles, like marketing, HR, and user research. I found this to be true at Google, and I didn’t like it. Almost every product manager, tech lead, and engineering manager I’d met or worked with were men who were at least ten years older than me. But Yammer was the first company I’d worked in where I got to collaborate with female product managers, female tech leads, and female engineering managers every day. Some came to Yammer in a different capacity but quickly rose to these positions, having been recognized for their talent and given a chance (which, though possible at a large company like Google, is far less likely). It’s been incredibly inspiring and reaffirming to work with so many ladies at Yammer who are so well-respected and influential.
Working with people I (really) like. Yammer is technically “collaborative enterprise software.” Sounds like dry stuff right? It easily could be, and I was working on similar stuff at Google. But I love coming to work because my coworkers and the way we interact represents the very culture that we’re trying to promote through our product — working openly, informally, and using your own voice as opposed to a formal business persona. Before hiring anyone, we ask ourselves “Would you want to spend eight hours a day sitting next to this person and working with them?” As a result, our team works really well together because we get along really well as people, and friends. I know now how important this aspect is to liking your job and being able to work well with others.
Working with a bunch of assholes. And I mean that in the best way. At Yammer we regularly refer to ourselves as assholes because we are: we’re not going to agree with your suggestions at face-value and we’re not going to dress up our response to you with niceties. It’s this type of candor and cynicism that helps keep us honest, and we like it that way. As a researcher, I’ve been really happy to see that it’s not only Research constantly questioning product decisions, it’s everyone across the company. Our Yammer network is a place where healthy debates are happening all the time, between product managers, researchers, data analysts, engineers, and anyone who has a strong opinion and an instinct to question the status quo. Coming from Google, where a lot of the big questions were already answered a long time ago, it’s been a welcome change of culture for someone as naturally contentious and skeptical as myself.
Like most people my age, I won’t be at this job for the rest of my life. But when the time comes to move on, the things I’ll be looking for in my next job will be the things I realized were important during this one.
Priya Nayak is a User Researcher at Yammer. She is fluent in English and Doge.
