Returning to Tech after Starting a Family
Earlier this month I had the honor of participating on a panel about returning to your career after a break at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration. In 2004, I left my position as a Group Program Manager at Microsoft to start a family thinking that I would take a year off and then return to work. It turns out that being at home with my young family, and pursuing my own projects was way more fun than I anticipated, and one year pretty quickly turned into several.
During my break, I experimented with a lot of things. I started a family travel blog with more than 80,000 unique visitors per month, co-created and then sold the world’s largest travel blogger conference, wrote for Condé Nast Traveler, and launched an iPhone app. It was really fun and rewarding to find success in areas I’d never considered as a career options while I was working — but my heart never really left tech, and my curiosity about what I could build fueled everything I tried during those years.
As my kids got older, my desire to work on bigger projects with a group of peers who would challenge me and help me move forward only grew and I started looking into returning to technology. I knew that the biggest challenges in shipping great software hadn’t changed, which helped me feel confident in beginning my search. If anything, my skills for scoping projects, using limited resources well, experimenting, and negotiation had only improved during my time off.
The search was more daunting than I expected at first. I met with more than one hiring manager who looked at me like my head was upside down. However, I was surprised by how many of my former co-workers supported me in my search. They connected me with potential employers who would be excited about my background, gave me referrals, and generally helped me figure out the best way to tell my story.
Figuring out the right kind of role, the type of work I wanted to be doing, and how to prepare for interviews was a long process, but ultimately I was thrilled to land at Zillow in the Spring of 2014. There I found a Product Manager position on a small but growing team, which gave me the opportunity to get my bearings, while still having plenty of runway to challenge me as I came up to speed.
Over time, I’ve added to my skills here at Zillow. As a Senior Development Manager, my job is to identify how we can better serve the customers who visit us from paid advertising. It’s a role with a lot of depth and breadth, from looking at how we can apply user understanding to create better on-site experiences, to digging into how to optimize our advertising.
Initially, I felt a lot of internal pressure to get my sea-legs as quickly as possible. I had all the normal new-job challenges of getting up to speed quickly, but I also needed to catch up on the shifts in tech. I took lots of notes during the day, and then hopped on LinkedIn Learning (Zillow pays for a subscription) in the evenings to catch up in areas where I needed to know more.
I felt like my long hiatus was visible to everyone I met, so I have a strong memory of the day my then Development Manager asked me in a 1:1 how it was going and said “you know, nobody can tell that you’ve had a career break — they just think you’re new to the company.” It was incredibly reassuring to hear that and the comment helped me settle in with more confidence.
My return to work was a big adjustment for my family as well. I thought a lot about how it would impact my kids, and tried to make that transition as seamless as possible for them. I didn’t really anticipate the impact on my husband, and our relationship, upending the way we divided up the work of running a household. When I had been at home, it made sense for me to take the role of “default parent” taking on anything that might come up, but once I was back at work, we both needed to juggle to make things happen. Five-plus years later, we’re still juggling, but I can say with confidence that the effort has been worth the reward!
