Career advice for tech professionals

Who is talking to you about your career? Who is helping you chart your best path forward professionally? Is it your manager? Your spouse? Your best friends and co-workers? All of the above!? These people want the best for you, but their career advice can be inherently clouded by bias. Not to mention, they haven’t necessarily walked in your shoes. 

There is an overwhelming amount of material out there on how to manage people, be a great product manager, or even interview for a job. But there’s a shocking dearth of guidance on how to shape a career that is fulfilling, joyful, and makes a real impact.  Over the past 10 years, I’ve coached nearly a hundred people in tech on how to conduct a job search, negotiate a job offer, start a new job, and thrive in their current role. My goal is to help them build a career map and answer one central question: What are your skip jobs? You know, the next job, the one after that, and so on—so I ensure that what they are doing today will get them to where they want to be tomorrow, the next days, and years from now. 

I’m hoping to share this same advice with you in this newsletter, free for now. You can expect bite-size pieces of advice from my two dozen years of working in tech and coaching people. I’ll focus the content on navigating tech careers with a heavy slant toward product managers, since that’s been my area of expertise over the past 10 years. 

Oh, and finally, just a bit about me. I grew up in Kansas, did my undergrad and grad work in computer science from Stanford, then did four startups out of college. One I joined, one I founded (which failed), and two I founded as CEO. Cast Iron Systems was acquired by IBM, SayNow became Google, and that started chapter 2 of my career. During my four years at Google, I became a product manager and got to launch Hangouts and pivot Google Photos. Then I joined Credit Karma as chief product officer, helping to expand the business from offering free credit scores to adding the money button on the phone in the US, with over 90 million members. And I now work at Facebook, supporting the News Feed. I’m settled in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife, two kids, and two white fluffy doggies.

Enjoy and I hope to hear from you!

In the meantime, tell your friends!

(Photo by Justin Luebke on Unsplash)