Why I needed to pause the vertical growth of my UX career
After years of a steady journey of vertical growth, I wondered if there might be other opportunities to enrich my User Experience career than the conventional professional path.
Pixar’s movie Soul contains one scene that resonated with me deeply. Joe, a school music teacher who had spent his entire life chasing his dream of playing with a jazz legend, finally gets his chance and long-awaited gig.
After a fantastic show, he asks himself, “What happens next?” “We come back tomorrow and do it all again,” responds Dorothea, the band leader. He replies, “I’ve been waiting for this day my entire life. I thought I’d feel different.”
Then, Dorothea tells him a story about a fish that swims up to this older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.” “The ocean?” says the older fish, “that’s what you’re in right now.” “This?” says the younger fish, “this is water. What I want is the ocean.”
In 2022, Meta offered me a role on Instagram’s New York City team as a content designer. At the time, I was working in Chile at Globant as a UX lead for LATAM Airlines, a position I had aimed for since I started in this discipline.
Like most of my colleagues, my career path had consistently moved vertically. With my background as a journalist, I started as a UX writer, then was promoted to expert UX writer, then to senior UX writer, UXW mentor, and content strategist. A role as UX lead was the obvious next step, and I couldn’t be happier. It felt like a refreshing challenge and, why not, a well-deserved recognition after years of hard work. Up to that moment, that was my idea of the ocean.
Redefining my ocean
After a year of leading an outstanding group of people -five product designers and four content designers- and learning how to help them grow with their unique personalities and strengths, their performance reviews came out great. Their products impacted millions of users in an industry that I loved, my manager was supportive, and the position allowed me to hone my skills and learn new ones.
That’s when Instagram offered me this cool position in the US at my favorite app. Big tech companies had recruited me for content design roles a few times before. It is something that I wanted. But this time, it was different. I was finally in a leadership position, and why would I leave that happy place to go back to an individual contributor (IC) role when it took me so long to get here?
Choosing to remain on a vertical path seemed safe and rewarding. “If I stay in my current role,” I thought, “I would land similar positions with bigger teams in the future, higher salaries over time, and steady growth as a leader.” But as great as it sounded, pursuing vertical growth non-stop for so many years was starting to feel like water.
I still wanted the ocean, but how did that look now?
- I wanted to work for the best tech companies in the world and learn as much as possible from them.
- I wanted the challenge of being a good UXer in a different language.
- I wanted to accomplish the goal of working in another country and all the professional, personal, and cultural adaptation that comes with it.
- I wanted the excitement of unlearning rooted beliefs on how to get things done and acquiring new perspectives on UX processes and workflows.
- I wanted to be responsible for impacting billions (not millions) of users globally.
- I wanted to accomplish all of this to become a better UX lead and be able to share this experience and knowledge with my future teams and companies.
Resetting my objectives and the challenge to accomplish them felt like an ocean again, a vast, renewed, scary ocean. And by doing that, I had an eye-opening moment: I realized none of my UX goals were tied to a specific role’s level.
With that in mind, I accepted the offer, even if it wasn’t a leadership role. I felt like a local race driver who gets the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join the Ferrari team for a season to learn from the best. And for that, I had to pause my vertical growth.
Pros, cons, and hesitations of pausing my way up
Going back to a role I was previously familiar with was a whirlwind of emotions that I had to calibrate daily. I consciously relied on my strengths to mentally convert the more-than-known aspects of my work (aka the boring stuff) into a tool that would allow me to make the most of this learning experience.
Three examples of how the miserable and the magical blend
- You manage daily obstacles better
Remember the obstacles you had years ago in previous roles, and you were so happy not seeing them again in your leading position? You guessed it. If you return to an IC role, they’ll be back to haunt you. On the other hand, you have experienced them before and helped teams work their way through them. Therefore, you now have more skills to navigate these issues more maturely and with a broader vision. You have a better radar to discern between an inconvenience and a tragedy, and you know how to prioritize meaningful battles to design better experiences.
2. You don’t let ego get in the way of good UX
As a UX lead, you perfect your listening skills and the ability to provide helpful feedback detached from ego. You are not what matters. Your team’s success and how to guide them towards it is.
Going back to an IC role is exceptionally humbling. The transition from conducting meetings and design decision-making to battling for a place at the table once again can be frustrating, especially when you encounter biases from peers and other roles. Sometimes, based on your position and not your expertise, your voice won’t be heard, your notes won’t be considered, or your input will be dismissed, even when you used to lead those roles and processes.
Understandably, egos are bigger among ICs because there’s a huge need to prove your worth within a team to move up the vertical ladder. You were there once, too, and you’ll have the tools and empathy not to take things personally -even when they bother you- and work through the noise.
3. You transform routine into an opportunity to learn
Ramping up is easier when you have been and led a specific role. Your relationship with leadership is more fluid, and most tasks are familiar. They can even feel like a routine or the unchallenging part of your job. However, you can use that knowledge to find motivation in that scenario.
It’s the perfect playground to learn about other things you haven’t explored. You can focus on absorbing knowledge about a company’s processes, documentation, reviews, business strategies, and large-scale impact. Here’s where that local driver makes the most of her opportunity. She knows how to drive, but now she’s learning everything about Ferrari and how the best in the field do it.
You analyze and understand patterns, similarities, and differences and put things in perspective. Here’s where pausing the vertical growth pays off.
So, what happens next?
After a year at Meta and a couple of months into another role working for Google (via BayOne), I have checked most of the boxes on my goals list. It has been an incredible learning experience with two of the best tech companies in the world, which I’m sure will open many doors for me in the future.
But just like Joe in the Pixar movie, there will be a moment when I‘ll ask myself again, “What happens next?”
The Harvard psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar described the Arrival Fallacy as the illusion of finding happiness once you reach a goal only to feel, once you get there, that it didn’t equal fulfillment.
Like many, I have encountered that feeling, but redefining what your ocean looks like and reviewing your career goals from time to time is necessary. It allows you to re-explore options, give yourself the space to learn new skills, and remember that the purpose behind your work is not necessarily limited to one dimension.
At any given moment, and depending on your context and aspirations, your goals can shift from financial to mental stability, from a promotion to a better work-life balance, from more perks or having a big company in your resume to finding the inspiration of feeling like an apprentice again, learning from the best.
My choice of pausing my way up, however, also came with uncertainties:
- Will I ever be considered to be in a leading position again? How long will that take?
- Will my experience as a UX lead go unnoticed in my resume between my Content Design roles?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I know that after this experience, I‘m more skilled than ever.
I moved to a different country, adapted to it and its culture and work environment, and learned how to work in another language for two of the biggest companies in the world. I impacted billions of users, established strong team connections, and got solid performance reviews. Last but not least, I became more resilient after navigating relocation, the immigration-related stress, and the uncertainty of layoffs, all while doing it all by myself, far away from family and friends.
The experience of pausing my vertical growth has made me a better UXer and UX lead in more ways than I can name. There is no setback in a refreshing challenge, and I’ll take the knowledge I’m absorbing with me when I return to a leadership role, for which I’m now better positioned for success in this bigger ocean.
Thanks to my awesome Google colleague Gina Luzzi for her feedback
