How my failure to redesign my career at Google led me to unexpectedly design my own business

Since leaving Google last summer after 8 years in the company, the number one question that I get from most people is: “Why?”

I’m sure they’re wondering why anyone would give up free food, good pay, incredible benefits, an innovative culture, and exceptionally smart and talented colleagues. I still happily recall the fun memories, such as:

A fluffy dog showing up during an innovation workshop

An impromptu pillow fight during Halloween

But people do actually leave and they do so at fairly high rates. The median tenure at Google is merely 1.1 years. People leave because of limited opportunities for professional advancement, the desire to launch their own companies, the lure of competitive offers elsewhere or even the quest for a more diverse and inclusive work culture (for instance, Black & Latinx Googlers show higher attrition rates according to Google’s 2018 diversity report).

No matter how amazing the benefits are, Google is still just a company and its employees are, well, people. There are times when I saw that collaboration wasn’t as fluid as anticipated or differing perspectives led to roadblocks or friction. When clunky tools or processes slowed down progress. When there was a greater focus on “shining” in front of your superiors by quickly turning out deliverables versus taking the time to solve for deeper problems.

But the real reason I left was because, after nearly 5 years of “redesigning” my career at Google around my passion of human-centered design and ultimately burning out, I had reached a dead end. I had depleted my energy for an unsatisfactory payoff: feeling undervalued and underutilized across my full skill set.

That dead end eventually turned into an unexpected opportunity nearly a year later. I'm now celebrating the launch of my own business at www.sandrabydesign.com as an independent innovation consultant and facilitator.

Before I talk about the end, let’s go back to the beginning. The question at the heart of my story is, “Can you truly pursue your passion at work?”

Discovering my passion for human-centered design at Google via a side project

I joined Google in August 2010 fresh out of college as an advertising strategist in a sales team in the Cambridge office (Boston area). My background was neither in business nor in advertising (I studied International Relations and French), but Google had a series of entry-level sales and marketing programs for new graduates of all academic backgrounds (a great diversity strategy). My digital savviness and creativity as a self-taught web and graphic designer along with my soft skills were enough to get me into the door.

The first few years were an intense deep dive into the highly technical and data-driven world of digital marketing, which was before unknown to me. I quickly embraced the Google philosophy of learning, persevering and experimenting in order to survive a fast-paced environment with a steep learning curve (basically, if you don't know how to do something, figure it out as quickly as possible).

This philosophy drove me to explore Google’s numerous learning opportunities, one which would change the entire trajectory of my career. By chance, I attended a workshop on design thinking in early 2012 run by a Googler who was a part of a community called the CSI:Lab (Creative Skills for Innovation). This “Googler-to-Googler” community, started in April 2010 by Frederik Pferdt (now the Chief Innovation Evangelist at Google), enabled teams in and outside of Google to experience innovation culture through hands-on workshops.

I was overjoyed to discover a discipline where I could integrate my design sensibility with my curiosity for the human experience. I attended three more workshops that year and decided to officially join the CSI:Lab community in January 2013 as a design thinking facilitator (a 20% side project alongside my core role).

The Human-Centered Design Process (Source: Greater Good Studio)

Pursuing the passion by redesigning my career : successes & failures

As I started facilitating more workshops in 2013, I realized that I had discovered a new driving force in my career. The challenge was that, well, it was a side project that didn’t exist as an actual role in the Cambridge office. I wasn’t in Mountain View (HQ), New York or London where numerous opportunities could’ve been at my disposal. I had already decided that year to move to France (a dream of mine) and wasn’t looking to uproot my entire personal life again for quite some time.

I had to try to make it work under my current conditions. So in my third year at Google, I unknowingly started running a series of experiments to redesign my career toward human-centered design.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned along the way.

Experiment #1 : Take on a side project

Google’s culture of 20% projects made it fairly easy at first to explore my passion for human-centered design and balance it in terms of time management with my core role. My manager encouraged this work, as I was able to develop valuable problem-solving and facilitation skills that I could bring back to my team. I was also able to find new meaning in my work by exploring innovation challenges with different teams and even with non-profits.

Verdict: Success

Key Lesson: Working cross-functionally and beyond the walls of your company not only provides meaning in your work but helps you find new sources of inspiration.

Experiment #2 : Pitch a hybrid role and pursue continuing studies

Because my core role was highly focused on data and very little on design (besides data visualization), I saw an opportunity in a colleague’s maternity leave to pitch my manager to partially take on her role, which was focused on industry research and creative storytelling. My manager agreed to a 50/50 split between my role and her role, which opened the doors for me to explore visual design. Through Google’s education reimbursement program, my manager also approved a typography course at a local design school to sharpen my design skills. This led to my first official design project in my core role: a custom user interface for a branded YouTube channel that was eventually transformed into a 3D stand and touch screen at a marketing industry event.

Verdict: Success

Key Lesson: Dare to formulate a compelling pitch for what you want in your role, even if you may face a “no,” and proactively seek out learning opportunities (and company programs) that will support your goals while providing value to your team.

Experiment #3 (the turning point) : Maximize opportunities in both my core role and side project

Once I moved to France into a role as a regional product expert for Google Analytics, I questioned how human-centered design could fit into highly analytical and technical work. Soon enough, however, I realized that a design-driven approach could help to address complex challenges related to organizational silos in decision-making that technology on its own couldn’t solve. As a result, I launched an innovation taskforce, a measurement training program designed via co-creation, and a series of design-inspired marketing workshops with clients.

At the same time, I took on more challenging opportunities in my side project: co-leading a large-scale thinking workshop for P&G at a racetrack in Hungary, facilitating a People Development team through the early stages of a redesign of the Noogler onboarding experience in Japan, and rethinking onboarding for design thinking facilitators at Google with experts at the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany.

While in the end, these initiatives showed the impact of human-centered design in driving innovation and enabled me to progress from a skills perspective, they destroyed me from a health standpoint. Amidst a jam-packed travel schedule that regularly sent me to dozens of destinations in Europe and beyond for two years straight, I found myself doing two roles on 150% time. An 80%/20% balance was virtually a myth for me at this point. By mid-2015, I was facing chronic pain, an avalanche of physical illnesses and emotional distress. By pure obligation, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was in a state of burnout.

Verdict: Failure

Key Lesson: Pursuing your passion at all costs can be completely unsustainable if you don’t have the right KPIs and environment to support you and a strong sense of self-awareness. I was swept up in a “work as hard as you can to pursue your goals” mentality that I no longer was seeing things clearly.

Experiment #4 : Propose my own “innovation” role within my department

In the fallout of my burnout, it was clearly time to make a change. I hypothesized that creating my own role that would be in line strategically with the team’s objectives while integrating my broad skill set could help me circumvent the need to do two roles at the same time. And so I pitched two variations of my existing role to my manager as an education lead and a change agent with what I thought were compelling KPIs and outcomes. But in the end, the answer was no due to operational constraints and the lack of a strong enough business justification.

Verdict: Failure

Key Lesson: Teams that are evaluated and rewarded more significantly on operational success metrics will be more wary of risk-taking and experimentation that doesn’t have immediate revenue impact. I should have been more strategic and evidence-based in my approach to pitching a new role, but the burnout had left me in such a haze that I had become overly focused on my final destination versus the journey on getting there.

Experiment #5 : Take on a hybrid role (again) while concurrently doing a master’s program in relation to my passion

I had already tested this model back in 2013, but once I realized I couldn’t create my own role, I sought to find a new role that could bring me closer to human-centered design. With limited opportunities in the Paris office, I discovered a global sales training team that had recently been created and that could accommodate a handful of “remote” team members (I was just 1 of 2 people in Paris). I joined as a curriculum manager and was able to evolve this into a hybrid role between instructional designer and content manager to blend my subject matter expertise in measurement with my learning design abilities. Because of the team’s start-up nature, this model worked well for the first 2 quarters.

Once I embarked on a part-time design innovation master's program at Ensci (French design school), I first had to drop my side project because the workload no longer permitted it (I also had reached a ceiling in terms of advancement due to the short-term focus of the innovation workshops). As the team reached greater success and maturity, my hybrid role began to cause confusion and friction. For my managers, there wasn’t clarity in how to evaluate my contributions that went beyond what was required from my role “on paper” and I seemed to step on the toes of other designers on the team whenever I veered into design territory. Thus, the hybrid role could no longer continue. Moving to a purely design role wasn’t the right fit for me, I was told, and, at this point, I realized that I had run out of options to pursue my passion within this team.

Verdict: Failure

Key Lesson: I was so engrossed in the Google philosophy of “learning, persevering and experimenting” from my early years that I didn’t realized that it didn’t quite apply anymore in my current working conditions. While a hybrid role may have been possible years prior, my team at the time seemingly required crystal clear definition in roles and responsibilities. It was becoming clear that every solution I tried was merely a bandaid to the problem.

Experiment #6: Take a sabbatical to pursue my passion elsewhere and return to find a suitable role

At this juncture, I decided to take 6 months of sabbatical leave in late 2017 and into early 2018 to complete a required professional mission for my master’s program. While I could’ve pursed a project at Google, I was highly driven by my desire for social impact and eagerness to test my skill set in a new environment and decided to join an NGO (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières aka Libraries Without Borders) for 5 months to work on the IdeasBox program (a portable media center that provides access to education, culture and information).

This opportunity opened by eyes to a complex world where my full skill set could utilized and have significant impact – it sent me to do user research and co-creation in emergency shelters in the greater Paris region and in refugee camps in Burundi. There was no question that this is what I was meant to do in my career – not on the sidelines but front and center as my previous career redesign experiments had taught me. Upon returning to Google, I returned to my old role (which was no longer hybrid) and spent a few months relentlessly searching for a role in Paris that would align with my vision. I didn’t want to give up without a fight and I was about to receive a diploma with the academic credentials to line up with my professional experience. But I still came up short. It was time for me to go.

Verdict: Success & Failure

Key Lesson: After years of countless experiments of redesigning my career, I realized that I was creating the foundation of a future business. Instead of trying to mold my career to Google, I actually needed to mold my career to myself.

So, can you really pursue your passion at work?

After much reflection and words of guidance from numerous freelancers and thought leaders in the innovation and design sector (thank you!) following my departure from Google, I applied the learnings from my failures and continued to pursue my passion by designing my own business in innovation consulting and facilitation. I never imagined that I’d become an entrepreneur, but I discovered that Google had already activated an entrepreneurial energy with me.

So to answer the question, yes, I think that you can pursue your passion at work. But only under the proper conditions. Do you have managers and an organizational culture that support experimentation, risk-taking and side projects? Are there the right incentive and performance evaluation systems in place to measure the value of experimentation in “non-core” projects and justify the time invested into it? Is there a margin for error and a willingness to collaborate across functions and outside your company (if your passion takes you beyond your core role)?

I recognize that not everyone has the luxury to create or change these conditions in their company. Or that their philosophy may be different – for some, a job is just a job and passions are pursued outside of work. Others may not have even identified a passion in life or care to find one. And for some, passion doesn’t even come into the picture as work is a means of survival.

I hope, at the very least, that those who have the chance to take the risk to pursue their passion at work approach it as an experiment that’s worth redesigning a couple times before getting it right – for you.