From Big Tech to the Public Sector

Between my desire to jump to a social good industry and switching from engineering to product, many people have asked me how I make my career decisions. I thought it would be helpful to write a post about my career journey so far, and how I came to the decision to leave Big Tech for the public sector.

I started my career as a software engineer at Google.

I am a software engineer by trade - specifically I studied robotics and computer vision in school. I joined Google out of college, and in 2017 had the opportunity to co-found an internal startup through Google’s Area120 program (intra-preneurship, if you will).

The project was a product focused on giving families with young children time back in their lives, with high implications for children on the autism spectrum. The team and work was far more mission-driven than the usual Silicon Valley gig, and that’s where I got a taste of what it meant to work on something that fed my soul, not just my wallet.

It was a great experience - I learned how to pitch, hire, and lead; how to build a consumer hardware product; and how to get a lot done with very little. By the time our funding was pulled we had grown to 22 people and was about to hit mass production - a great run for only 2 years.

But I realized that I needed to make a change - both mission-wise, and field-wise.

Alas, all good things come to an end. The project cancellation was a period of self-reflection for me, and I came to 3 realizations -

1. My career needed to be mission-driven.

I couldn’t go back to just working for work’s sake. Since college I had dabbled in side projects for social good - from building a web app to connect Dreamers with mentors, to using machine learning to explore what an optimal public transit system for Los Angeles might look like, to a computer vision program canvassers could use to automatically tally their walklists. But the idea of only working on such projects on the side was no longer enough for me.

2. The missions I cared about were best served outside the private sector.

I am generally interested in solving system-level problems at scale. As such, I identified 2 themes that called most to me:

• Modernizing legacy civic infrastructure. There is nothing more frustrating to me than seeing a technically working but impossible-to-use UI on a government website - I can just feel the hundreds of thousands of collective hours lost by people trying to fill it out, giving up, and calling the office (or not!) instead. Moreover, I have a theory that trust in government would increase if everyday civil services were easier to use - a theory that so far seems borne out by the California DMV website redesign. (Side note - the official New Zealand Immigration webapp, NZ Ready, is a perfect example of how easy government services should be to use! We CAN have nice things, folks!)
• Disaster response. Response has always been my civic engagement of choice - I keep my CPR/First Aid certification up to date, and was part of Google’s CERT group. Coupled with living through the devastation of a few wildfires in my home state of California, response is near and dear to my heart. It is also very tied into the first theme - there’s so much that can be done in modernizing disaster response communication and prevention systems.

For both these missions, the private sector’s ability to have a major meaningful impact is limited. Thus, I turned my interest to the public sector.

3. I could have a greater impact on these missions as a product manager than as an engineer.

I already had several years of software engineering experience under my belt. I could continue digging further into Google infrastructure, but deep knowledge of how Google runs wouldn’t get me any closer to realizing my vision of transparent, modern, tech-forward civil services! Considering my passion for user-first, high-impact products and desire to learn more cross-functional skills, I decided to make the jump to product management.

I stayed at Google for another year to gain key product experience

However, while I had experience leading a scrappy startup, I recognized I didn’t have formal experience as a product manager. I also recognized that I was sitting in one of the few places in the world that could provide me with a world-class education on what it meant to be a great product manager. So in early 2020 (before the pandemic hit), after looking at a few options, I decided to remain at Google and join the Android Automotive team. I chose this team for a few key reasons:

• A strong mentorship presence and a great manager. The team had many seasoned product managers who were more than happy to answer all my beginner-level questions, and the manager was willing to assign me extremely stretch projects, so I knew I would grow the fastest in this role.
• Learning how to bust through the bureaucracy of a legacy tech stack with many stakeholders. The mission of Android Automotive is to get Android into cars. However, Android is a 10-year old stack that was built for phones, not cars! Working on this team has been an eye-opening experience on identifying whether systems should be fully retired or simply reskinned, and when you should be asking for permission or for forgiveness. Given my goal is to help modernize legacy systems, this all seemed like an important lesson to learn.
• Onboarding quickly into a huge, slow-moving, heavily-regulated industry, and learning how to shift it. The automotive industry is almost the antithesis of the software industry. It has been around for over a century, is highly regulated, contracts most of its engineering out, has hundreds of variants out at once, and adheres to a very long-term development cycle (all traits analogous to working in GovTech…I chose very deliberately :) ). On this team, I learned about managing complexity, setting expectations with stakeholders coming from a completely different background and work pace from you, and simply learning how to learn about a deeply regulated industry.

While I worked on Android Automotive, I also took on 2 volunteer projects in the Disaster Response space, to keep the mission-driven part of me nourished:

• One is a Google-internal project to accelerate the curation of disaster-related satellite imagery so we can publish fresh imagery to the media, public, and first responders as fast as possible - I lead the overall effort, designed the UI as well as the initial engineering architecture, and recruited other volunteers to help build it out.
• Another is with the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), a non-profit that helps provide wifi and alternative communication methods to disaster shelters across the nation. I am helping to scope California fairgrounds and prep equipment kits for each.

But now is the time to leave.

It’s coming up on a year now since I started with Android Auto and these two volunteer projects, and what a crazy year it’s been. Between COVID, ever-growing climate-related disasters, and general unrest across the nation, I feel the urge to serve stronger than ever. I have been eying either the Presidential Innovation Fellows, the United States Digital Service, or the California Digital Services as my next step.