Why I Left My Great Job

A few months ago I decided to leave my role as a Director of Research in Tech. The truth is, I needed a reset. It was prestigious and high-paying, there was great work-life balance, and my colleagues were all really nice. I also had the skills to do it well. But even so, it wasn't a great personality fit.

Tech org structures are famously flat. But, it was in insurance, which is a highly regulated industry. I struggled with the (justified) bureaucracy, and the reality that beyond a certain level the role became less about trading in facts and more about navigating various approvals processes and reviews. What I really wanted was to move at a faster pace and for the strongest business ideas to have a better chance of winning out organically.

Also, I now know I have to be more selective in picking long-term roles that enable me to:

• Be one of the decision makers, and helping make consequential strategy and operations calls that will ultimately determine whether we succeed or fail. Many researcher roles effectively function as advisors and sounding boards.
• Borrow from the wisdom of others, intuition, first principles thinking, simple logic, and efficient pragmatism. You don'ts always need much research for that! I also love optimizing across these more fundamental inputs from multiple domains.
• Having a direct and material impact on the target audience. Why do the engineers, PMs, designers, marketers, and operations folks get to have all the fun!?

Whilst I could have maybe pivoted into a different role within my company, I felt like I needed a bit more psychological distance to find the level of career clarity needed to attack my next role with 100% conviction.