Escape Velocity: Building a Career Beyond Your Job

Building a path from here to where you want to go

Escape velocity is defined as “the minimum speed that an object at a given distance from a gravitating body must have so that it will continue to move away from the body instead of orbiting about it.” (ref)

When you meet a stranger in Silicon Valley, the first question they ask after your name is, “Where do you work?” The next question they ask is, “What do you do there?” 

Our identities are bound up in our jobs. The headlines on our resumes are synonymous with who we are. We wear our business cards like an identity, a mantle that defines us. When this happens, we are unable to achieve escape velocity and end up orbiting our current job and company, rather than being able to break free. But what if we thought about ourselves differently? 

Your job is a moment in time, a role that is only one chapter on your career - and your life - story. But if you get stuck only focusing on where you are, you will miss opportunities to gather the building blocks that will take you beyond your current scope. 

Fill your bingo card

We often keep working on the same set of skills, getting better and better over time. Our jobs require mastery. Twice I reached a point in my career when I realized that the skill I had mastered most was how to navigate and build in a big company. Each time, I reflected on how I was learning less and less marketable skills, and every day got better at something that I could only leverage in the place I had learned it. It was a humbling admission, and it forced me to make a change. 

If you had to choose between impact and learning, what would you choose? Most companies want you to show impact, but you personally benefit more in the long term if you grow your portable skills. Your job is to manage your role so that you can do both, delivering results while also continuing to grow. A diverse set of skills is more important because there will come a time when you need it. When I was interviewing for CEO roles, many questions centered on three areas PMs fail to build capability during their mid-career: board experience, general management with P&L responsibility, and strategic skills. This is why, when PMs ask me the path to the C-suite, I suggest they work backward from those three areas and ensure they are filling their bingo card with experiences that will help them get to where they want to go. 

Consider what you take with you

We don’t expect to leave our jobs, but we will all end up doing so at one point or another. So much of our work is devoted to our companies and not translatable in other contexts. While this benefits our current employers, what will we take with us when we go elsewhere? When we first created Women in Product, it was an extension of the work we did at Facebook to build a community of women in product management. However, we soon realized there was so much more we could do, so we recruited women leaders from companies across the industry to join us and launched the organization as a nonprofit. Today, it is a community of over 25,000 women with dozens of chapters throughout the world. By thinking about how it could live beyond my current company, it became an industry-wide group that will carry on long after my tenure at the company. 

Likewise, while at Facebook, I wrote internally and made posts once a month. I made a commitment to my manager around five years ago, and I stuck to it. For this year’s New Year’s Resolution, I decided to start publishing externally. I didn’t have a specific goal in mind, and I had not yet decided to leave Facebook when I started the Perspectives newsletter. The newsletter now has close to 5,000 subscribers (a modest number in the grand scheme, I know). More importantly than that, I have met so many people in the industry who have shared the impact my writing has had on their careers. That is something I can take with me no matter where my career goes.  

Don’t define yourself based on your job

We spend so much of our lives at work, but be careful that you don’t let your job define you. There have been times when I loved what I did, only for a sudden reorg or company need to take me off the path I thought I was on. A friend of mine was once suddenly let go from a role he enjoyed when new leadership came in and replaced nearly the entire senior staff. This unmooring threatened his sense of self and well-being to the point of making him question his own skills, which clearly were unchanged before and after this event. Even though he ultimately landed on his feet and his career went in a new direction, he still recalls how that rejection took him off course and wonders if he could have done something differently. 

Try writing your headline without your title or company name and see how it feels. By defining yourself using your skills and demonstrated impact rather than your role, you are opening yourself up to more possibilities. Go to LinkedIn and write a compelling summary of yourself, sharing only what you have to contribute, not by someone else’s leveling, title system, or company brand. 

Mark your milestones