Navigating Careers

I was invited by Seasoned to work towards the growth of a new enterprise, and it's been a challenging experience.

Writing, per se, has never been something I had a hard time with (you'll understand why in a few paragraphs), but describing how it is to work with something I'm not quite experienced in makes me shiver.

It's not the first time I’ve moved careers — and it won't be the last — and I want to share a bit of how things are going, and how I moved from journalism to graphic design, then to coding, then to tech-leading, then to growth marketing.

First, some context.

A proud generalist

My professional life can be summarized as filling the gaps.

I started studying journalism in 2009 — I loved writing and taking pictures — but soon noticed every journalism student could write (better than me, even), but not one of them could put the text + photos on a pretty page. I saw a gap, I studied it, and I filled it. I finished college as a graphic journalist, a position that didn't exist and that I made for myself. This landed me a job at Latin America's biggest newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo.

Then, as a full-time graphic designer — doing layout, infographics, and the occasional journalistic writing — I realized everyone had a great taste for print, but they had a terrible understanding of the internet and how things could be displayed there. I started studying simple HTML and CSS, then moved to JavaScript, and before I knew it, I was, again, filling a gap. My new job had a simple description (and a fairly complicated execution): to build tools and ways of moving print material to the internet in a beautiful, usable, and even interactive way.

The designers couldn't code. I could. Soon I was not only moving stuff from print to the web but doing stuff web first — damn, I fought to do stuff mobile first! People liked working with me because I knew journalism, I knew design, and I knew the internet and how to work around it.

Then, after moving on from Folha, I started working with heavy-duty programmers and, guess what? Found a gap. They were great coders, way better than I ever was, but terrible communicators. They could make any computer do their bidding, but trembled and sweated in a client meeting. They had conflicts while talking to product people, and a real struggle understanding how the design process worked.

They needed someone that had the technical knowledge, understood how designers work, and also had a love for communication. Well, I could absolutely fill this gap. So I did it.

Since then, this has been my (very hard to advertise) job description — a proud generalist that links developers, designers, and non-technical people. A kind of tech lead that's not just tech. I would code, of course, but mainly get the team processes oiled up so they could do what they knew best, and everyone could be on the same page. I put this on the first part of my website, so that every recruiter could see it.

Movin' on up

After my last project ended, Daniel Weinmann (Seasoned's CEO) called me and invited me to a new — and novel — position. I was coding for the last, hmm, 8 or 9 years, but he wanted something more. When I worked for him as a coder some years ago, he always said stuff like, "I think you're more than just a programmer, but right now we don't have any way of testing that — because the job requires a coder and you are a coder." This time, he had a great team of coders — like, really, people with amazing skills. What he didn't have was someone with the knack for tackling new things, studying stuff from scratch, and doing their best to communicate all that.

For him, I was the guy. He insisted, more than once, that I should try to face this new challenge.

If there's one person I deem persuasive, it's Daniel. I accepted this role and here I am, now, learning a bunch of stuff, going from zero to hero, and doing my best to share all of that. My new position? Head of Growth, someone to tackle all obstacles in growing a new product they are working hard on.

This is not a publicity post, so I won't talk much about what we're building — if you want to check it out, you can visit Flashboard's website — but this is an introduction to whatever will come next. This is the first of (hopefully) a series of articles on how things have been going and what I've been learning.

I hope that, if you find yourself in the same career-moving journey, you find this at least interesting. Let me know if my path has resonated with you below, in the comments. I would love to hear about it.