Something New

22 February 2011 was my first day on the Typekit team. 23 February 2018 will be my last one. After seven years, I’m moving on from Adobe to do something new.

I’ve accepted a new job as a product manager at a small company you may have heard of who are doing very interesting thing in the search space, and the advertising space, and also the cloud-based office documents space, the mobile operating systems space, not to mention the hardware, fiber internet, self-driving cars, food delivery, and god-knows-what-other spaces.

That is to say: I have accepted a job at Google. And it may surprise some of you to hear that my new role has nothing to do with fonts!

Google’s NYC office, photographed as I was on my way in for on-site interviews, 21 Sept 2017

I will be working for Google’s Corporate Engineering (or “Corp Eng”) team, who are responsible for internal tools and devices used by Googlers — everything from buying/configuring the computers they make software and documents on, like a normal IT organization, to designing and making software to help keep Google running in the most effective, Googley way possible.

While that’s going to be my official job, one of the nice things about working for Google (according to several Googlers I’ve talked to in the last few months) is that there’s a lot of moving around and collaboration. PMs there are considered “technical”, so it’s conceivable I could help out with some code, or be part of helping to bring some internal or even public-facing product into the world. (There are some Google teams that are probably gonna get very tired of my bug reports. ?)

I have some mixed feelings about leaving my team and corporate home of seven years. Adobe is a great company doing some really cool stuff—if you haven’t yet, you owe it to yourself to check out Adobe XD, especially if you use Windows—and the Typekit team is one of the finest, nicest, most creative, and most cohesive I’ve encountered, let alone been part of. I’ve made some lifelong friendships there and shipped a lot of fine software. I’m sad to be leaving.

Actual Adobe Stock image used in slides I presented to the Typekit team announcing my departure. Until last night’s Super Bowl, I had solid claim to the ?emoji for like a week.

On the other hand, when Google calls you about a job, you owe it to yourself to take it seriously.

Working for Google is something I never expected I could do. I didn’t attend a top engineering school; in fact, I left my midwestern art college six credits shy of my BFA. I’m still a little bit surprised they called me back, let alone invited me in for interviews and offered me a job. But I plan to make the most of it, not only enjoying free lunches(!) and in-office espresso bars(!!), but also learning as much as I can from such a humongous assemblage of very smart people.

I hope to have some of you over for lunch at the office sometime. The ginger snaps in the café are very good.