North Star Vision Drives Unconventional Career Choices for Impact
TL;DR
- Transitioning to a director role requires shifting focus from managing individual contributors to directing managers, demanding a different philosophy centered on strategic direction and cross-departmental resource connection.
- To succeed as a director when hired into a role above existing senior staff, build trust by demonstrating a commitment to their career growth and unblocking their challenges.
- Pursuing a "north star" goal, like becoming a CTO, enables strategic career choices, such as intentionally taking on unfamiliar domains like camera technology to fill critical knowledge gaps.
- Maintaining technical proficiency, even at senior leadership levels, is crucial for making informed strategic decisions and ensuring credibility, as exemplified by continuous code reviews and pull requests.
- Company culture evolves significantly with scale; leadership must be resilient and adaptive, recognizing that doubling team size necessitates building a new company with new ways of thinking.
- Evan Spiegel's effectiveness as a leader stems from an exceptionally high bar for performance, even at the pixel level, and a deep care for personal connections and engineering value.
- Inbound job opportunities are often more valuable than proactive searching, especially when they arise from personal connections, fostering trust and shared resilience through company cycles.
- Prioritizing impact and long-term fulfillment over titles and promotions leads to greater career happiness, as impact is controllable while titles are company-granted.
- Embracing unconventional career paths and thinking differently early on, rather than solely following conventional wisdom, increases the likelihood of identifying and capitalizing on unique opportunities.
Deep Dive
Rong Yan's career trajectory from a frontline manager at Meta to Senior Director at Snapchat in three years highlights a deliberate strategy of aligning career decisions with a long-term "north star" goal. This approach emphasizes personal fulfillment and impact over traditional metrics like title or immediate promotion, suggesting that a clear personal vision is more critical for sustained growth than simply climbing a corporate ladder.
Yan's career pivot from a research scientist to a software engineer, and subsequently into management, was driven by a desire for broader impact and a belief in engineering as a primary value driver. His progression into director roles, particularly at Square, involved a significant learning curve in "directing" rather than "managing." This shift required him to move beyond detailed operational knowledge to strategic thinking, resource allocation, and empowering managers. He learned to provide value by focusing on high-level direction, connecting resources across departments, and solving complex organizational problems, rather than micromanaging individual contributors. A key insight from this transition was the necessity of building trust with existing team members who might have aspired to the director role themselves, framing his presence as a catalyst for their growth rather than an obstacle.
A consistent theme throughout Yan's career is the intentionality behind his moves, guided by a north star of becoming a CTO at an AI-first company. This vision led him to make unconventional choices, such as directing the camera team at Snapchat despite his background in data and machine learning, which required him to learn iOS and Android development from scratch. This decision was rooted in the understanding that a CTO needs to grasp product, user experience, and cross-functional collaboration beyond a technical domain. This proactive pursuit of diverse experiences, even outside his comfort zone, demonstrates a commitment to holistic leadership development. Furthermore, Yan emphasizes that true career growth is less about external validation like titles or company valuations, and more about building products that genuinely impact people's lives, a metric he finds far more fulfilling and sustainable for long-term career satisfaction.
The core takeaway is that a north star vision, coupled with a willingness to make unconventional, challenging choices and a focus on intrinsic impact over external validation, forms a powerful engine for career acceleration and personal fulfillment. This approach allows individuals to navigate the complexities of organizational structures and company needs by prioritizing their own agency and long-term objectives.
Action Items
- Audit personal career trajectory: Identify 3-5 key decision points and evaluate their alignment with long-term goals (e.g., CTO of an AI company).
- Create a personal skill gap analysis: For 2-3 target roles, document required technical and leadership skills not currently possessed.
- Develop a network trust-building plan: Implement strategies to foster trust with direct reports within the first 3 months of a new role.
- Define 3 core strategic priorities: For the next quarter, identify and focus on the top 3 initiatives that align with organizational goals.
Key Quotes
"my career path is a little bit non traditional i was a phd i used to be in research world for more than 8 years so and because after i graduate i spent 5 years in phd program and then i spent another 3 years in ibm as a research scientist mostly is focused on computer vision and machine learning right and then i start to realize um industrial research model like ibm research or microsoft research with this kind of 50 mix between research and engineerings it's probably not going to be sustainable i have to choose either 100 on research or 100 on engineering one way or the other"
Rong Yan explains that his career path was unconventional, moving from a PhD and research scientist role to considering a career in software engineering. Yan highlights his realization that industrial research models, which blend research and engineering, might not be sustainable long-term, prompting him to choose a more focused path.
"first i wanted to be software engineers i think that's the way that you can creating something that was influenced more people than just doing trading the second thing is that i want to go to a places that can make engineerings to be the first class citizens i think in the financial world engineering is always the second class it's not the first class i can be a faculty but being a faculty i think the impact is smaller because you can only impact the scale of a school or maybe the community but not the entire world"
Yan details his reasoning for choosing software engineering over finance or academia, emphasizing his desire to create impactful products that influence more people. Yan also sought environments where engineering is prioritized, contrasting this with his perception of engineering's secondary status in the financial industry.
"i will be very transparent here in fact like when i joined square i was taking a director offer to join the square oh okay so you signed up with a team that was uh already director size that's right exactly yeah so and of course square is a smaller company so that's why they are willing to give me the opportunity to perform at a director level after i joined the company um when i started the team it's about 25 people and then i grow the teams into 50 plus people in a year before i left the company"
Yan clarifies that he joined Square with a Director offer, indicating he was hired at that level rather than being promoted internally from a frontline manager. Yan notes that Square, being a smaller company at the time, was more amenable to offering him the opportunity to operate at a director level, and he successfully grew the team significantly during his tenure.
"managing a managers require different set of skill because like typically the line managers are the one that knows the detail the best unlike my facebook experience i grow from an ic to become a manager then i'm the one in the teams knows most of the details so that's why i continue i can continue to use that as the anchor points to managing other people because almost most the other people in my teams joined after me so that's why i'm the senior people in the rooms but you start to go to a new environment you become the more junior people in the company but you are actually leading the more senior people in the company in their tenures of the company they are more senior and but you are leading them and also they know more details that you then what's the right way for me being a director position to actually provide my values to those people"
Yan articulates the fundamental difference between managing individual contributors (ICs) and managing other managers. Yan explains that as a frontline manager who grew from an IC, he had deep knowledge of the team's details, which served as an anchor. However, as a director in a new environment, he was leading more senior individuals who possessed greater company tenure and domain knowledge, requiring a shift in his approach to providing value.
"my philosophy is about north star i always have a north star goal in my mind it's that i want to become a cto at some point for an ai company you did it so thank you yeah so that's that has been a north star goal even like after i get my phd degree for my machine learning i have been imagining a world at some point that ai can become a business by itself but when i when i graduated the world is not like that i mean ai is just always amplifiers it's just like a component in a bigger company who can make the business better"
Yan describes his career strategy as guided by a "north star" goal of becoming a CTO at an AI-first company. Yan explains that this ambition predates his transition from research and that he envisioned AI becoming a standalone business, even though at the time of his graduation, it was primarily viewed as an amplifier for existing businesses.
"this is a very critical cultural philosophy i learned from facebook it's that everyone who work on engineering need to be technical i still remember the times that like facebook have this six weeks boot camp process i don't know whether they still have it right now so but when back in times everyone need to go into the six week boot camp process before they can choose the teams and i remember there's a vp level hires sitting right next to me and she's just like doing the same thing as what i was doing like finding bugs fixing bugs writing pull requests she was doing that for six weeks that actually shocks me because i come from ibm like ibm's vp he never code anymore"
Yan shares a critical cultural philosophy learned at Facebook: all engineering hires must be technical. Yan recalls Facebook's six-week boot camp process, where even a VP-level hire participated in coding and bug fixing, which contrasted sharply with his experience at IBM where senior leaders did not engage in such hands-on coding.
"we do have direct access to evan so and in fact um i work pretty closely with evan like for a few projects i really like evan as a leader so and in fact the two things really strike my mind like when you work with evan first evan have a really high bar for performance so and his bar is even at the pixel level and it reminds me of steve jobs so and then basically for example in our product review if we show him a demo he will actually point out a pixel level issues and ask us to fix so that's why sometimes i would say that okay if we're building a demo we say you need to build an evan ready demo not a normal demo but that really help him to be very successful in terms of like building a great product that's what he's really good at"
Yan discusses his close working relationship with Evan Spiegel, highlighting two key leadership traits. Yan notes that Spiegel possesses an extremely high performance bar, even at the pixel level, reminiscent of Steve Jobs, which drives the creation of exceptional products.
"second thing is that i think he really care about personal connections especially with the engineers like he really keep his promise and uh he appreciate the value of engineering so one thing i remember very clearly is that like he actually told one of our leaders that no matter what happens you should never fire the first 15 engineers in the company because they are the founding member for the company"
Resources
External Resources
Books
- "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" - Mentioned as a resource for building trust and foundational team success.
People
- Steve Jobs - Mentioned as an example of someone with a high bar for performance.
- Evan Spiegel - Mentioned as the founder and CEO of Snapchat, known for his high bar for performance and appreciation of engineering.
- Michael Jackson - Mentioned in relation to a cryptographer neighbor in Los Angeles.
Organizations & Institutions
- Facebook (Meta) - Mentioned as the initial employer where the guest learned a critical cultural philosophy about engineers needing to be technical.
- Snapchat - Mentioned as the company where the guest grew from a frontline manager to a senior director, experiencing rapid company growth.
- Square - Mentioned as a previous employer where the guest took a director offer and grew the machine learning and data science infrastructure teams.
- IBM - Mentioned as a previous employer where the guest worked as a research scientist focused on computer vision and machine learning.
- CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) - Mentioned as the university the guest chose for computer science, over other well-known institutions.
- Princeton - Mentioned as an alternative university offer the guest did not accept.
- Cornell - Mentioned as an alternative university offer the guest did not accept.
- HeyGen - Mentioned as an all-in-one video generation platform focused on empowering content professionals.
Other Resources
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) - Mentioned as a field the guest has a long-term goal to lead a company in.
- Computer Vision - Mentioned as a research focus during the guest's time at IBM.
- Machine Learning - Mentioned as a research focus during the guest's time at IBM and a core area of the guest's career.
- North Star Goal - Mentioned as the guiding principle for the guest's career decisions, specifically to become a CTO of an AI company.