This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rhiannon Bell, vice president of user experience for Google Search, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
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I had an interesting start to my career. I’m from a small town in Wales called Aberystwyth and I didn’t finish high school.
I remember when the internet came out, I was like, “what is this magical thing?” I worked in a local cafeteria and had access to the university computers, so I taught myself HTML and JavaScript. I started understanding more about design and topics that weren’t available to me in school.
I fell in love with design and computers at 16, and I’ve maintained that passion ever since. I educated myself, which eventually led me to university for design.
My first jobs were in advertising and brand design in London for various agencies during the digital revolution when there was a lot of opportunity in marketing and website development.
Now, I’ve been at Google for eight years and lead user experience at Search.
Learn to take feedback
I think my curiosity, willingness to try and fail, have a point of view, and conviction helped me get where I am. I’ve always inherently asked the question of, “what else can we do?”
It’s about what you make of opportunities and how you learn from them. It’s about finding the people that can be the bar that raises you. I believe that it’s the people who supported me and saw that I had talent that enabled me to get to where I am today.
However, if you find managers who invest in you, then you also need to take the feedback.
Having some humility and being able to say, “OK, what can I learn here?” has been something that I’ve developed throughout my career. I’ve taken a lesson from every single company I’ve worked for. At Zynga, I learned about how to think about connecting to users. During my first foray into product development at NerdWallet, I learned about relentless self-improvement.
When you’re going in to receive feedback, you should be in the mindset that it’s probably going to be hard, and you’re going to have some feelings around it. That’s unavoidable.
The feedback that changed my perspective
I’ve always had this really deep conviction to get ahead. Sometimes, earlier in my career, I was so driven by getting something done that I didn’t always stop to take stock and think about how to position things. I just made the assumption that everybody else would know what I was talking about or have the same perspective as me.
Roughly 12 years ago, during my first year at NerdWallet, the CEO, Tim Chen, gave me feedback that I was way too “fire, ready, aim.”
I was around 34 or 35 at that time, and I was about to make VP there, but hadn’t yet.
I always interpreted the “fire, ready, aim” feedback as: Don’t rush in or be too quick to judge. I have always been oriented toward action and this feedback doesn’t change that, but it changed my approach.
This ranges from taking a beat before responding to specifically communicating my point of view and directing the team. For example, before I received this feedback, I’d rush into a situation and deliver an absolute point of view, like, “I think we should build it this way,” but I never communicated the “why” or the instinct behind the decision.
This made me less effective — and frustrated — because when teams don’t understand the “why,” they likely won’t deliver a solution that solves the entire problem.
Bringing teams along with your idea and point of view creates a much better dynamic with discussions and debates, and it builds trust. So on the occasion where you might still “fire, ready, aim,” teams trust you have the “why”‘ to back it up.
As product leaders, we rely heavily on our instincts, but we can’t always expect others to share those instincts or inherently know their foundation. If we want to grow the next generation of leaders, we have to bring folks along and help them see why building experiences grounded in deep user empathy is the best for everyone.
Now, even if I’m right, instead of shooting from the hip, I try to spend a moment articulating the “why.” I’m a fast-paced person, so I don’t always love that, because it might take me longer. But it’s worth it in the end, because I get to bring a bunch of people along.
