- Written by Marie-Therese McCann, Lead Product Designer at ESO
An extensional crisis will help you ask questions of yourself that stop you in your tracks. 2020 forced me to pause and take stock of what was really important to me on an everyday basis (what I really draw value and meaning from) and the answers made me rethink my working life balance. So I took the plunge, and changed jobs during the pandemic.
I feel since the moment we were forced to leave our offices in March 2020, the pandemic gave me the opportunity to refocus and acknowledge the things that mean the most to me in life. I loved seeing my girls more during the working day and hearing their wee stories, even with the balance of home-schooling! I loved how we ate together more regularly and went for daily walks with our dog Zeta. The lack of commute chopped off a major portion of my time away from home, and allowed me to get to my other passion of GAA coaching earlier in the evenings and with less of a panic leaving the city.
I had been working in an UX agency when the pandemic struck with the best team you could ask for, but the pace of agency life finally caught up with me. To win in agency life, you have to be very good at managing multiple industry challenges and stakeholders at any one time, and at pace. It demands a lot of mental capacity, that I felt increasingly hard to shut off from in the evenings and from the very moment I woke up. Coupled with what I had identified about myself during the pandemic, I decided I needed to protect more of that mental energy outside of working hours for my kids, my wider family and my love of sport. It was then that I decided to re-orientate my working life towards Product, where I could focus more on crafting experiences within one industry and my new chapter was born at ESO.
Researching open roles
As I began to do my research, an interesting discovery was that my current location and my future job’s location didn’t have to be the same. For me, I wanted to remain working from Belfast / NI, but in many companies I started to research, flexibility had increased for remote roles. I could start thinking about roles almost anywhere in the world. Product design roles in Finland, Spain and New York where all hiring remotely, with full virtual interview processes.
I took a step back at that point and decided to reach out to peers for a virtual coffee and chat through product life, how they find it and what to look for if considering a move. Armed with their advice and my goals set, my checklist started to take shape.
Key for me to make a move, any new potential company must:
Around the same time, a message through LinkedIn put ESO on my radar, when People Experience & Recruiting Manager, Carole Callender got in touch with a prospective Lead Product Designer role. A lot of the key points on my checklist where suddenly looking promising. Here was a US company in the health care industry, HQ in Austin Texas but in the early stages of an office set up in Belfast, beginning to grow at a fast pace. Carole and I spoke over the phone to talk through the hi-level needs of the role before I decided to apply and learn more.
Interview process
My interview process was understandably fully virtual, took approximately three weeks from start to finish across five rounds of interviews. Using Zoom each stage of the process was a narrowing of focus and by the later stages I felt that the ESO team where ensuring that I got to know them and their culture as much as the other way around, which I really appreciated and understood better after I joined, as one of their hiring principles. With virtual interviews we lose the ability to assess a new environment and judge the culture for ourselves but having that space and opportunity to ask lots of questions about process, measuring success and their vision for my role was really valuable.
After the delight at getting offered the job, I set about making the mental and practical plans for switching. I had been with my current team for 6 years and with only a month before starting it was a busy and emotional goodbye to a team that I had grown so much with.
ESO ensured our tech was ordered to personal spec and delivered 2 weeks in advance to home. Who doesn’t love a new MacBook Carole sent through the onboarding process before my first day which was really comforting, knowing what to expect on day 1 — after all I wasn’t leaving home to go to a new office and it just eased those anxieties.
Joining remotely
When I joined ESO in Sept it didn’t take long to get a feel for who they truly are.
On starting I was quickly introduced to lots of people who had also started during the pandemic and understood how I felt. The People team guidance (led by Carole and bolstered by her US counterparts) had every step of the way paved for me in my first week. I got time to delve into the industry (we design software for Fire departments, EMS teams and Hospital environments), complete some training and say hello to some cross functional folk.
One of the stand out memories of joining was the amount of authentic welcomes that came from across the organisation, I don’t think the power of a genuine welcome can be underestimated especially when you are onboarded remotely. My manager had created a range of Zoom meet & greet’s across my first few weeks with various team members who I would begin to bond with quickly.
ESO has a very supportive people team who really made the initial month a lot easier, keeping me right with various queries as I began to understand our organisation:
First six months at ESO
What I have enjoyed the most about working for ESO is getting to solve real world problems every day which impact a range of health care professionals across the US, at scale.
As Lead Product designer, I have autonomy to shape my working day and week which best brings value to the teams I am working within, and choose the right tools and techniques to solve those problems. It’s also hugely exciting as we are only just starting to scratch the surface in our industry and we have so much more to give.
Since I have started I have:
Added bonus
Something I didn’t envisage as part of my role before joining, was having a part in the design of our new office space. ESO had acquired office space on Fountain street in Belfast, and architectural work had begun.
My passion for experience design helped me bring some research and support to the team heading up the final few months of the fit out. With the pandemic having changed how we need and see the world of work, I wanted to ensure our new space embraced and embodied collaboration, vibrancy and innovation and I felt it needed to strongly ground and connect us to the humans we build technology for.
We don’t exactly know yet how the majority of tech industries will adapt long term to working from home, but we do know that office space will be used in at least a part of our future working weeks, as a means of coming together to do the brainstorming and collaboration together, when time allows.
Goals of office design:
Looking back on this past year
I am really mindful that for many people, this past year has been a very difficult time. My experience thankfully has remained a healthy one both from Covid and mentally. I learned by April 2020 that a regular routine of exercise helped me keep my pandemic-induced anxiety down. I also realised that we don’t have to be in the office to be productive and we don’t have to accept the 9–5 burn out felt by running from school drop offs in the car, to bus to train, to make a meeting in another city. In many ways, even with this past year’s constraints on our lives , I have never felt as happy with my working and family life balance than I do right now and I credit the pandemic re-focusing of priorities and my new role in ESO for that.
If you feel like I did (that you are ready to make a new career journey) don’t let the pandemic stop you. Be brave. You are reading this post which means you are considering it. Speaking directly to someone that has moved jobs will give you another fresh perspective. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people on Linkedin and ask mentors / trusted peers in your field to have a virtual coffee with you to talk it through. I found a number of friends really helpful to lean on. Lastly, the job search during the pandemic is definitely different but a completely virtual hiring process doesn’t automatically mean its worse / harder. I lived to tell the tale!
Like a friend of mine on Twitter said lately, “Be fearless and take chances anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Come and work with me! There are loads of open ESO roles in Belfast here.
