Catt Small

She was the first staff designer that I met that I felt like, oh, maybe I could do what she does one day.

Yeah.

I feel like we think really similarly about the work.

She's also a prolific blogger, and I definitely recommend checking out her writing.

And for a little bit, she was a mentor of sorts when I was working with her at Etsy.

And I would just ask her, what made you not want to go into management and to take this level up?

And yeah, just getting to pick her brain on things a little bit opened up

The idea that maybe I don't have to become a manager to progress in my career.

And at that point, I had actually tried management and found it.

There were parts of it that I really liked, but then there were parts of it where I just felt like I was really struggling on the HR side.

And I'm very, very empathetic, which can be really good.

But

I think that to be an effective manager, sometimes you have to learn how to create a little bit of distance.

And so I think I really struggled.

But I wanted to figure out what career progression would look like for me.

And so while I was at Etsy, I started advocating for myself to potentially be put into that kind of staff position.

But I think the language at the time was really unclear.

And I think that basically like I think managers knew what influence was to them, but I didn't know what it meant.

And it was hard to explain those kinds of terms.

And so they would say, you know, you have to build your influence skills like you have to build these certain kind of mushy skills.