I resigned from Bleacher Report last week after accepting a job at Yelp as a product manager. Officially, I am a UI product manager, meaning I am guiding design decisions and helping with interaction design across the site. I am very excited about the new position.
Leaving Bleacher Report was much harder than I anticipated it being, mostly because it was difficult to decide to leave the people I work with. The team that B/R has built is incredible. It’s easy to build a solid team if you’re Google or Twitter – recruiting consists of posting a job on your site and watching the thousands of resumés role in. As a start up without much hype, it takes a lot of work to hire the right people and I think Bleacher Report has done a great job.
The decision ended up coming down to where I wanted my career to be in five or ten years and this move will help me get there. Continuing as the designer at Bleacher Report would be great, but I don’t want to be a designer forever. Design is fun, but I have no desire to be a Creative Director and I am never going to spend the time learning to become a world-class visual designer.
Yelp is a bigger team, a bigger website, and my role is something that I haven’t done before, so it will be challenging.
