What do Carrie Fisher, Dana Scully, a Michigan CMO, and a recruiter named Katie have in common?
They are partly responsible for how I ended up here.
Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016. My birthday.
She was the first woman I remember seeing as a child who was smart, strong, funny, and completely unwilling to take shit from men. She did not make herself smaller or more agreeable to make other people comfortable. She became one of my earliest models for what an intelligent, outspoken woman could look like.
When she died, I was a stay-at-home mom and had been away from the professional world for a while. Then, in early 2017, I received a call about going back to work. Carrie was part of what made me get up and move.
A year later, I was interviewing for a job with Matt, a CMO in Michigan. He asked me who my personal hero was.
I answered, in full sincerity, Dana Scully. He asked why. I told him that she was smart, stood her ground, and didn’t take shit. At that point, I was fairly certain I had blown the interview.
Instead, I got the job.
About a year later, I learned that Matt had been telling people it was the best answer he had ever received to a question he had asked for years.
What felt risky to me had told him something useful. I had not reached for a polished executive, a famous entrepreneur, or the answer most likely to sound impressive in an interview. I had answered the actual question. Then I explained the reasoning underneath it.
Years later, a recruiter named Katie asked me what I would actually like to do next. The question rattled around in my brain. By the following morning, I could describe my ideal role almost exactly.
I want to enter a company early enough to build the customer lifecycle and the technical and data foundation underneath it from the beginning. I want to understand what the company is selling, how the customer moves through the experience, what data exists at each point, what should exist, where it belongs, and how the organization will use it.
Lifecycle strategy plus the infrastructure that makes it possible.
Once again, the answer arrived before I had a conventional title for it. It initially sounded a little left of field. But after I explained the system underneath it, everything connected.
That pattern has followed me throughout my career.
The first answer my brain produces is not always the expected one. But it is usually connected to something real that I have noticed before I have found the standard language for it. If I trust the answer long enough to examine it, I can generally show the structure underneath.
Carrie Fisher helped get me moving. Dana Scully helped me answer honestly. Matt showed me that the unexpected answer could be the most revealing one. Katie asked the question that made me name what I want to build next.
None of them gave me a career plan. They helped me recognize the one I had already been building.