Down the Rabbit Hole: Secret Projects and Your Career
By: Cheryl Platz
Tags: Design, Startups, Echolook, UX, Innovation

Down the Rabbit Hole: Secret Projects and Your Career

Designers dream of working on new products, but what are the risks to your career? Are they worth it?

“You’re receiving two offers from Amazon, actually: one from the FireTV team, and one from a confidential project at the Concept Lab.”

My journey as the first designer on the Echo Look team began this way: an offer without context. I thought back to seminal geek movie The Matrix: remain in the comfort of a “safe” career, or see how far the rabbit hole goes? This moment, and the conversations that followed, were a turning point for my career, but it was far from an easy decision — and far from an easy journey.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” (Morpheus, The Matrix)

Many designers and technologists daydream about working on the Next Big Thing. In practice, this is a tricky concept. Projects come and go, but your career is a marathon.

The most groundbreaking technology projects are likely to be shrouded in secrecy. They may be called “disclosure projects” or “tented projects”. In many cases, you will not even know what the project is before being asked to make a decision. That was the case for me as I started my Echo Look journey. (The team even came close to staging a prank where they’d initially reveal I was working on the Kindle Toilet: “Fire in the hole!”)

It’s easy to be swept up in the excitement of being invited into a secret club of trailblazers. But before taking the leap of faith, it’s important to take stock of your career goals and assess whether you’re ready to take such a risk.

Before diving down the rabbit hole on a secret project, ask yourself these questions…

Are you intrinsically motivated?

Secret projects conjure grand images of working at the cutting edge of our fields, being lauded by the best and brightest. The reality is that your lifeline to the broader design community becomes somewhat severed.

You can’t feed off of the excitement of others, because you’re prohibited from telling others about your work, possibly for years on end. The same applies to your peers at the company you work for — you won’t be the talk of the town because no one will be familiar with your work.

Your primary job satisfaction, perhaps for years, will have to come from within. Can you go home confident in the quality of your work without external praise? If you require external feedback and praise to thrive, a secret project may be demotivating.

On the other hand, if you’re motivated by learning new things, a tented project may be a fantastic choice. The insular environment created by secrecy usually means there’s an opportunity to expand your role. I switched between product design, UX design, prototyping and research during the early days of the Echo Look because our team was very small, and big questions needed to be answered quickly.

Can you go home confident in the quality of your work without external praise? If you require external feedback and praise to thrive, a secret project may be demotivating.

Are you content at your current level?

At large organizations in particular, folks looking for promotions from within a tented team are at a disadvantage, because their work cannot be spread widely. If you manage to stick it out until the end, you MIGHT find an opportunity, but a great deal can happen to slow your path down during that time.

So if your current job title limits the scope of projects you’re able to work on, and that makes you unhappy, perhaps that advancement should be your primary focus. Get to a level where you’re adequately challenged, then seek out the glamour of new products.

Secret software-only projects (like games or apps) might have a shorter cycle where this becomes less of an issue. But if you find yourself attached to a secret hardware project, you’re facing several years where you’re cut off from the kind of exposure you’ll generally need to get promoted at a medium-to-large company.

Does your portfolio stand on its own?

No matter how fantastic your work, you won’t be able to share it until the product releases. Which could be years — or never. If you attempt to leave your tented project before it ships, you’ll essentially be trying to get a new job with the exact same portfolio that got you your previous job.

This is a large reason why I counsel junior designers NOT to run straight to the sexiest secret project they can find. They may exit on the other end with no shipped products, and they will have to compete against mid-career designers with far more shipping experience.

Shipping a product changes you. It forces you to accept the unexpected, as customers use your product in unique ways. You owe it to yourself to put in the time on a few non-academic products before leaping into the unknown.

If you attempt to leave your tented project before it ships, you’ll essentially be trying to get a new job with the exact same portfolio that got you your previous job.

That said, there’s no right or wrong answer. Perhaps your heart is telling you this secret project is “the one” even with an incomplete portfolio. In that case, I would advise young designers to get around this by doing volunteer or personal design work in your free time. If pursuing these parallel paths, be careful not to run afoul of moonlighting policies or your NDA.

What are your values as a designer?

There’s a risk, when accepting a role on a tented team, that you’re accepting a job working on a project that doesn’t match your values. Your hiring manager won’t know this unless you’re willing to bring up the conversation.

For example, if you’re unwilling to work on military projects, and the company you’re interviewing with does work with the military, it’s in your best interest to be up front with that information. It’s not going to change the amount they can disclose, but it allows them to decline to provide an offer that would put you in a bad position.

Are you good with secrets?

It sounds silly, but this is extremely important. Many new projects rely on the element of surprise. If you don’t have the strength of character to resist the temptation to leak the powerful information you have, you could put your whole career at risk.

Even if you don’t seek it out, the temptation may find you. Even without ever mentioning the specific projects anywhere in my resume, I’d hear from major tech bloggers right before major Amazon product leaks, trying (and failing) to get a response. They keep poking at the fringes of a rumor until something cracks. You will need to resist these temptations. It’s not their career at risk: it’s yours. Don’t sacrifice your career just for some fleeting social capital.

This secrecy begins to impact other areas of your life as well. As someone who was privy to Amazon’s internal hardware timelines, I could not trade Amazon stock except in narrow pre-defined windows to comply with insider trading regulations.

If you’re publicly facing (someone who gives talks and maintains an online presence) this becomes even more challenging. You will need to maintain strong compartmentalization, remembering which data you work with is public and which is need-to-know. I scrubbed my new VUI workshop repeatedly to ensure I was not discussing any Alexa features that weren’t public knowledge.

Do you believe in the team?

You may not be able to learn about the project itself, but you can probably learn about the team members. So much of new product design is storytelling and persuasion. If your new team can’t convince you this project is destined for greatness, that’s a red flag.

At the same time, TOO much hubris is also dangerous. (See the Juicero.) Are they humble enough to listen to customers? My team talked at length about the ethnographic user research they were arranging to explore and test their ideas. THAT got my attention.

Check out the track record of the people with whom you’re interviewing. On new projects, every team member is critical and will have a big impact on your experience.

Take it from the Pied Piper folks: team matters. An all-male team would be a red flag for me on most new products, since more than half of the population is female. Are they asking the right questions?

Do you have room in your life for stress?

Without fail, tented projects are high-risk, high-reward, high-stress. The insular nature of these projects creates a feedback loop consuming much of your waking thought, especially if you happen to be passionate about the project.

Inevitably, tented projects will bring frequent reviews from high-level stakeholders. Don’t join the project because you want to meet the CEO — in many cases just a few people get into THAT room. My Echo Look pitch storyboards made it to Jeff Bezos’s desk, but I could not accompany them there.

But regardless of whether you’ll be in the room where it happens, your work WILL, and that brings stress. I was so passionate about the Look that I completely unwittingly cracked a tooth grinding my teeth in my sleep a few days before that CEO review where we received go-ahead for our initial round of experience prototyping.

If your health isn’t well-managed, if your marriage is on the rocks, if your kids are going through a tough time — it’s worth being honest with yourself and asking whether you have room in your life for this level of prolonged stress. Especially given that you won’t be able to discuss the reasons for your stress with family members. That secrecy can be detrimental to your relationships and your mental health if you can’t find ways to cope.

If your health isn’t well-managed, if your marriage is on the rocks, if your kids are going through a tough time — it’s worth being honest with yourself and asking whether you have room in your life for this level of prolonged stress.

Can you define success without shipping?

Odds are, unless you’re being hired in at an executive level, you don’t control the eventual outcome of this secret project. And even with total internal control, countless things can happen outside the project to prevent it from shipping: recession, competitors, factory strikes…

Before joining a secret team, know what success looks like for YOU. What skills do you want to develop? Is success just a higher salary and a new company on the resume?

My general goals when the Echo Look project crossed my path, in order:

Gain experience at a new company after 7 years at Microsoft Continue to develop my voice user interface design skills if possible Find a project where I could have a large scope of influence Ship a product (after having just left a cancelled 2-year project) Work on a consumer product

The team was able to tell me what skills of mine were most interesting to them: my work on constrained device form factors and my experience in voice design. Intriguing. I still very much wanted a project with a high chance of shipping, but my other desires were met.

Even then, I still needed a pep talk or two from the VP I’d be reporting to (the trailblazing Eva Manolis) to convince me, with zero context, that I’d be better off on her riskier project. It’s easy to look at us after the fact and assume we had it all figured out. But every step was a step into a vast unknown with the odds stacked against us.

And even when you DO ship, success is not guaranteed. Microsoft’s Band flopped despite great internal fanfare. Amazon doesn’t even speak about the Fire Phone. If you haven’t disconnected your personal success from the eventual outcome, shipping can be the most devastating step of all.

Quality work is success. Commercial success is, in many ways, like winning the lottery. Control what you can, and try not to obsess (you’ll fail, but try anyway) over the outcomes you can’t control.

Opportunity is waiting for YOU to knock

In many cases, opportunities can’t find you until you make yourself available. If this type of experience is on your design bucket list, you’ll have to meet life halfway and seek that first one out. Folks on tented projects don’t have the luxury of luring people with glamorous job descriptions, so recruiting is almost entirely driven by networking.

You’ll never know what opportunities are out there without bravery, curiosity, and perhaps an affinity for adrenaline

When you look at a successful product launch, like the original Amazon Echo, it’s easy to envy the people who got their “big break” there. But the truth is that most of the early hires had to do the exact same thing I did: accept an offer blindly in hopes of something great. They made a calculated risk that paid off. I also met plenty of folks who made that same leap and ended up on the Fire Phone. Or tented Microsoft projects that never saw the light of day. Some were crushed by disappointment — others took the experience they gained and moved on to fight another day.

None of us knows how the story will end, but still, thousands of us turn the page anyway, come what may. The true opportunity to “change the world” is generally only available to people who can look at this list of questions, see the risks, and still choose to fall down the rabbit hole with their eyes wide open.