Let Time Pass
I arrived at the US Senate as a 27 year-old ready to make a mark. It was the first time I had worked in a centuries old institution. Emboldened by a steady diet of “girlboss” ideology, I wanted to bring tech literacy to Congress. But the Senate operated in years not months or weeks. I was impatient. I was frustrated by the archaic process that required running a physical copy of a bill with a senator’s signature to the cloak room.
Seeing my frustration, David, a children’s privacy advocate, explained that change in Congress required spending 5-10 years working on an issue and then waiting for that issue to enter the zeitgeist. I was incredulous. I couldn’t fathom spending half my life working on an important issue, hoping that my moment would come.
Coming from Silicon Valley, I had internalized the “bias to action” mantra. I believed that bold innovators could bend institutions and time to their will by sheer force and grit. I spent my year in Congress listening to advocates talk about how technology was amplifying disinformation and misinformation, violating children’s privacy, and perpetrating many other harms. But I was unable to make any meaningful change. So the world of the Senate was decisively not for me. Moreover, the slow moving world of the Senate was no match for the speed and power of the technology industry. And I wanted to be where the power was.
So I returned to tech with a job at Microsoft where I was explicitly tasked with helping other product managers be more effective. I was excited by the prospect of helping other product managers at the tech giant mitigate the harms caused by technology. I was finally where the real decisions were made. And to my delight, I could move with speed to create change.
My team’s leaders often asked “how can we do that quicker?” And I acquiesced. I did more, quickly. I did customer development without organizational support. I ran book clubs about accessibility. I mentored young Black and Brown product managers. There was no problem I could not solve by doing more. And inevitably, I burnt out.
I was no match for the multi-billion dollar technology companies. My efforts moved things at the margin. But I couldn’t anticipate Elon Musk buying Twitter and dismantling the trust and safety teams or billions of dollars flooding into AI systems that ingest a world of creative content without consent. Between my burnout and these developments, I was discouraged.
In my burnout, I revisited David’s words from my year in Congress. His advice was to work on an issue for 5-10 years and wait for your issue to come into prominence. And I could finally see the wisdom in it. I had spent much of my time in Congress writing angry letters to tech companies and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In COPPA’s 20+ year history, it had only resulted in 10 Million dollars in fines despite the continued exploitation of children online.
And 9 months after I had left the senate - 9 months after my last oversight letter was sent - the FTC levied a record fine of $170 million dollars against YouTube. So if I had just waited, I would have seen the fruits of my labor. And a large part of me wished I had waited. I tried to share this good news with my coworkers at Microsoft but many of them were paid to avoid fines like these. For them, this was not a victory but a cautionary tale. I started to see how my work in Congress was a legitimate match for the multi-billion dollar technology companies. I simply had to let time pass to see the impact.
But letting time pass isn’t agile. It’s not lean. It’s not inline with the contemporary product development ideology. However, the boldest ideas often need time to find fertile ground. As much as there is a place for urgency, there is also a place for ease and letting time pass. There is a wisdom in leaving room for change to happen naturally with time
Nothing else in the world...not all the armies...is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."--Victor Hugo, The Future of Man.
Letting time pass doesn’t mean doing nothing. It simply means working sustainably with as much time for rest and relationship-building as there is for doing. For me, this is scary because I have no control over which efforts time will show as wise and which will be washed away. But I never had control.
And by letting time pass, I can more easily discern which ideas are worth investing in and which are unwise. I can start to see the unintended consequences of bold ideas before the harms are too big to mitigate. I’m still impatient and want results tomorrow. But now I recognize that time is an important tool to help bring about change.
Acknowledgements.
Thank you to Rye for being a brilliant editor and telling me what an em-dash is. Thanks to Don for reminding me that things don’t have to be agile or lean to be important and impactful. And my forever gratitude to David for helping me see the value in letting time pass.
