In early 2010 I left my job as Director, User Experience for Yahoo! Messenger. After three years I was ready for something smaller, where I’d have more of an impact and spend less time fighting big company politics.

But something was brewing at AOL. It had a portfolio of embarrassingly bad products and was admitting that publicly. Tim Armstrong (AOL’s CEO) and Brad Garlinghouse (head of Consumer Applications and famous for his “Peanut Butter Manifesto” criticizing Yahoo’s lack of focus) pulled in Matte Scheinker to fix the problem. Matte — my former manager, ongoing mentor, and one of my absolute favorite people — invited me to help found his new Consumer Experience team. The opportunity was too intriguing to turn down. So I weathered the inevitable, “AOL? Really!?” from friends and family and signed on in May 2010.

Armed with authority over AOL’s product review process, the three of us — Matte, Christian Crumlish, and me — set out to turn terrible experiences into great ones. We consulted, pleaded, designed, brainstormed, fixed typos, debugged code, cleaned trash out of conference rooms. It was exhilarating. The team grew and flourished; by fall 2011 there were seven of us. In the course of it I got to lead the TechCrunch redesign, build an internal social network, and meet and earn the respect of product teams across the company.

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