About Jennifer

I spent a decade in tech in Australia and Europe, collecting companies, titles and salaries. From the outside everything looked fine, and I should have been content, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t how I wanted the next thirty years to go.

I didn’t quit straight away. I adjusted instead — smaller companies, a move overseas, remote work, freelancing, a portfolio career, a four-day week. Four years of changing the external conditions before I admitted that no amount of rearranging was going to fix what I’d outgrown. I was trying to build a career that belonged to a younger version of me, and the person I’d become valued different things.

The professionals I work with are somewhere inside their own four years of adjusting. It usually arrives as a career problem, through the question, what next?

Underneath that question, a set of beliefs that have started to shift. Beliefs about who you are, what you owe other people, what counts as a serious life, what you’re allowed to want and what happens when you stop being the person everyone relies on. Work just happens to be the place where the pressure shows first.

• LocationEriceira, Portugal
• CredentialsICF ACC, EMCC Senior Practitioner
• NewsletterWork Worth Doing
• Career10 years as a product designer (UI/UX) at Google, Deloitte, Unbabel and early-stage startups across Europe
• Worth knowingOriginally from Sydney, Australia, born into a bi-racial family (Indonesian and Ecuadorian). I now live in Portugal with my Chilean partner. Living between cultures has been the running theme of my life, so questions of who you are and where you belong have never been abstract for me.