Here’s every team I’ve managed in nine years at Zillow:

Year 1   AI — Search & Personalization
Year 2   AI — + Zestimate, + 3D & Rich Media
Year 3   AI — + Agent Partnerships, + Data Platform, + ...
Year 4   Shopping! — Search, Home Details, Seller, Agent
Year 5   Shopping! — Search, Home Details, Agent
Year 6   Shopping! — Home Details, Full Agent Experience
Year 7   Red team?
Year 8   AI again! (this time with 3D & Rich Media!)
Year 9   AI again! + Zillow Home Loans

It looks scattered. It’s not.

Early on, people told me the path to VP was breadth. Run more teams, manage more people, cover more surface area. So I spent a few years doing exactly that. Shopping, seller experience, platform teams. I was broadening my scope because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Then I went back to AI.

Not because the other work wasn’t valuable — it was. But I noticed a pattern: the moments that actually compounded in my career were the ones where I went deeper, not wider.

The compounding effect

Spending years going deep on AI at Zillow — when it was a small, unproven bet — is what built the foundation for everything that came after. When AI became the company’s strategic priority, I wasn’t learning the domain from scratch. I’d been living in it.

Last week we publicly launched Zillow’s AI mode and I got to present our AI strategy to investors. That product exists because of nine years of depth, not nine years of checking boxes across the org chart.

Depth creates credibility beyond your company

Going deep is also what made it credible when I testified before Congress on AI in housing. It’s what led to a seat on Stanford’s Graduate School of Education Advisory Council. It’s why I can co-lead an AI Task Force at Lakeside School and have something real to contribute.

None of that happens if I’d kept broadening. Those opportunities came specifically because I’d spent years building genuine expertise in one domain — enough to have a point of view that mattered outside the walls of my own company.

The breadth finds you

The career advice I wish I’d gotten earlier: it’s fine to go deep on one thing for a long time. The breadth shows up on its own.

When you have deep expertise, people pull you into adjacent problems. You get asked to weigh in on strategy, policy, education — things that feel like “breadth” but are really just the natural surface area of going deep enough that your knowledge becomes relevant in other contexts.

The messy-looking scope timeline above isn’t a story about zigzagging. It’s a story about one bet — AI — that kept compounding because I stayed with it long enough for it to matter.

Depth creates options that breadth can’t.