A 12-year Google veteran who rose up through the ranks shares the simple advice she would give to her 25-year-old self

Google

When asked what advice she would give to her 25-year-old self, Bonita Stewart, Google’s Vice President of Global Partnerships, says: "Go see for yourself."
Stewart talked with us about how immersing herself in her career impacted the work she’s done at Google.

As Google’s Vice President of Global Partnerships, Bonita Stewart is no stranger to juggling numerous relationships across a variety of industries — from the automotive field to finance, entertainment, and media.

But when it comes to the principles that have helped shape her more than 12-year tenure at Google, Stewart’s advice sounds fairly simple.

"Go see for yourself," she said in an interview with Business Insider when asked what guidance she would provide to her 25-year-old self today.

Since joining the company in 2006, Stewart has risen the ranks to oversee Google’s global partnerships, a job that entails managing relationships with major publishers across Google’s news, search, mobile, broadcast and commerce products.

That includes taking a leadership role in the Google News Initiative, the company’s organization dedicated to helping news publishers succeed online. Her work has earned her recognition outside of Google as well; she was named one of Ad Age’s Women to Watch in 2011 and made Crain’s New York Business’ Most Powerful Women list in 2017.

Whether it’s visiting colleagues in other countries, traveling to other parts of the world to get a glimpse at how different markets operate, or visiting a partner’s office, getting firsthand experience with people and industries you’re working with is important. "I am constantly looking for ways to immerse myself," she said. "I’m always looking for opportunities to go see for myself."

At the time of our interview, Stewart had just returned from a trip she had taken with her leadership team to London to better understand the work being done by their coworkers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

But there’s one trip from 2016 that stands out as being particularly insightful for Stewart. During April of that year, she traveled to India and learned more about the country’s mobile-first ecosystem, which was particularly relevant to the work Google had been doing around its Accelerated Mobile Page Initiative at the time. "I was able to take that back and talk about that with our publishers so that they could understand that in a mobile-first environment, speed is important," Stewart said.

Commonly referred to as AMP for short, Accelerated Mobile Pages is the open-source project Google launched in 2016 to help publishers create mobile-friendly articles that load quickly on the web. If you’ve ever Googled a newsworthy topic on your smartphone, you’ve probably seen AMP news stories appear near the top of search results.

To demonstrate the impact that insight around the importance of speed had on her work, Stewart pointed to a Google case study from 2016 on how its AMP initiative improved The Washington Post’s returning user rate.

Immersing yourself in the work you’re doing is important for success. But so is having the flexibility and willingness to try new things, according to Stewart.

"Be fearless," she said. "Because there are some skills you might have to throw yourself in to actually learn something."

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