In the last couple of months, I’ve had some interesting conversations with my employer about my career. Frankly, I’m not sure what I want to do next. One thing that has come out of these conversations is a simple abstraction I’ve used to think about different positions and what they do. I’ve based it on the Five W’s.

  • Who (individual assignments) - Team Lead
  • What - Product Management
  • When - Project Management
  • Where (which team) - Engineering Manager
  • Why - CTO
  • How - Architect, Tech Lead

There are plenty of corner cases but at least having some high level abstraction has given me some guidance.