When someone wants to change roles, there is usually something visibly wrong with the job. The pay is too low, the politics are exhausting, the workload is crushing. My case was stranger. Nothing was wrong. I was rated well, paid fairly, and surrounded by good people. Yet every two to three years, I needed a change, and I could not have told you why.
Until now.
Looking back through the last fifteen years, I can see that every time I moved to a new role or a new company, I was answering the same three questions:
- Capacity. Does the role use everything I can give, or only a small part of it?
- Authority. Can I act on what I see, or only observe and report?
- Impact. Does the work I do multiply, or just add?
When all three are present at once, I am fulfilled. When I run into the limit of any one of them, I feel I have outgrown the vessel, and it is time to find a new one.
My whole career, it turns out, was the slow discovery of these three variables, one at a time. And I had to reach each limit before I knew it was there.
Capacity: the analyst years.
My first job out of university was as a business analyst on a risk-rating application.
I walked in knowing just about nothing. Nothing about risk management, nothing about requirements, nothing about how any of it fit together. But by the end I knew the app and the project as well as anyone else in the room.
That arc, drop into something I do not understand, absorb the whole of it, become the person who holds it, would repeat at every stop for the next fifteen years.
The analyst seat was sized for a fraction of what I had to offer. While I could do the slice very well, I could also do a great many other things.
Many large organizations are built so that a defined role stays defined no matter how much more you bring. It is simply the nature of big institutions, especially in the carefully governed, heavily regulated verticals.
And each time capacity became the limit, what I felt was restlessness.
Authority: the program years.
When I progressed from analyst work to program work and took over a portfolio of improvement initiatives, I found myself running things rather than analyzing them. This was a good fit. For a while it scratched the real itch and I loved making things run better.
But it introduced a constraint I had not met before: lack of real authority over the system.
I could redesign the processes but not the tools and not the people. I could write the requirement strategy but did not have the authority to operationalize it or change the framework.
I could see a better way forward, but was unable to act on it. Even when I could see clearly what would make things better, moving it from idea to reality depended on far more than my own effort.
For what it is worth, I was good at these roles. I moved from a pod lead to a program lead within months of joining one of them, with a top rating in my first year, for example.
The limit I kept reaching was never about whether I could do the work. It was about how much of what I could see was mine to shape. And the lack of authority translated into a feeling of being stifled.
Impact: the thing I did not know to look for.
Eventually I was pulled into a seat that handed me the first two dimensions.
I joined a startup a few years into its life and took on its strategy and operations leadership, with a place at the table for every major decision. The container could finally take everything I had, and I had the room to act on what I saw. For the first time in my career, both boxes were checked.
And checking them taught me there was a third box I had only just begun to understand.
I call it impact, but impact can mean many things. There is one-to-one impact: I put in an hour of effort and yield a benefit proportional to, or slightly higher than, what I put in. I have had plenty of those, and they were deeply satisfying.
But there is a second kind that I am just beginning to learn about. The kind where an hour of effort does not move the number by one unit, it moves it by ten, because of where the business sits and what that effort sets in motion.
For instance, restructuring a pricing matrix thoughtfully can reset the margin on every future dollar, while building a new system of processes, tools, and training can let a company take on ten times the volume without ten times the cost. This is work that bends the trajectory of the P&L rather than improving a single line on it. The same work compounds in one business and just adds up in another.
I expect to spend the next few years figuring out how to create multiplicative impact: not just add to the P&L, but multiply it.
So the three are a kind of diagnostic I now carry through my career. If I feel restless, I know capacity is the limit and my skills are not being fully used. If I feel stifled, I know I lack the authority to fix the system. And I am still learning what it feels like to run into the limits of impact.
What I actually am.
Over the years I tried on the labels. Analyst, delivery lead, product manager. Each fit partway, and none fit all the way. Putting it all together: what I am is an operator. The person who holds the entire system in view and makes it run better. Who fills the gaps, turns chaos into order, and multiplies the effort of everyone around them.
The analyst’s systems thinking, the delivery lead’s results, the product manager’s ownership, all of it, plus the one thing none of those seats had on its own: a mandate to see the whole board. It is what the org chart sometimes calls business operations, or strategy and operations. I think of it simply as operating.
And I had been operating the entire time. I just kept doing it inside roles built to use a fraction of it, in places that did not have a single seat for the whole thing.
In my next post I will write about what it means to be an operator, especially an operator without founder authority, and the seven principles I believe every operator needs to internalize.
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