A Career Decision Triangle

Domain, people, and role are three sides of a triangle to help decide your next career move. This model has helped me clarify otherwise amorphous decisions.

When choosing between job opportunities, I’ve found the following model to be helpful, shared with me by a mentor.

You can think of job opportunities as being a point on a triangle whose three vertices are:

• Domain: Is the work in consumer or enterprise? What is the underlying technology? Which category of product is it?

• Role: What am I specifically doing on the team?

• People: Who am I working with? Who’s working for me? Who’s my manager?

A bit more on each below, followed by some advice on how to choose your next job.

Domain

I’ve always been interested in building applications that everyday people use, so I tend to lean towards consumer products and away from enterprise work. This has remained true for my entire career.

For some people, the technology itself is the most important factor of a job’s domain. You’ll find people who “only want to work on AI” or “only want to code in Rust.”

Business model or business stage can be facets of work domains. I’ve met folks who only want to work in nonprofits, or only want to work at startups.

The point is to identify which aspect of work domains matter to you, and then to identify how a job opportunity aligns with it.

When I started my first full-time job out of college, the Microsoft recruiter asked me what team I wanted to work on. I didn’t ask any questions about tech stacks, coding languages, roles, or people — I just blurted out “Microsoft Money.” Being a poor college student, it was the only Microsoft consumer product I had ever used, given they had a big discount where the product was free for a year.

My early career started with a laser focus on Domain as the way to choose jobs.

Role

I then went through a period of time when I was obsessed with career growth via promotions and becoming a manager. My younger self was convinced that I wanted to be a Dev Manager at Microsoft. It had seemed to me the pinnacle of achievement to aspire to.

Having this as a goal made decisions easy for a good decade. I simply switched teams and took jobs anywhere in Microsoft that would give me the opportunity to be a tech lead, then a dev lead, and finally a dev manager.

For some people, a focus on Role is a lifetime commitment. There are folks who’ve always and only ever wanted to own and run their own business. I know people who’ve indeed become a Dev Manager and are as happy as clams to remain thus their entire career. Role, understandably, is very important to many people.

However, you’ll also find people for whom the role really doesn’t matter. This, for instance, is Sheryl Sandberg’s own telling of how she accepted a job at Facebook:

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat!

I went through a good decade-long stretch of career being singularly focused on taking jobs based on Role.

People

When it comes to the job opportunity triangle, People is about:

• Who are my peers?

• Who are my managers and execs?

• Who are my reports?

You may value a particular set of these more. For instance, some people feel their immediate peers make the biggest difference in their everyday work experience, and prioritize them over managers/etc when choosing jobs.

I’m one of those people. Especially in my IC roles, where I feel peers matter greatly. But even as a manager or director, the people who you work alongside have a huge impact on everyday job satisfaction.

But did you know that 57% of people left one or more jobs because of their manager? This concords with my own experience in three decades of work: I’ve increasingly come to see my immediate manager as one of the most important factors influencing job satisfaction. Over time, I’ve become very careful with how I choose jobs depending on who will manage me.

Fireside True Story™ Time: I once worked for a manager who edited his résumé, live on his laptop, during a team meeting he was leading. This caught the attention of a few people on the team beyond even his direct reports, which made the incident especially awkward.

Later, I was called into an interrogation in the secret, unlabelled Microsoft Men in Black™ building off-campus where internal investigations are held. It turns out the manager was not only siphoning money to someone he was dating, but also taking a bit for himself.

This manager was an advocate for me and promoted me quickly. But I’d definitely never work with him again. Integrity, above all else, really matters.

Values & Decisions

There are ultimately quite a few models you can use in order to make a decision about your next team or company change, but the distinction of Domain, Role, and People is one I’ve found useful in my own job changes.

The key is twofold:

• Each job has a location on this triangle.

• Your preferences are also located somewhere on this triangle.

The trick is to find the best match between the two.

Decisions are easy when your values are clear to you.
— Roy Disney