Read the Person, Not the Ladder

For years, the first thing I asked anyone to do after they finished onboarding was go find their next job. Not to leave. To go find the person who already holds the role they want after this one, and study them. Pull up their profile, their talks, their portfolio, the bio they wrote for themselves. Write down four things: their hard skills, their soft skills, their title, and how they position themselves. Then bring it to our next one on one.

That page became the spine of everything after it. The career conversations, the reviews, the where-am-I-going talk that usually runs on vibes because there's nothing underneath it. Instead of me projecting a path onto someone, we both had a real human to point at. Here's the gap. Here's a person who already closed it. Let's work out how.

It worked because there used to be a map. Five years ago the ladder was legible. Product Designer, Senior, Staff, Principal, Director. Each rung carried a rough job and a rough set of expectations, and you could navigate by title. If you wanted to know what Principal asked of you, the word itself told you most of it.

That map is dissolving. Watch how roles get named now and the rungs flatten into a single ramp. Builder 1 through Builder 6. Member of Technical Staff, whatever you do all day. Every company minting its own leveling framework, none of them portable to the next one. The title used to carry information about the work. Now it mostly carries a pay band.

AI is a lot of why. The old ladders were built on specialization, and the thing that separated a Senior from a Principal was depth in a craft that took years to accumulate. That depth was the scarce thing you were climbing toward. The rungs that took years of specialization to climb are the ones AI just flattened. When a generalist with good judgment and the right tools covers ground that used to need a specialist, the specialized rungs stop meaning what they meant, and the ladder collapses into one question. Can you build, and how much. Builder 1 through 6.

So if the title can't tell you what to become, a person still can. That's the whole move. A real human one rung ahead of you stays legible even when the ladder's a blur. You can't read Builder 4 and know what it takes. A specific Builder 4, the actual person, is a list of things you can't do yet. That list is what you were climbing toward the whole time. The title was just the shorthand.

Pick the job you'd want in two years. The job, not the title. Find three people who hold it now, reachable ones a rung ahead. Skip the famous ones a mountain away. Study the same four things. Where do your hard skills already overlap theirs. Where's the gap in the soft skills, the ones that never make it onto a resume but show up in how other people describe them. How do they talk about their own work, what do they claim, what do they leave out. You end up with an honest read on the distance, so the next year of effort points somewhere instead of nowhere.

If you manage people, make this the first assignment after onboarding, and bring it back around every year. Now every career conversation has an anchor that's more than your opinion. You find out what someone actually wants, which is often a different thing than the title you assumed they were chasing. And your team hears that you're building them toward the next role, not just spending them on this one, which is most of what retention comes down to. When review season lands, you're not inventing a growth story on the spot. You're measuring against a person they chose. It's the mirror of writing the role clearly when you hire them, aimed one step further out.

One caution. Aim for the direction, not the costume. If someone comes back trying to become a carbon copy of the person they studied, the exercise misfired. The human you pick is a reference for the distance, and that's all you need them to be.

The disappearing ladder feels like a loss, and for anyone who wanted the map handed to them it is one. But you were never meant to become a title. You were meant to become capable of something real, and the title was only the blurry proxy we used to point at it. That proxy is going. What it leaves behind is more honest than what it replaced. Find the person doing the thing you want to be able to do, and close the distance. Read the person, not the ladder. That holds in any market, under any leveling scheme, no matter what they decide to call the rungs next.