Land and Expand to Take Ownership of Your Career
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski put it bluntly: “Nobody cares about your career as much as you do.” Hey, this isn’t a rap that CEOs don’t care about your development, it’s just the reality.
So what does “taking ownership” of your career actually look like from where you sit in your current role or when you’re seeking your first one?
Start by considering how you’d prioritize choices across three dimensions that can help shape your career journey.
What Industry and Organizations Do You Want to Work In?
This is the WHY question. Ask yourself ‘Why am I working here?, and ‘Do I believe deeply in the product or service we’re creating and delivering?’ Specifically, do you connect to the user and customer personas you serve?
Some people put this element at the top of their list and make it non-negotiable. For example, they’re drawn to climate tech, education innovation, healthcare breakthroughs, or financial services. The mission matters. They want to wake up feeling like their work connects to something bigger, something that’s really important to them.
Go deeper. Are you drawn to mission-driven nonprofits? Do you want to build a consumer product people need and use every day? Are you interested in working to streamline how a complex and highly regulated industry like healthcare can make people’s lives better? Do you want to help small businesses scale, or would you rather work on infrastructure that most people never see but that ultimately powers everything?
I like to start here because this is the dimension that can gnaw at you if you get it wrong. If you wake up one day and think “why am I building, selling, or doing operations for this company?” you may need to step back and find an industry, and organizations in that industry, that matter more to you.
What Functional Area Do You Want to Become Expert In?
This is the WHAT question. What functional area within the organization do you see yourself developing real expertise?
Think about three broad buckets:
Product development - building and shipping the product or service
Go-to-market - selling and supporting the product or service in the market
Business operations - helping the organization run efficiently and scale
Then get more specific. Within product development, are you drawn to product management, engineering, design, or data science? In go-to-market, is it sales, customer success, marketing, or strategic partnerships? In operations, do you see yourself in finance, people/HR, business operations, or legal?
This matters because functional expertise is what travels with you across industries and companies. You can shift from a healthcare startup to a fintech company and still be “a product person”, “revenue centered”, or “someone who builds finance systems.”
You can absolutely shift your functional focus over your career—plenty of people do. But having a functional anchor early on helps you tell a clear story about your career focus and makes it easier for others to understand the value you bring today.
Functional expertise also helps when you are trying to land in a new industry or ecosystem. For example, project management expertise is needed in every sector — use your functional expertise to help you move to the organization that matches your “WHY?”.
What Stage of Company Do You Best Fit In?
This is both a RISK and VIBE question, and it’s the one people can easilty generate a “grass is greener” mentality around.
Early-stage startups (going from zero to one) mean high risk, wearing many hats, failing and fast learning, constant chaos, and not much “manager feedback”. You might have equity that becomes worth something—or nothing. You’ll work on problems that don’t have established solutions, which means lots of experimenting and iterating. And the definition of work-life balance isn’t a 40-hour, Monday through Friday thing.
Growth-stage companies (think Series B or C funding rounds or even later stage) still carry risk, but you’ll find more structure and likely more functional focus. The company is trying to scale what’s working, which creates different challenges. For some people these companies are the Goldilocks “just right” combination. You’ll have more people to collaborate with and learn from, but less ability to shape things from scratch. Your role starts getting more defined as teams specialize, but things are still fluid so you might be pulled in a lot of directions and feel like you report to several people.
Large, mature companies mean more resources, established processes, and (maybe) clearer career paths. You may have more narrowly defined responsibilities, and perhaps find yourself operating in a more predictable decision making environment that doesn’t tug at you from multiple parts of the organization. It’s also likely that you can discretely define your work and non-work schedules.
Your risk tolerance and desired workplace vibe isn’t static—it shifts throughout your life. What feels exciting and manageable when you’re 25 and single might feel terrifying when you’re 36 with a mortgage and two kids. There’s no “right” answer here, what matters is tuning into what works for where you are at your current life stage.
Land and Expand
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s all about establishing a foothold.
Pick the one dimension that matters most to you and explore from there. Maybe you know you want to work in climate tech but you’re not sure if you should go into sales or operations—that’s cool, you have prioritized the industry and can explore the functional areas more once you “land” inside a climate tech company in a role that maps to your current functional identity.
Or maybe you’re clearly a product designer working in a large company, but you’re struggling with FOMO thinking you need to be at a VC backed startup? That’s something you can “solve for” by finding a PD role at a start up, and then paying attention to how that environment feels to you. Do you thrive in ambiguity and constantly needing to “figure it out” with fewer resources, or do you miss the bigger team, more predictable pace and not having to turn something around on a Saturday afternoon?
I could go on and on with examples. The important thing is to find which of the three dimensions you’ll “land” on first and then expand from there. Once you land somewhere, you’ll learn fast and figure out which of the other two you need to dive deeper into next. And document your work somewhere - a google doc, your phone notes app, etc. so you can continually see where you’re at and where you have work to do.
So where are you going to “land” in the next few months: the “why”, the “what”, or the “risk/vibe” dimension?
NextPlay>Forward AI Disclaimer: I very actively use artificial intelligence and large language models to generate the content you read here, but I do review it and edit it to make sure it can be generally useful to people who read it. Keep in mind that AI can make mistakes - check important information. Let me know if I make any errors and I will correct them.