The career move I’ve had to explain most often wasn’t leaving one industry for another. It was moving into product.

On paper, the role carried less organizational scope than the positions I’d held before it. I was giving up some authority and stepping closer to the work. The second part is why I took it. The first part is the only one other people seemed to notice.

When we talk about our careers, we reach for lines like “in a past life, I…” The first version of mine was entrepreneurial. Then a small aviation and engineering shop, then public education, then “startup life” in productivity and content promotion, then, most recently, fintech and small business growth. I’ve enjoyed learning through every level, from entry-level tech to small business owner to CTO to product director, not because something forced the change, but because I kept finding work in each area that I wanted to do. The product move was the one that didn’t read as progression to the people watching from outside.

That instinct, treating growth in scope as the only legible kind of progress, isn’t unique to the people around me. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that just 6% of more than 23,000 respondents across 44 countries name reaching senior leadership as their primary career goal right now. Most are optimizing for learning, financial security, and a sense of purpose instead. Looking back at my own arc, that’s a more accurate description than “climbing,” even if I couldn’t have named it that way at the time.

What’s Expected

Most career narratives that you read on LinkedIn or hear from career guidance folks tend to follow a recognizable shape. They start with individual contribution and move through increasing organizational scope, taking on more teams and budget over time. Each transition comes with an announcement and a new title that signals “you’ve arrived” at some next level.

This isn’t accidental. Organizations reward this pattern and modern social networks amplify it (or, back in the day, when you moved into the “corner office” as a social cue). A promotion to executive generates engagement that a lateral move never will. The system is built to celebrate one kind of career story, and that optimization shapes which announcements get written and which ones don’t.

Most of us are molded to this template in high school or college–progression is everything while lateral move needs explaining. A step back in title needs even more. The narrative machinery doesn’t have a format for “I moved closer to the work on purpose,” so that story tends to arrive as recovery from something, or not at all.

The corporate ladder isn’t the only template with this problem. The entrepreneurial narrative has its own default ending: the successful exit. Most ventures never produce one, and the ones that don’t are often compressed into a gap on the résumé or quietly dropped from the professional narrative, because the only version anyone knows how to write up is the one that ends with a check. We’re not very good, as a society, at publicly celebrating our failures learning opportunities.

I’ve had both sides: successful exits and a lot of learning. They each shaped how I think and what I know, and some of that is worth more than what would have shown up on the cap table, even if there’s no format for putting it in a summary.

A Different Calculation

The authority and implied trajectory I gave up were real, and what I gained was harder to quantify beyond “this looked interesting.” What stood out then, and still does, is that the work sits closer to what I actually care about: people, how technology shapes their lives, and the teams that bring those experiences to life. The coaching runs in both directions, up toward senior executives and down toward other product managers and engineers, but it’s grounded in craft rather than org-chart position. The problems I’m solving these days are the ones I want to be solving.

That clarity has practical value I didn’t fully anticipate. When you’re not managing your own advancement alongside the work, you stop carrying two separate optimization functions at once. The decisions feel cleaner, because there’s only one question on the table rather than two running in parallel.

That clarity has a cost too. It’s a lower ceiling on compensation than the path not taken, and recruiters who need the “step back” explained twice before they take the résumé seriously. I’ve made peace with that trade, but pretending it isn’t one would be dishonest.

I’ve seen this pattern in other contexts too. In aviation, the people closest to the actual decisions in safety-critical systems often weren’t the most organizationally senior. When a question affected airworthiness or operational safety, the room’s attention usually shifted away from the highest-ranking person and toward whoever understood the components and systems deeply enough to see the consequence. The same pattern shows up wherever the quality of a specific decision matters more than the breadth of who’s covering it.

If You Can…

Choosing proximity over progression is easier when your finances and circumstances leave room to choose. For a lot of people, the next title or the next raise isn’t vanity, it’s the thing that keeps the lights on. But when choice exists, it’s worth admitting the most legible option isn’t always the most meaningful one.

The career choice worth making deliberately is the one that answers what kind of work you actually want to do, not what kind of title you want to hold.

That sounds simpler than it is, because most people don’t make that choice explicitly. They make it by default, following the next available opportunity and the logic of the path already taken. The default isn’t bad. For some people, the organizational challenge of leading at the C-suite level is the right problem, because they’ve found the match between their skills and what that altitude requires. That story gets told well.

What we rarely focus on is a version where someone saw the organizational machinery and concluded their best work doesn’t happen there. Where staying closer to the product, the customer, or the code, with fewer organizational levers, turned out to be the more productive place to operate.

Before that next opportunity arrives, think about what decisions you want to be close to and whether the organizational layer between you and the work is enabling you or insulating you from it.