What Do You Want to Be Known For — Positioning Grows at a Different Speed Than Skill

Skill and Positioning Grow at Different Speeds
The Illusion That Narrowing Reduces Opportunity
The One-Sentence Test
The Material Is a Class of Problems, Not a Stack
What Leaks When There Is No Sentence
One Thing You Can Do Today
Where This Advice Does Not Apply
Further Reading

Skill and Positioning Grow at Different Speeds

Skill is the set of things you can do. Positioning is the one line about you stored in someone else's head. The two are related but not the same, and above all they grow at different speeds. Skill grows a little every day. Positioning updates only when someone has a reason to re-file you, and that reason does not arrive many times a year.

That lag produces much of the resentment in an engineering career: you can do work you could not have done two years ago, while the organization still refers to you the way it did two years ago. The usual reaction is to build more skill. But if the problem is update lag, building more skill also widens the gap.

Mistaking positioning for self-promotion makes the whole exercise uncomfortable. What you are actually doing is closer to indexing than to advertising: arranging what you have so others can find it. Material with no index is treated, inside an organization, almost identically to material that does not exist.

The Illusion That Narrowing Reduces Opportunity

The most common reason people postpone positioning is the feeling that narrowing shrinks the field. The opposite is closer to the truth, because opportunity is distributed through search. When a problem appears, people call up two or three candidates from memory and contact someone on that list. A person who is broadly good at everything rarely enters the list, because no search term is attached to their name.

So narrowing is not about reducing what you can do; it is about securing at least one slot where you have a chance of being recalled. Someone with one slot gets pulled in through it and then does other work too. Someone with no slot never gets the occasion to be pulled in at all.

Narrowing sounds frightening because people hear it as locking. Positioning is an entrance, not a prison. It can be renewed every few years, and it is. Someone with one deep axis uses it as a foothold to move sideways; someone with no axis has no foothold and has to explain themselves from scratch every time.

The One-Sentence Test

There is a simple self-diagnosis. "If this kind of problem comes up, go ask that person." Answer for yourself what fills the first blank. If no answer comes immediately, the slot is probably not empty — someone else has likely filled it already, usually with the name of whatever chore you handled most recently. You fix a deployment script twice and become the deployment person.

The default label is not attached by a bad actor; it is the summary an organization inevitably produces in order to remember people. If you do not submit a sentence, the organization writes one for you.

The Material Is a Class of Problems, Not a Stack

If you start your positioning sentence with tool names, it comes with a short shelf life. Tie yourself to a specific framework or database and your worth moves with that tool's popularity. Write it as a class of problems instead and it lasts far longer. Here is how a tool-first sentence and a problem-first sentence differ (a constructed example).

Tool-first — "I have worked with message queues."
Problem-first — "I move data without stopping the service. Queues are part of how I do it."

The second survives a change of tools and is easier for a listener to connect to their own trouble. Good positioning is not a list of what you know; it is the name of a difficulty other people have.

What Leaks When There Is No Sentence

Work still gets done without a sentence. It just leaks quietly in four places. First, referrals do not arrive: a referral requires someone to recall you, and there is no cue to recall. Second, work is assigned arbitrarily, because the direction you want is not registered anywhere in the organization. Third, the resume becomes a list — a document that makes the reader do the summarizing does not get read. Fourth, the learning budget scatters: with nothing chosen to go deep on, you skim several new technologies shallowly, and after a few years what remains is the list itself.

All four share one property: none of them hurts today. So they are usually left alone, and then billed all at once when you start preparing to move. That is why so many people discover, mid-application, that they cannot summarize their own career.

One Thing You Can Do Today

Write three sentences: one problem you solve repeatedly, two recent pieces of evidence supporting that claim, and one thing people actually come to you to ask. Then ask three colleagues who have worked with you, "What kind of work do I look like I do?" The gap between what you wrote and what comes back is the real starting point of positioning work. A large gap means exposure needs fixing, not skill. No gap, but you dislike the answer, means the direction needs changing.

Where This Advice Does Not Apply

In the first one to three years there is nothing to narrow yet. In that stretch, breadth of exposure comes before positioning: you have to meet several kinds of problems before you can know which one to narrow toward. Narrowing in a hurry ties you not to a preference but to whatever you happened to be assigned first.

In organizations small enough that everyone does everything, internal positioning also means little; it is better to set the reference point outside the company. And if the thing you narrow into sits in a shrinking market, narrowing is exactly the risk it appears to be. The advice to write it as a class of problems earns its keep here once more: what disappears is usually the tool, while the problem survives and migrates to another one.