Aditi Khullar, VP at Two Sigma, senior engineer bridging research to production; experience leading AI/ML teams.
For 15 years, I’ve worked in engineering organizations built around two paths. The Individual Contributor (IC) path runs Senior, Staff, Principal: technical depth, no reports. The other runs Manager, Senior Manager, Director: people, headcount, budget. Near senior, someone asked which path I was on. I thought I knew. My mother headed the auto-claims division at a public-sector insurance company in India; my father built his own chartered accountancy practice of 20. Leadership in that house meant leading people on two fronts at once: optimizing for the company’s goals and for each person’s career progression. The manager’s path looked obvious.
Then I got to live it. Three years ago, I was the founding engineer on a new team, and as it grew, I became a tech lead manager, still coding but responsible for four others. The defining project was a high-stakes migration of production models, each required to come out bit-for-bit identical to what it replaced, coordinated across teams moving in lockstep to a hard date. When we delivered, the satisfaction confirmed what I believed: I was a people manager. The promotion followed, and a larger team felt obvious.
This time, I paused. “Do you want to manage people?” The question this decision supposedly turns on had quietly stopped being the right one. The industry has mapped each path well. Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path charts the climb into management; Will Larson’s Staff Engineer argues the IC track is real leadership. Neither answered which map I should be reading. So I drew a framework.
Impact And Meaning: The Basis Vectors Of Your Career Gradient
The first axis is how you create impact: through your own output, or through others. The second is where you find meaning: in the craft, or in the people around it. They aren’t independent, but crossing them gives four quadrants.
Before you place yourself, name your objective function: the question you’re optimizing for, and its answer. For me, it was “Who is your role model?” Yours might ask how much influence you want, or what organization you want to shape. It tells you which direction is forward, and your next step should close the gap between where you stand and that answer.
Each quadrant has a core question, an honest signal and a decision rule.
The Craftsman: creates impact by owning the output, finds meaning in deep craft.
Question: Is my best contribution something only I can build?
Signal: You feel diminished when you stop making things directly.
Rule: Stay IC; invest in the craft’s depth, not headcount.
The Choreographer: creates impact through others, finds meaning in deep craft.
Question: Can I shape the work more powerfully by setting direction than by doing it myself?
Signal: You’re more frustrated when the team ships something wrong than when you didn’t build something.
Rule: Move toward management, but guard your craft fluency. Most tech leads live here.
The Captain: creates impact by owning the output, finds meaning in the people.
Question: Am I mentoring to grow someone, or to avoid letting go of the work?
Signal: You’d rather redo it yourself than coach someone through it.
Rule: Name the tension before you decide. It’s the most conflicted spot, and the most common profile for senior ICs promoted into management.
The Coach: creates impact through others, finds meaning in the people.
Question: Does someone else’s growth energize me more than my own output?
Signal: Your best days are when someone cracks something hard, and you feel no grief that it wasn’t you.
Rule: Go into management. The longer you stay IC, the more friction you create for everyone.
Applying The Framework On Real Careers
I ran it past colleagues, a mix of ICs, managers and senior leaders, asking each to plot their path across both axes. Almost none was a straight line. Most had crossed quadrants more than once: a Craftsman who became a Choreographer, then drifted toward Coach once the team outgrew his bandwidth to review the work. The people who seemed most settled weren’t the ones who’d picked a lane early. They were the ones who’d moved deliberately and knew why.
Charity Majors calls this the “engineer/manager pendulum“: Swinging between the roles isn’t a failure to commit but the thing that builds great technical leaders. My framework tells you which way it should swing next, and why. I expect to make this loop again, maybe within a single quarter, maybe not for years. Whenever it comes, I’ll make sure it’s intentional. The fork was never a one-time choice between two identities. It’s a position you occupy as long as the work needs you there, then leave. So the next time you face the fork, don’t answer where you’ll be for the rest of your career. Answer two smaller questions: Where do you create impact right now, and where does your meaning sit? Those answers place you in a quadrant, but the quadrant was never the destination. Leadership is what you make of it while you’re there.
The views expressed herein are the author’s own and do not represent the opinions, positions or strategies of the author’s employer or any of its affiliates, employees or officers. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional, strategic or investment advice. References to specific companies, products or technologies do not imply endorsement or any commercial relationship.
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