What does context have to do with your career?
One of the perspectives I bring to career coaching from my Master of Social Work degree and clinical training is the importance of understanding people within their broader context.
We exist within systems: families, communities, organizations, and all the relationships between them. When we try to understand someone’s experience without considering that context, we can miss a significant part of what is happening.
The same principle applies to work.
You might see a title such as senior product manager, account manager, or UX designer and assume you understand what that person does. You might also expect a role with that title to look fairly similar across companies.
But a title leaves a great deal unexplained. The surrounding context shapes the responsibilities, the challenges, and the experience of doing the work.
In my Career as Craft course, I call these the dimensions of your profession.
What are the dimensions of a profession?
Your core competencies are the areas of work you are responsible for. The dimensions help describe how those responsibilities take shape in a particular setting.
I use the following dimensions to help people explore their profession:
| Dimension | What to look at |
|---|---|
| Activities | The individual things you do within a responsibility, such as researching, analyzing, writing, presenting, or teaching. |
| Ways of working | The approaches, frameworks, and structures you use, including independent work, collaboration, upfront planning, or iteration. |
| Problems | The challenges you are trying to solve, such as entering a new market, untangling ambiguity, improving an established process, or turning around a struggling area. |
| People and audiences | The people who receive or use your work: internal teams, executives, customers, users, partners, or the wider market. |
| Markets and domains | The industry, subject matter, technology, and market you work within, such as healthcare, cybersecurity, on-premises software, or software as a service. |
| Business context | What the organization is like and what it is going through: an early-stage startup, a growing business, a mature company, a restructure, or an integration after an acquisition. |
| Scale and scope | How far the work reaches, including a single product, multiple teams, an entire portfolio, a local office, or a global organization, along with the resources involved. |
| Outcomes | What the work is intended to change, the results you are working toward, and how success is assessed. |
These dimensions overlap. You do not need to sort everything into a perfect category for the exercise to be useful.
For example, business-to-business versus business-to-consumer work tells you something about both the market and the audience. A global project tells you something about scope, but it may also change how you collaborate.
The purpose is to develop a fuller understanding of the work. In a previous article, we looked at activities and ways of working. Those are two parts of this broader picture.
How can one dimension change the job?
Take UX design as an example.
A UX designer working on an internal tool for employees may need to understand different people, problems, and workflows from a designer working on a product sold to customers.
The role may also look different in a single-product company compared with a company managing a large portfolio. A startup may define the role differently from a large enterprise. A business selling to other businesses may have different needs from one selling directly to consumers.
The underlying profession is still UX design. But what the designer spends time on, who they work with, and what they are expected to accomplish can change.
Sometimes changing just one dimension is enough to make a familiar responsibility feel substantially different.
This is why understanding your profession requires more than knowing its usual list of competencies. You also need to understand the settings in which those competencies are used.
Because again… Context is critical.
Why do companies define the same role differently?
Context helps explain some of the variation you see in job descriptions.
You can look at several product management, product marketing, or account management roles and find different responsibilities under the same title. The company may need a different combination of those responsibilities because it is solving a different problem.
A business integrating an acquired product has different immediate needs from one introducing its first product to a new market. Those needs can shape what it asks someone in the role to focus on.
That does not mean every difference is well thought out. Companies can also be unclear about what they need or where responsibilities belong. But context is an important part of understanding why a role has been defined a particular way.
When I look at job descriptions, I often find a long list of responsibilities with very little explanation of the context behind them. You may have to investigate that context separately.
Useful questions include:
- What is the company going through right now?
- Is it privately held or publicly traded and what do I know about its funding or ownership?
- How long has it been operating and how many products does it have?
- What are the top priorities for this role?
- Who will use the work and what needs to change as a result?
- How broad is the responsibility and what resources support it?
These are clues to explore and questions to ask. A company label alone will not tell you what the day-to-day experience is going to be.
Which version of your profession interests you?
Understanding the dimensions is the first part. The next is understanding your relationship with them.
Which problems do you gravitate toward? Which audiences do you enjoy working with? What subject matter interests you? How much breadth or depth do you want in your responsibilities?
Imagine two people working in product marketing.
One enjoys a consumer-focused startup that is trying to turn the business around and enter a new market. Another prefers working at a large, established business-to-business company, developing the story across a portfolio of on-premises products.
Both are product marketers. But those settings may call for different combinations of skills, approaches, relationships, and judgment. They may also appeal to different parts of who those people are.
Neither description makes someone a better product marketer. Each tells us more about the version of product marketing they want to practice.
You can begin exploring this by comparing two roles you have held, or your current role with one you are considering. Write down what you know about their dimensions, then identify which differences matter to you and why. If you do not know enough about a prospective role, that gives you something specific to investigate.
You are moving from “I want another product marketing job” toward a clearer description of the work and context you actually want.
How does context help you define your craft?
Knowing who you are gives you a foundation for understanding what interests you, what matters to you, and where you tend to do work you want to develop further.
Knowing the dimensions of your profession gives you a fuller picture of where those parts of you might best fit.
The connection between those two is where you begin to define your craft more precisely. You can describe the problems you want to solve, the people you want to serve, and the settings in which you want to apply your skills.
Your title may stay the same. Your understanding of the career you want to build can become much more specific.
