Main idea

Between intent and delivery there is a ladder of identifiable steps: staying at the mockup, producing a prototype you can handle, building an internal tool or a dashboard people actually use, opening a supervised pull request, carrying a deliverable all the way to production, understanding the risks well enough to get what you produce properly validated. Each step demands something the previous one did not.

An equipped Product Manager can climb several of them; a developer moving up toward product climbs the same ones in the other direction. The Product Engineer in particular is reached by two opposite paths — a developer moving up toward the problem, or a sufficiently technical product profile moving down toward production — and nothing in the result says which way the person came.

The job of origin therefore stops being the right predictor. What situates someone is the step they reach, and the question "how far do you go?" replaces the question "what are you?".

Why it matters

It provides a shared scale for discussing what a person can take on, independently of the title they carry and the department they report to.

And it avoids two symmetrical hiring mistakes: turning a contribution down because it comes from the wrong job, and accepting it because it comes from the right one.

Nuances and limits

The scale is not linear: someone can carry a deliverable into production on a simple perimeter and still be unable to produce a usable mockup for a complex journey. The step reached depends as much on the area as on the person.

And a continuum says nothing about the right to move along it: knowing how to open a pull request does not authorize doing so on any perimeter at all.

Open questions

• How does a team establish the step someone has actually reached, other than by handing them a perimeter and watching what happens?