Management/Custom Role Definition Approach

Here are the steps I’ve used to get to such a role definition. This is an approach to define your own role, so the steps are to be followed by the person in question (which could be you if you’re defining your own role, of course):

Identify an (initial) scope of potential impact. If a person is new to the company or junior, the manager may need to nudge things into a specific direction than with more senior people. For instance, when hiring a junior or mid-level engineer, a perfectly valid starting point is to propose owning the implementation of specific features in the scope of a team. For more senior people, this scope should be bigger and ideally ever increasing.

This scope of potential impact ought to be based on the area of interest and expertise of the person in question, although ideally slightly wider to push people outside their comfort zone. Questions to ask:

How would you describe your scope of potential impact at the company, what area do you currently feel responsible for, or want to grow into to have more of an impact on?

Identify the customer’s and company’s needs in the identified scope of impact. Questions to ask:

What do you think the customer and company gaps are in your area of potential impact? In other words, what in this space is not going perfectly just yet?
Of those gaps identified, which ones do you think have the most priority?

Identify your role and goals. Questions to ask:

Of the high-priority gaps identified, which ones…
- can you fill immediately?
- can you grow to fill?
- do you see yourself as a high-leverage fit (a high “bang for the buck”) to fill?
- do you want to fill?
Which ones do you want to commit to filling in the next time period?

Identify blockers. Project yourself some predetermined time into the future, you’re in your next performance review and we get to the section “What blockers or challenges did this person experience over this review period?” Questions to ask:

What is this section likely to include? What are some steps we can take today to avoid them from becoming a problem?

From this, we can make a plan. If our company is flexible enough to allow the creation of individual job descriptions, you can do that. If not, just position this plan as personal development goals.

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