Clarity Has Gravity

There’s a point in an organization’s growth where the problems stop being local.

What used to feel like a workflow tweak reveals a deeper data inconsistency. A platform improvement surfaces unclear ownership. A tooling decision exposes assumptions that were never fully examined. The issues don’t live neatly inside a single backlog anymore; they stretch across teams, incentives, and timelines.

At some point, you stop seeing tasks. You start seeing the system.

And once you see the system, everything begins to feel connected.

That’s when it gets interesting. And where, for me, growth began.

As a senior engineer, my instinct was straightforward

If something could be improved, improve it.

If I noticed a fragility, I hardened it. If I saw a misalignment, I named it and helped correct it. If I could trace a downstream consequence, I surfaced it early so we could avoid unnecessary pain later.

That instinct served me well. It’s how you build trust. It’s how you raise the bar. It’s how you grow into senior.

But the shift into staff dev and higher requires a different muscle.

Because at that level, the problems you can see are rarely confined to your lane. They span domains. They reveal capability gaps rather than implementation gaps. And they multiply the more context you gain.

The question changes from “Can I fix this?” to “Should I own this?”

That’s a learned lesson, by the way; not just theory.

When clarity creates gravity

One of the less discussed aspects of staff+ work is that clarity has gravity.

When you can connect dots across domains, people naturally pull you into conversations. You have the context. You understand the tradeoffs or can figure them out very quickly. You can anticipate second- and third-order effects that aren’t yet obvious.

Over time, you become an informal integration point.

And that can feel like growth. And at first it is. Influence expands. The room relies on your perspective, you’re trusted with ambiguity.

But there’s a subtle edge to it.

If you equate understanding with obligation, you begin to absorb responsibility for everything you can see. The more interconnected the system becomes, the more you feel compelled to stabilize it personally.

Over time, that pattern reduces leverage instead of increasing it.

There’s also a social layer to this that I didn’t fully appreciate at first. Many women, and others who’ve been socialized to be the reliable one in the room, are conditioned to equate usefulness with value, to step in, smooth things over, and keep everything moving.

But reliability and strategic growth are not the same thing. Being the stabilizer can make you indispensable at your current level. It doesn’t automatically position you to reshape the system itself. And without realizing it, you can start optimizing for being needed rather than being leveraged.

Not everyone cares about that. I do.

Interconnected doesn’t mean centralized

At scale, everything touches everything. Architecture influences process; process shapes ownership; ownership affects incentives. The system is inherently interconnected.

It’s tempting to respond to that by centralizing coherence through one person or one team. If you can see how the pieces fit, maybe you should coordinate them all.

But interconnected doesn’t mean centralized ownership.

In fact, centralizing too much through one person or team can unintentionally slow down the very maturity you’re trying to cultivate. You become the glue that compensates for structural gaps instead of designing structures that remove the need for glue.

There’s a career dimension to this that took me time to understand. Organizations tend to elevate people who redesign systems, not just the ones who keep them running. If you’re constantly compensating for structural gaps yourself, those gaps remain invisible, and so does the need to expand the mandate around the work.

There’s a difference between being helpful and being high-leverage.

The former stabilizes. The latter transforms¹.

Foresight and restraint

There’s also something uncomfortable about foresight. When you can see where something is likely to fracture months from now, it’s hard to watch it move forward imperfectly. Sometimes it makes me literally wince. It feels negligent to stay quiet when you can anticipate the cost.

Earlier in my career, I interpreted that discomfort as a cue to step in.

Now I’m realizing that instinct doesn’t scale.

I think that part of operating at staff+ isn’t expanding the number of things you personally own, but refining the ones you choose to transform. It’s naming risks without absorbing delivery. It’s designing clean interfaces rather than patching every adjacent seam. It’s making the implications visible and then allowing the organization to decide how much it wants to invest in closing the gap.

That feels less immediately satisfying. But it’s also a lot more scalable and more directly in service of cultivating and maturing a system.

The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to do the work that makes the other work resolvable.

Choosing the hill

When multiple capability gaps are visible at once, the discipline isn’t in addressing all of them. It’s in choosing the one that, if transformed deeply, will change how the others are approached.

The right transformation raises the baseline. It shifts mental models. It clarifies ownership. It makes future decisions less fragile. It might look like designing the interface three teams were previously working around, or naming the ownership gap that was quietly slowing every initiative. It’s not less work. It’s more precise work, the kind that compounds.

The goal isn’t to reduce scope. It’s to increase leverage. To focus on the change that makes other changes easier, faster, and more durable.

When that work is done well, adjacent systems don’t get ignored. They become easier to evolve because the foundation is clearer, the interfaces are cleaner, and the ownership model is stronger.

Seeing the whole system still matters. But the real impact comes from reshaping it, not personally carrying it.

1. This is a nod to Zone to Win by Geoffrey Moore, who articulated 4 zones an org can operate in: performance zone, productivity zone, incubation zone, and transformation zone. Here’s a brief-ish summary of the book. ↩︎