Role Discovery

The process of finding how your particular skillset can provide leverage in an organization, rather than trying to fit a predefined role archetype.

Relevant especially when you have a spiky skillset — strong in some areas, weak in others — and when no clear template for your role exists.

Greg Brockman's process at Stripe:

Identified he couldn't do all parts of the CTO job well
Hired a VP Engineering to take the parts he was weakest at
Surveyed ~20 CTOs to discover what their roles actually were (answer: mostly facilitators, not chief architects)
Identified which feedback loops he'd lost and which activities restored them
Returned to coding — the thing that recharged him and gave him honest ground-level data

At OpenAI, a different version of the same process:

Found a problem more important than any role (beneficial AI)
Assembled the right people around it
Discovered his contribution by seeing what the org needed and what he could do better than anyone else (engineering as research bottleneck)

The pattern: find the problem first, then let the role emerge from what you can uniquely contribute to solving it.

Sources