2026-10-24
October 24, 2026
Before you ask what the next level requires, find out which kind of Staff your organization actually has a slot for. Promotion is mostly a fit problem, and most people discover that after the cycle closes.
Will Larson's 2020 essay on Staff archetypes is cited so often that it has become wallpaper. Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand: most senior people can recite the list and then go back to asking their manager the same question as before, which is "what do I need to do to get to the next level?" That question assumes there is one next level. The essay says otherwise. It describes four different jobs that share a title and a pay band.
Here is the part that gets lost. Organizations do not create these jobs evenly. Larson notes that a company needs roughly one Tech Lead for every eight engineers, that Architects mostly emerge in large companies or highly coupled codebases, that Solvers show up where work is planned around individual ownership, and that the Right Hand is the rarest, typically appearing only at organizations with hundreds of engineers. So a promotion case is never judged against an abstract ladder. It is judged against the roles the organization already knows how to use.
For a Senior or Staff TPM this matters more than for an engineer, because the TPM archetypes are rarely written down. Nobody has published the equivalent essay for your function, so your org fills the gap with whatever it saw last time. If the last promoted TPM was a rescuer of failing programs, you are being compared to a Solver, whatever your own preference. If your director wants a person who can sit in staff meetings and run the cross-org agenda, you are being compared to a Right Hand, and nobody told you.
Start with the translation. Larson's four archetypes map onto TPM work more cleanly than you might expect, with one caveat that I will come to.
The Tech Lead equivalent is the program lead who owns delivery for one team or a tight cluster of teams, partners closely with one manager and one product counterpart, and carries the context nobody else holds. It is the most common slot and often the first Staff-level role. The Architect equivalent is the person who owns a durable domain, such as release engineering, launch governance, or the planning process itself, and shapes its direction through earned authority and not through headcount. The Solver is the person leadership calls when a prioritized program is failing: they parachute in, resolve it, and move on, which gives them real impact and an unstable address. The Right Hand extends a senior executive's reach with borrowed authority, attends their staff meetings, and works problems that cross business, technology, people and process.
The caveat is that Larson described engineers, and TPM roles shift with the structure of the company. Justin Reidy, building on Larson in 2020, added a fifth archetype, the Community Organizer, for organizations with weak team structure, where a Right Hand's borrowed authority does not travel. His point generalizes: the archetype available to you depends on how the organization assigns ownership. In a strong-team org, work is tracked through teams and sprints, and the Tech Lead and Right Hand roles thrive. In a weak-team org, work follows individuals and relationships, and the Solver and Organizer roles do.
Now the practical consequence. Most people choose an archetype by temperament and then wonder why the promotion does not come. A better method is to read the organization first. Look at the last two or three promotions to your level or one above, in any function, and write down which archetype each person was actually playing. Not what their packet said, what they did. You will usually find that one or two archetypes account for nearly all of them. That is what the org knows how to recognize, fund and defend in a calibration room.
Then you have three honest options. You can lean into the archetype the org already rewards, which is the fastest path and often a good one. You can make the case for a second archetype, which is slower and needs a sponsor who will spend capital on it. Or you can move to an organization whose structure fits the archetype you want. What does not work is doing Solver work while hoping to be evaluated as a Right Hand, which is the most common failure I see in TPM careers, and which glue-work habits make easy.
There is also a market backdrop worth keeping in view. Mind the Product reported in June, using Live Data Technologies figures, that US tech PM headcount was down 28% from its 2022 peak, with management layers hit harder than senior individual contributors. In the Pragmatic Engineer conversation published this week, Larson argued that middle management has become precarious and that putting business problems first is now a baseline expectation at Staff+ levels. Read together: roles that translate organizational complexity into decisions are surviving, and roles that only relay it are not. Pick the archetype where your work visibly changes decisions.
Try this week. Write down the last three people promoted to your level or one above in your org, one line each, and tag the archetype each one was really playing. If two or more share a tag, that is your org's default slot. Take the page to your next 1:1 and ask your manager one question: "Which of these is my case closest to, and which one do you think I should be?"
What it is. A way to think about what a person wants from their next two years. Kim Scott describes two trajectories: gradual growth, where someone has mastered their craft and values stability and steady refinement, and steep growth, where someone learns fast and needs new challenges to stay engaged. Neither is better, and steep does not mean promotion or management; Scott notes many individual contributors stay on a steep trajectory their whole careers.
When to use it. When you are deciding which archetype to pursue, when you are about to take on a new role or program, and when you are managing or sponsoring TPMs and need to match them to work. It pairs well with the archetype read above, because it asks what you want from the role, not just whether the role exists.
How to run it:
When NOT to use it. Do not use it as a label to sort other people into fixed boxes, which Scott explicitly warns against, and do not use it to avoid a harder conversation about performance.
One-line example: a Staff TPM who loves being the person every cross-org launch depends on, and has no appetite for a director track, is on a gradual trajectory in an Architect-shaped job, and should say so before someone offers them a Solver rotation as a "growth opportunity."
The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson — Gergely Orosz interviews Larson on larger spans, precarious middle management and the shift toward business-first expectations at Staff+. Read it for the market signal behind your archetype choice.
What the data tells us about tech and PM layoffs in 2026 — Mind the Product's June analysis of headcount by level. Management layers shrank faster than senior ICs, which is useful context if a manager track is on your list.
Staff archetypes — Larson's original 2020 essay. Re-read it with the question "which of these does my org actually staff?" and not "which one am I?"
"Don't put people in boxes and leave them there."
— Radical Candor, on growth trajectories
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