I think of turning points as major milestones in your career. They’re often combined with a turbo boost of performance or experience that takes you to the next level. I’ve experienced a few of these over the course of my career, and sometimes they were associated with a promotion.

At Meta, I experienced a turning point when I was deciding between IC and manager. I was hired as a manager and was considering whether people management or product leadership was where I was best suited. Over and over, I told myself, “I should be a manager.” This played on repeat through most of my career, even outside of Meta. However, there’s a bit of poison in that sentence: the word “should.” Psychologists, therapists and career coaches teach us that “should” is a harmful word — it sets us up for pursuing something that might not be best for us.

Shifting out of this mindset is really hard. Outside of Meta, the career ladder looks something like this: You start as an intern, gain experience doing IC work and then graduate into management, where you’re often heading up product ownership, strategy and team growth.

I was on that path as a manager at Meta, looking toward a director role. But something didn’t feel right. At our company, managers are primarily tasked with growing people’s careers, improving team health and evangelizing the team’s work. Managers (at least content design managers) do more people management and less direct product work.

Looking at the management path, something felt missing in it. I knew I was most passionate about going deep into a product and pushing the work, building a strategy and helping teams move to achieve that strategy. And as I considered this director role, I saw myself managing managers and getting farther away from being able to do this. I felt that I should remain on the manager track in order to succeed, but this was a mental trap.

I had to figure out what was strengthening for me. Ultimately, an opportunity opened, and I became the first full-time content designer on Meta Portal, a smart video-calling device and the company’s first homegrown hardware product. After 2 years on the Meta Portal team, I was promoted to director.

I grew a lot once I began working as an IC again. IC leadership looks different than management leadership because the former allows for deeper intimacy with your subject, product or practice. This lets you lead in a different, complementary way to how a people manager might lead. Here’s what I was able to do in this new role:

Build crucial relationships.

I made it a priority to be active and present with cross-functional product owners and leaders across teams to ensure consistency with the Meta company brand. To do this, I leveraged relationship-building skills I gained from my time in management at Meta and previous roles. To position myself as a leader on the team, I built relationships with people who ended up in leadership positions as our team evolved. I made sure to tend to these relationships as the team grew.

Stretch into general UX leadership.

Moving into general user experience (UX) leadership meant growing product design, content design, research teams and product formation. I helped define the product and identify what success looked like. And when priorities shifted, I was able to step in to keep us on goal.

Move fast within a lot of shifting priorities.

Because I had already earned the trust and respect of cross-functional leaders, I was able to step into ambiguous or friction-filled situations to drive and influence strategic and tactical decisions.

Create foundational standards.

I set standards for what cross-functional teams could expect from content and product design and helped them see the value of our work. I also set standards for UX patterns, terms and principles that helped guide cross-functional teams and the designers who would some day join those teams.

As you progress into senior IC leadership, the ways you grow might look different from mine, but you’ll use your deep, discipline-specific knowledge to start influencing change on a larger scale.

As you level up, the work doesn’t necessarily get harder. What does get harder is managing critical relationships and working through the roadblocks. You can start to see this when you begin growing out of your mid-level contributor role. At that point, you start to have a wider impact on your peers and cross-functional leads. And when you become more senior, you’re expected to have direct influence on product strategy, product quality, product success and team operations.

Succeeding as a senior IC is less about tactical skills and more about core leadership skills. That’s the big difference in leveling up. You'll be asked: Have you earned the trust and partnership of your cross-functional leaders? Have you helped the team become more efficient and aligned to goals? Are you representing and pushing for the highest standards? These are the aspects you’ll be held to in your evaluation.

After you’ve done your homework, how do you know you’re starting to operate as a more senior IC?

You own and solve the hardest problems.

I think a lot of people assume this means new products, but it doesn’t. Hard problems are problems the company is facing that are affecting our audiences, business or internal tools.

You thrive in ambiguity.

We talk a lot about thriving in ambiguity during interviews with candidates. This becomes even more important as you level up, especially how you help teams through it. It’s important to be able to help others find their way in uncertain situations.

You consistently offer good judgment.

Applying good judgment applies to both design and business strategy, and it also means educating people on your decision-making process. People need you to provide more holistic recommendations and thinking and to walk them through those ideas.

You help teams simplify and stay on goal.

You get teams to focus on the meat of the problem they’re trying to solve. This is 90 percent of what design leaders do.

You wrangle cross-functional players to get things done.

You connect people, rally troops and prioritize and focus on helping the team move forward, all while producing high-quality work.

You’re a strong voice of escalation.

You speak out when things are going awry or when your team isn’t building something in the best interests of our audiences. This tactic requires strong relationships with top leadership, which is why it’s best to continuously nurture these relationships. To be effective, people need to trust you when you offer feedback, ideas or solutions. In regard to building relationships, I often hear people say, “I had a meeting with that person. It must all be good now.” But once isn’t enough — just like you wouldn’t water your garden once and expect it to thrive, you shouldn’t expect your relationships to thrive without care either.

You represent the highest standards.

You go beyond creating standards. You enforce them and educate partners about why they matter. This is a core distinction between IC leaders and managers — IC leaders are intimately involved in product work and can — and should — influence and drive quality day-to-day, while also ensuring cross-functional partners understand why this is necessary and what to expect.

You influence the roadmap.

You tend relationships with key leaders and influence where your product or service is going. To influence this trajectory, it’s important to speak up often and make yourself visible. Position yourself as a lead and knowledge keeper at all-hands meetings, publish internal notes and share strategies and points of view. Sometimes you may feel like you don’t have the “right” to do this — whether it’s because of your tenure or discipline — but this is where you have to “just do it.” Make yourself influential and you will be.

You influence team structure.

Quality can’t be achieved if teams aren’t running efficiently or collaborating effectively. You might think this is something for project managers and engineers to figure out, but it’s key to how you’ll ultimately influence product quality and output. Design leaders push back on team structure that’s causing ineffective design practice and represent their discipline to show how that work gets done. Again, this is not only a manager’s job. You can certainly partner with your manager here, but it’s also something that you can confidently drive and escalate.

You help others grow in their career.

You’ve been in the shoes of your early-career colleagues, so you’ll often have ideas on how to guide them. In meetings, you’re open to helping them work through problems. You may also volunteer to lead panels or give talks on how early-career contributors can improve.

You facilitate the best collaborative thinking.

You know how to get people to generate ideas, synthesize them and articulate them so that they are actionable. And you create space to make this happen.

You pull people together to solve problems for the company.

As an early-career or mid-level IC, you’re often solving micro-level problems for which you (or your small team) are responsible. But as you grow, you become attuned to more macro-level problems whose solutions require multidisciplinary thinking. And sometimes, you might be one of the few, if not only, people who know who else needs to be “in the room.”

Those last two imperatives get at helping teams motivate and produce great results. Some people may think that being an IC leader is about solely identifying a problem and solving it solo. But it’s not. It’s about solving together for the benefit of the company, the product and our audiences.