Leverage Maps #24: The Feedback That Redirected My Career

Two years ago, a tech lead pulled me aside after a peer review. I’d been pushing hard for more leadership responsibilities. I was convinced that I was ready for the next level.

“You’re sharp,” he said, “but if you want to confidently lead projects, you need time in the trenches first. Your technical foundation needs to deepen.”

It stung, and I wanted to argue. I told myself leadership is learned by doing, and that my systems thinking was already strong enough.

But something in his tone cut through. I didn’t fight back, and I listened. And the uncomfortable truth was that he was right. I was rushing and optimizing for title velocity instead of competence depth by trying to skip steps.

So I shifted. I buried myself in embedded systems by debugging hairy integration issues, grinding through design tradeoffs, and building intuition that only comes from repeated failure and eventual success.

That feedback reshaped me. When I lead technical discussions now, I’m not speaking from a place of theory. I’m speaking from lessons learned through lived experiences.

The Leverage Map Looking back, the system was simple but invisible to me at the time:

Stock: Career Credibility (the trust others place in your leadership and judgment). Flow #1: Competence Depth Rate — grows credibility slowly, but it compounds. Flow #2: Title Velocity Rate — grows perceived authority quickly, but it erodes when challenged without depth.

The external, peer feedback was the lever that redirected my energy from chasing title velocity to compounding competence depth. The small redirection that was painful in the moment changed the slope of my career trajectory.

Now that I’m pursuing roles with both technical depth and leadership responsibilities, I’ve come to deeply appreciate that advice. The credibility I built in the trenches is exactly what helps my leadership land.

Sometimes the feedback that hurts most is exactly the lever you need to hear.

What difficult feedback bent your trajectory?