The Box Model: A Framework for Role Clarity

I spent months as a Senior Staff Engineer before realizing nobody had clear and consistent expectations of what I should be doing. In leadership roles, everything becomes less defined. You’re responsible for shaping your own position and how you spend your time.

When I moved into a Senior Staff Engineer role at Shopify, I really felt this ambiguity. The official role description provided general guidelines, but they hardly mapped to what I spent my hours doing or what I got feedback on in Impact Reviews. I needed a way to define my own job - for my own clarity, and to agree on it with my new manager and peers.

Working with Shopify’s career coach (a great perk that more Shopifolk should take advantage of), I worked on defining my role more clearly.¹

I interviewed several other engineers in my new role and in the level above me. I asked them how they defined their role, what they spent their time on, and how they knew if they were successful. I found a lot of variation but as I summarized my notes, I found I started grouping traits into four sides.

From those sides, I developed a simple mapping framework that’s helped me and others figure out the exact responsibilities of a role and how to evolve it. It takes five minutes as a first pass, and you can keep refining it as you grow.

Draw Your Box

To understand any role (even my own), I started by asking: what would it take to replace this person? What doesn’t happen when they’re gone? As I described what they do and don’t do, a box emerged.

Left Side: Priorities

Write out your priorities and responsibilities. This is the input to your day: how you’re directed to fill your time. These come from company strategies, product initiatives, team goals. If you don’t know these like the back of your hand, your next meeting should focus on clarifying them. It’s your lead’s critical responsibility that you know these like your own name.

At levels of leadership, you have control over these priorities. You should be able to articulate them clearly and negotiate them as needed. If you can’t, you’re not in a leadership role yet. You can spend more or less time on this “Left Side” - thinking about and agreeing on priorities - depending on your appetite and the organization’s needs. But priorities don’t really affect change until acted on, so this side is only half the equation.

Right Side: Output

Write out what you’re actually spending your time doing. This is your output, your impact, the actual work. Look at your calendar, your commits, your reviews, your shipped changes, your mentoring, your 1:1s. Writing something hand-wavy will impede yourself because you won’t see the gap between priorities and activities.

On my first pass at the “Right Side,” I actually mapped out calendar time according to categories of work I was doing every day. I did this for about a month, then averaged it out. This gave me a clear picture of where my time was going, and I could see the gaps between what I thought I was doing and what I was actually doing. I was spending way more time in interviews than I thought, and way less time on strategic thinking.

Bottom Side: Delegation

Write out what you’re not doing, shouldn’t be doing, or have delegated. This is the distinction between your current role and what you used to do, or what team members below you handle. If you’re having trouble filling this side, look at what people one level below you spend their time on. There should be clear differences.

You can also clearly identify things you don’t want to delegate. For example, many Senior Staff Engineers are not in on-call rotations. I specifically agreed with my manager that I remain in rotation so that I stay connected to the product and team and pain points. This is a conscious trade-off of my time, at the expense of other things I could be doing.

Top Side: Reaching

Write out what you see others above you doing, or what you want to be doing but haven’t been given responsibility for yet. This is your growth edge. These are things you can practice and try; things that, once you do them well, will necessarily pull you up to the next level of scope.

For me, this includes things like cross-org prototyping, writing org strategy, and being vocal at the company level. I now allot time in my calendar to work on these things, or ask for stretch assignments that let me practice them. I also look for people above me doing these things and take notes on how they do them.

Using Your Box as a Map

I took this map of my role and wrote it up as a document. It is very specific about how I expect to spend my time, what I prioritize, what I delegate, and what I’m reaching for. I share it with my manager and peers to get their feedback and agreement. This way, we all have a shared understanding of my role and how they can complement it and where I might try to reach.

Once drawn, this box becomes a lens: a map of where you are and where to go. I update mine regularly, whenever org strategy shifts, or when I feel lost. Armed with my box, I have no ambiguity going into impact reviews or 1:1s. I can clearly articulate what I’m doing, why, and where I want to go.

If you draw your current box and don’t like its shape, you need to focus on moving/shaping the box by change one or more of those sides.

Moving to a New Box

Want to move into a new role? You can use this framework two ways:

• Proactively: Map out the box you want to fill, then start doing that work
• Retroactively: Map your current activities and discover you’ve already moved into a new box—best to recognize it and formalize it

Either way, for you to take that position (move into a ‘new box’), the organization must have a gap shaped like that box. You need to align with everyone that:

1. The gap exists
2. You’re already doing work shaped like that box
3. You’re the best person to fill it

Reshaping Your Current Box

Want to change your current role? Focus on moving one or more sides:

• Push the top up by taking on stretch responsibilities
• Pull the bottom up by delegating more effectively
• Shift the left side by renegotiating priorities
• Align the right side by changing how you spend your time

Remember: the box’s total area is generally constant. We only have so many hours in the day. Reaching upward (raising the top edge) requires delegating more (raising the bottom edge). The trade-off exists side-to-side too: spending more time defining priorities (moving left) means less time for productive output (pulling from the right).

Start Drawing

The box is zero-zum but your impact shouldn’t be. Good leaders need to be striving for positive-sum work at all times. By default, time flows like a stream: constantly away from us. The leadership challenge is planting seeds in that box instead of letting effort flow away.

Take five minutes and sketch your box. You might be surprised by the gaps between what you think the shape is and what you actually draw out. More importantly, they might explain why your last review felt off, why you’re exhausted, or where you need to focus next.