After the Ladder

Late one night I was rewriting a single push notification. It was the one BetterKey sends after it notices you have walked away from your car and locks it for you. The message is one short line. I had been at it for an hour. Should it name the feature, or just say what happened? Should it sound reassuring or matter of fact? At some point I realized I had spent more time on those eleven words than I would have spent on the code that triggers them.

A few years ago that would have struck me as a misallocation. The strange part is that I was enjoying it.

I started BetterKey thinking of myself as a mobile engineer who happened to be running a company. Two years in, that picture is harder to draw. I spend long stretches in places that have very little to do with engineering. Copywriting. Positioning. Pricing. The hours I used to spend designing systems I now sometimes spend on a single onboarding paragraph or a single line of ad copy.

And the parts of me that used to want to push back on that are getting quieter.

I am not just doing this work because I have to. I am getting better at it. And I am finding that I like it.

That has been a surprise. I expected the non-engineering parts of running a company to be tolerated, the way you tolerate paperwork. Some of it is that. But more of it is genuinely interesting. The question of which two screenshots make a stranger tap install is a different shape than the question of how to build a reliable background task, but it is not a lesser one. It has its own rigor, its own taste, its own feedback loops. There are people who are very good at it. I want to be one of them.

For most of my career, growth was legible. There was a ladder. Larger systems. More scope. Broader influence. Senior to staff to principal. Each rung had a shape I could describe and a version of myself I could picture standing on it. I knew what I was working toward even when I was not actively thinking about it.

I also knew when I was doing well. There was one system grading me. Code reviews, design reviews, performance reviews, promotion committees. The signals pointed in the same direction. I trusted the verdict because the verdict was singular.

Both of those are gone now.

Today my growth is harder to plot. A week on App Store keywords. A week on partnership conversations. A week deep in pricing. Each of them teaches me something real. None of them belong to a clean career narrative. Some weeks I am not sure how to tell whether I am getting better.

At first the change showed up in places that still looked familiar. When I was evaluating a vehicle telematics integration, the engineering analysis was the easier part. Which makes and models. How long the access tokens last. The harder questions were about pricing, exclusivity, and how much I wanted my company downstream of a single vendor’s roadmap. Two analyses, two answers. I could see how they conflicted, and I could weigh them against each other. That was still a familiar shape of problem, even when I was new at it.

I have traded problems with cleaner answers for problems with more leverage.

Most of what I do now is not even shaped like that trade.

I spent months on trademark work. Filing applications. Choosing classes. Responding to office actions from an examiner I will never speak to. Deciding which marks to defend and which to let go. None of it is engineering. Almost none of it is business in the sense the telematics decision was. It is its own world. Part legal, part branding, part product strategy, part patience. Progress arrives in pieces weeks apart. There is no review cycle, no test that goes green, no partner replying within the hour. Most weeks the only signal is the absence of a problem.

It is also some of the work I have grown the most through. Not because it is difficult in the way engineering can be difficult, but because there is no version of me from five years ago who would have known how to do it well, and there is no obvious label for what I have learned. It is not a developer skill. It is not exactly a founder skill either. It is some third thing.

The same has happened around the App Store. I spent a stretch picking screenshots and rewriting captions. The version I would have shipped a year ago, the one that showed off the most features, would have lost. One morning I sat with two of the new ones in front of me and tried to decide which was better. I noticed I was reaching for the kind of decision I would have made about a code change. Cleaner. More correct. Easier to defend. None of those words applied. I picked one. I am still not sure if it was the right one.

I shipped no code that week. The engineer in me would have called it a bad week. The founder in me knew it was one of the better ones.

I spent another stretch inside Apple Search Ads, reading through keywords. “Lock car remotely.” “Forgot to lock car.” “Smart lock.” I started by treating them like feature requests I could sort and rank. Somewhere in the middle of that I was already reading them differently. “Forgot to lock car” is a small panic. “Remote lock API” is a feature nobody is in panic about. I did not have a stable way to decide which reading was the right one. I kept moving between them while I went.

None of that work shows up on an engineering ladder. No one is going to promote me for getting better at copywriting. And yet I am getting better at it, the company is better for it, and so, I think, am I.

I notice this most at the end of the week. The work is real. I can feel the hours in it. But the week does not point in a single direction. It points in several at once. I do not always know whether that is forward motion or just motion.

I still call myself an engineer. I still write code most weeks. I still get a particular satisfaction from a clean implementation that no marketing decision has ever given me. That part of me is not going anywhere.

But it is smaller than it was. The long unbroken afternoons inside a hard technical problem, the ones that used to be the best parts of my week, happen less often now. The word is doing less work than it used to. It used to describe everything I did and most of how I thought about myself. Now it describes one slice. The rest of what I do is real, and it is real growth, and I do not yet have a single word for it.

I expected the loss of a legible path to feel like drifting. It does, a little. Less than I would have guessed, but more than nothing. The unfamiliar part is not the absence of direction. It is the absence of a single system that tells me whether I am moving in a good one.

What it actually feels like is having walked off the edge of a map that was always smaller than I realized. There is no rung above me. There is also no ceiling. I am learning faster than I have in years, in more directions than I have in years, and what I am learning is shaping me in ways the ladder never would have.

I have been calling myself a founder, but founder is a role, not an identity, and the role will end one day.

I have started to wonder what happens if this continues to work. Not in a success sense. In a structural one. The things I have been getting good at do not map cleanly to a role I know how to return to. The identity question does not resolve on the upside either.

I think I am okay with that. Most weeks.

More and more of my growth is happening in directions that have little to do with engineering. I do not yet have a name for what that makes me.

I only know I like who I am becoming.