My first real job was research engineering at Sun Laboratories. I built high-availability systems in C, and thought I knew where I was headed. Then I spent years writing Android apps. Then I led an Android team at a major bank. Then I ran seven cross-functional engineering teams at a fintech startup. Then I became Chief Innovation Officer at an HR technology company, gave keynotes across Europe, wrote a book, and started a podcast.
If you drew my career on paper, it would look like a toddler got hold of a pencil.
Not a ladder. A playground. I wouldn't trade it.
The Ladder Is a Story We Were Sold
We grow up learning one model for career success. Start at the bottom. Get promoted. Go up. Repeat. The goal is the corner office, the director title, the seat at the table.
Neat. Logical. And mostly fiction.
The ladder model made sense when industries were stable, companies lasted decades, and deep expertise in one domain was enough. Neither condition holds today.
Most people I know... including the most successful ones... do not have careers looking like a tidy progression. Their careers look like something spilled on a map.
The problem with the ladder is what it does to how you think. When you believe your career is a ladder, every sideways move feels like failure. Every role without a promotion feels like wasted time. You spend energy protecting your position instead of expanding your capability.
The ladder makes you afraid of the playground.
What the Research Says
Here is where it gets interesting.
A 2024 study published in Management Science, led by Matthew Bidwell of Wharton and J.R. Keller of Cornell, tracked employees at a large healthcare organization over eight years. People who made lateral moves... stepping sideways into different roles at the same level... were 20% more likely to be promoted within three to four years. They also saw 16% more salary growth over five years compared to peers who stayed in their lane.
Twenty percent. Sixteen percent. Not small numbers.
The researchers' finding: "the career benefits of lateral mobility stem from skill diversification rather than immediate job performance enhancement."
Your performance rating in the new role won't shoot up immediately. You're learning. But underneath, you're building breadth. And breadth is what senior roles require.
Cornell's follow-up research confirmed the mechanism: "upper level jobs use a wide but not necessarily deep set of skills, so a lateral move today will make the worker more productive in the future if the worker is promoted."
The ladder tells you to go deep. The playground rewards you for going wide.
My Own Spilled Map
When I moved from mobile development into cross-functional engineering management, I stepped sideways. I stopped writing code every day. Technical depth narrowed in exchange for organizational breadth.
It felt risky at the time. I was good at Android development. Walking away felt like giving something up.
What I gained was the ability to lead teams building products across platforms, manage stakeholders, read business dynamics, and understand the human side of delivery. Those skills are worth more than my ability to fix a RecyclerView bug.
When I later moved from engineering management into HR technology, nothing about it was a ladder move. A jump to a completely different playground. Every odd angle of my background became an asset. Systems thinking, people experience, product delivery instinct... the combination would not exist if I'd stayed on the ladder.
The detours were the education.
Breadth Is the Promotion Strategy Nobody Talks About
When you make a deliberate lateral move, you learn how a different part of the business thinks. You build relationships across functions. You see problems from angles you've never had before. You become the person who translates between worlds.
Senior leadership requires exactly this.
A senior director does not need to be the deepest expert in any one domain. They need to understand enough of everything to make good decisions, align people with different perspectives, and spot risk before it becomes a crisis.
Breadth builds this capacity. Depth alone doesn't.
So the question is not "will this move get me promoted?" The question is "will this move make me broader?" Broader leads to promoted. The data confirms it.
How to Play
If you're thinking of your career as a ladder, here's how to start treating it as a playground.
Say yes to cross-functional projects. If someone in a different department wants you involved in something outside your normal role, say yes. The short-term cost is time. The long-term gain is perspective and relationships.
Don't only optimize for title. A lateral move to a company with a better team, more interesting problems, or more organizational access is often worth more than a promotion at a company limiting you.
Take the role where you're not entirely sure you belong. Not the one where you're completely lost. The one where you think "I'm not sure I'm ready." Discomfort signals growth.
Stop comparing your path to someone else's. Ladder thinking creates comparison anxiety. You watch a colleague get promoted and feel behind. The playground doesn't work like this. Everyone's path looks different. The only question is whether yours is moving.
Talk to people in functions you don't understand. Spend time with finance, sales, operations, legal. You don't need to become an expert. You need to understand how they think and what they care about. Cross-functional knowledge compounds.
The Playground Is Not Chaos
Playing on the playground is not the same as wandering without direction.
Deliberate lateral moves are nothing like drifting. Every move I've made had logic to it, even when it wasn't visible at the time. Building technical depth first gave me credibility. Learning to manage teams gave me organizational understanding. Moving into HR technology let me apply all of it in a domain where people and systems intersect.
You need direction, even when the path is non-linear. The playground expands your range. It doesn't replace commitment.
Think of it like compound interest. Each move adds to the mix. Over time, the combination of experiences becomes unusual. Unusual is valuable.
Stop Waiting for Permission
The biggest thing holding people back from playground careers isn't opportunity. It's permission. Waiting for someone to say it's okay to step sideways. Worried about what peers will think. Afraid of looking like they're not serious about climbing.
Nobody is going to give you permission. You have to decide your career is yours to shape.
The ladder is someone else's story about how careers work. The playground is where you write your own.
What's the lateral move you've been talked out of?