Cross-post: Four (and a half) Frames for Thinking About Ownership

Although I left 80k a while ago, writing this recent post for my blog felt like it ended up collecting a bunch of different pieces of career advice I've noticed and shared over the last few years. I think this advice is often going to be especially relevant in roles focused on impact, where the work is often ambiguous and success criteria aren't always clear, so it seemed worth cross-posting here.

Claude summarises the post as follows, though I'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

Ownership means taking responsibility for your work – both for its overall quality, but also for whether it's the right work to be doing at all. It's a key factor in career progression and explicitly one of Open Phil's operating values, but descriptions of ownership often don't feel action-guiding.

In the post, I break down ownership into four (and a half) distinct frames:

1. Ownership as manager leverage - Maximizing the ratio of your output to your manager's effort, making interactions efficient and making yourself legible
2. Ownership as default intellectual labour - Taking on more of the cognitive work in communication, providing context, structuring questions, and anticipating needs
3. Ownership as justified autonomy & trust - Being well-calibrated about when to make decisions independently versus when to check in, focused on developing good judgment
4. Ownership as project managing poorly-scoped work - Identifying appropriate end-states, creating systems to track progress, and taking responsibility for rescoping

The half: A note on LLMs - Using LLMs well requires demonstrating high ownership in how you interact with them, determining what questions to ask and how to evaluate responses.