The two words holding your career back

"Think bigger." You just got this feedback. Maybe in a 1:1. Maybe in your performance review. Maybe your skip-level said it casually enough that you almost missed it.

You didn't miss it. It stuck. Because you know it's not good, but you have no idea what to do with it.

Or maybe you haven't heard it yet. But if you're heads-down executing, shipping great work, and still not seeing the career movement you expected, this is the feedback that's coming. Better to fix it before it lands on your review than to spend the next two quarters trying to recover from it.

Here's the problem: "think bigger" is not actionable advice. It's a diagnosis. It means you're operating at the wrong altitude for the level they're evaluating you at. And most people hear it, feel the sting, then go back to doing exactly what they were doing before because nobody told them what to do differently.

This is what to do differently. Starting now.

Most people fail here because they treat vague feedback as motivational instead of diagnostic. They hear "think bigger" and start generating more ideas, pitching bolder projects, or trying to sound more strategic in meetings.

None of that is what they're asking for.

What they're actually telling you is: the scope of the problems you're solving doesn't match the scope of the role you want.

And until you understand what altitude they need to see you at, you'll keep getting the same feedback cycle after cycle.

The Altitude Problem

Every organization has layers. The work at each layer looks fundamentally different, not just in scale, but in kind.

At the individual contributor level, the question is: "Can you solve this problem well?"

At the senior level, the question becomes: "Can you identify which problems are worth solving?"

At the staff or principal level, it shifts again: "Can you reshape the problem space so your team solves the right problems by default?"

When your manager says "think bigger," they're telling you your answers are landing one layer below where they need to be. You're delivering excellent solutions to problems someone else identified. They need to see you identifying the problems.

This is why the feedback feels so vague. They're not asking you to do more of the same thing at a larger scale. They're asking you to do a fundamentally different kind of thinking. And most of them don't know how to articulate the difference, so they say "think bigger" and hope you figure it out.

Most people don't.

The Tactical Trap

Here's why this feedback keeps showing up at every level, including for people who should know better: tactical work feels productive.

Clearing your inbox. Reviewing PRs. Unblocking your team. Optimizing campaign performance. Every one of these things is useful. Every one of them gives you a small dopamine hit of completion. And every one of them keeps you pinned to your current altitude. The engineer debugs production issues instead of asking why the architecture keeps producing the same class of bugs. The PM runs stakeholder syncs instead of developing a point of view on whether the roadmap solves the right problem. The marketing lead cranks out content instead of questioning whether the positioning still holds. All three are busy. All three are productive. None of them are operating at the altitude that gets them promoted.

The trap isn't laziness. It's the opposite. The most driven people are the most susceptible because they optimize for output. They measure their day by what they got done. And tactical work always has a clear "done."

Strategic work doesn't. Thinking about whether your team is solving the right problem doesn't produce a deliverable by end of day. Developing a point of view on a tradeoff your leadership is navigating doesn't show up in your task tracker. Reframing a quarterly goal doesn't feel like work at all.

So people default to what feels productive. Senior leaders do this too. Directors spend entire quarters in execution mode because execution has clear feedback loops and strategy doesn't. VPs sit in reviews all day because being in the room feels like leadership. The urgent crowds out the important at every level.

This is the real reason "think bigger" feedback recurs. It's not that people can't think at a higher altitude. It's that the daily gravity of tactical work pulls them back down before they get any reps at the higher level. You have to actively protect time for altitude, or the calendar will eat it.

Nobody drifts into strategic thinking. You have to fight your way there.

What "Think Bigger" Actually Sounds Like at Each Level

This is the translation guide nobody gives you.

If you're an IC trying to get to senior:

"Think bigger" means stop waiting for your manager to define the problem. When you get a project, they don't want to see just the solution. They want to see that you understood the context around it. Why does this project matter right now? What happens if it succeeds? What does it connect to?

The tell: You're doing great work on well-scoped tasks, but you never redefine the task based on what you learned while doing it. You execute the spec even when the spec is wrong.

If you're senior trying to get to staff:

"Think bigger" means your impact is still bounded by what you personally touch. They need to see you changing how the team operates, not just shipping harder projects. Are you creating frameworks other people use? Are you influencing technical decisions you're not directly responsible for?

The tell: Look at your last self-review or promo packet. Count how many wins require you to be personally involved to keep working. If you disappeared for a month and every impact you described would stop, you're still the engine. They need to see you as the architect.

If you're at staff trying to get to principal or director:

"Think bigger" means you're still solving problems within the current framing. They need to see you questioning the framing. Why are we building this product this way? What would we do if we had twice the resources? Half? What are the second-order effects of our current architecture on what we can build in two years?

The tell: Your proposals are always good. They're never surprising. Leadership wants to see you change their mind about something.

Why the Usual Responses Fail

Here's what most people do when they hear "think bigger." All of it is wrong.

Response one: pitch a bigger project. You go back to your desk and write a proposal for something ambitious. A platform rewrite. A new feature area. A cross-team initiative. This feels like thinking bigger because the scope is larger. But scope isn't altitude. A bigger project at the same altitude is just more work. Leadership doesn't want you to do more. They want you to see differently.

Response two: start making strategic-sounding statements in meetings. You begin prefacing your comments with "from a strategic perspective" or "if we zoom out." People can tell. This reads as cosplaying a level above you rather than operating at it. The difference between someone who is strategic and someone who talks about strategy is visible in about four seconds.

Response three: ask your manager what "think bigger" means. This is the closest to useful, but the phrasing is wrong. Most managers will give you a vague answer because they don't have a concrete one. The feedback was itself an observation, not a prescription.

The right question isn't "what does think bigger mean?" It's: "What decisions are being made at the level above me, and what would it look like if I were influencing those decisions?"

That reframes the entire conversation from abstract feedback to concrete positioning.

The Actual Fix

Here's what works instead. It's not a mindset shift. It's a behavior change that creates visible evidence.

Step one: map the decisions above you.

Every level in an organization has a set of recurring decisions. Your manager's level has them. Your skip-level's level has them. Figure out what they are. Which projects get funded? How is headcount allocated? What gets prioritized on the roadmap? What tradeoffs are being made between speed and quality?

You don't need insider access. You need to pay attention. Quarterly planning docs, all-hands presentations, leadership updates, the questions your skip-level asks in reviews. All of this reveals the decision landscape one level up.

Step two: start forming positions on those decisions before you're asked.

This is where most people stall. They understand the decisions above them but wait to be invited into the conversation. Don't wait. Develop a point of view on the tradeoffs your leadership is navigating. You don't need to share it immediately. You need to have it.

When someone asks you about your project and you can connect it to a decision being made two levels up, not in a performative way, but because you've actually thought about it, that's what "thinking bigger" looks like in practice.

Step three: ship something that solves a problem nobody assigned you.

Not a pet project. Not a side quest. Identify a problem that exists at the altitude above you and do something about it. This might be a doc that reframes a tradeoff your team keeps debating. A prototype that answers a question leadership is asking. An analysis that makes a decision easier for your skip-level.

The fastest way to be seen as operating at the next level is to do work that only someone at the next level would think to do.

The Signal Test

Here's how you know you've actually made the shift.

Before: your manager gives you context about why your project matters, and you execute well.

After: your manager asks you to explain why something matters to someone two levels up, and your explanation matches theirs.

Before: your self-review is a list of things you shipped.

After: your self-review describes how the things you shipped changed what the team or org is capable of.

Before: you get "think bigger" feedback.

After: you get asked your opinion on decisions that used to be made without you in the room.

That last one is the real signal. When people start pulling you into conversations you weren't previously invited to, you've changed your altitude. Not because you asked to be included, but because your thinking made you relevant.

The Bottom Line

"Think bigger" is not motivation. It's a gap analysis.

It means the work you're doing is good but the level you're operating at is wrong. And no amount of harder execution at the current altitude closes that gap.

The people who break through don't just work on bigger problems. They start seeing problems that are invisible at their current level. They develop positions before they're asked. They do work that makes the decision-making above them easier, better, or different.

Most people hear "think bigger" and try harder. The ones who get promoted hear it and start looking up.

Same feedback. Completely different response.

~ Warbler