Testing the Waters: Explore Career Paths Without Burning Bridges

The question I get asked most often isn’t about technical problems or specific tools. It’s this: “How do I know if I should go into management?” Or product. Or consulting. Or stay technical and aim for staff/principal roles, or go found a startup.

The honest answer? You probably don’t know until you try. But here’s the thing: you can try without making permanent decisions. You can test the waters before jumping in.

The Low-Stakes Experiment Approach

The best career decisions come from experience, not speculation. But how do you get that experience when you’re currently neck-deep in model training and pipeline debugging? Here are some ways to dip your toes in different waters:

Testing Management Waters

Start small with mentoring. Volunteer to mentor junior team members or interns. The skills overlap significantly-explaining complex concepts, providing feedback, helping someone work through problems. If you find yourself energized by their growth rather than frustrated by the time investment, that’s data.

Lead cross-functional projects. Look for opportunities to coordinate between teams. You’ll quickly learn if you enjoy the ambiguity, the stakeholder management, and the art of getting things done through influence rather than direct contribution. A huge part of leading teams is the work it takes to connect your team to others, this will be a big part of your day if you are a manager, so make sure you enjoy it. It won’t always be smooth, often it’s going to be conflict resolution, negotation, and stakeholder management.

Shadow your manager. Ask to sit in on leadership meetings, strategic planning sessions, or difficult conversations (with appropriate permissions). Most good managers are happy to share what their day actually looks like.

Exploring Product Paths

Get involved in requirements gathering. Start asking “why” questions about the features you’re building. Volunteer for user research sessions or customer calls. Product work is fundamentally about understanding problems before building solutions.

Write product specs for your data science work. Practice translating technical capabilities into business value. If you enjoy this translation layer, product might be calling.

The hardest part about transitioning from an IC to a product role is that you will no longer be in charge of the how. Find opportunities to give some advice or a suggestion and pay attention to how you react to it being ignored, are you ok with being one step removed from the implementation?

Consulting Experiences

Take on internal consulting projects. Look for opportunities to work with different business units on their data problems. The variety and client-facing aspects will give you a taste of consulting life.

Volunteer your skills for nonprofits. Organizations like DataKind offer ways to do short-term, high-impact projects that mirror consulting engagements.

Senior IC Exploration

Contribute to architecture decisions. Start thinking beyond your immediate project. How does your work fit into the broader technical strategy? Volunteer for technical design reviews.

Lead technical initiatives. Standards, tooling, best practices-these are the domains where senior ICs add value beyond individual contributor work.

The Reflection Framework

After each experiment, ask yourself honestly:

• What energized me about this work?
• What felt like a slog?
• Where did I add the most value?
• What would I want more or less of?
• How did this align with my natural strengths?

The Permission Structure

Here’s what I wish someone had told me: you don’t need anyone’s permission to start these experiments. You just need to be intentional about creating the opportunities and honest about evaluating your reactions.

The goal isn’t to find the “perfect” path-it’s to gather enough data to make an informed decision about your next step. And sometimes, the most valuable insight is confirming that you’re already on the right track.

Remember: people do their best work on things they are geninunely interested in, so your best path forward is usually the one that interests you most. Have a strong view on what that is.