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👨‍🏫 Understanding the 5 Levels of Ambiguity

Why does it matter?

As you progress in your career, ambiguity becomes less of an obstacle and more of an opportunity.

Mastering ambiguity is essential as you progress in your career. Whether it’s executing a predefined plan or navigating uncharted territory.

The better you get at handling the unknown, the more valuable you become. 

But to thrive, you need to recognize the different levels of ambiguity you’ll face and how they evolve as you progress through your career.

Ambiguity Expands Throughout Your Career

When I got my first “tech job”, I was still a university student.

It was an on-campus job as a manual Quality Assurance Analyst. I received user stories from either the dev team or directly from customers. Our software was a simple people management tool for one of the schools within the University.

Needless to say, the ambiguity was extremely low.

Everything was spelled out for me! Start here, click X, scroll down to Y, enter ABC, record the result. It was tedious work, but provided valuable bug information back to the dev team. (Eventually I automated all this with a UI script runner, but that isn’t the point of this post).

Although it was tedious, it is was an appropriate level of work for me since I brought zero technical skills to the table, but I pitched myself as detail oriented and ambitious to learn software development. The pay matched the level of complexity: low.

Fast forward to my career today and my interaction with ambiguity is far different.

For example, one of my “TPM Wins” in the past 12 months was this: Successfully leading teams to stand up Disaster Recovery capabilities for some of our cloud products.

This was a wildly different experience from my first day as a QA Analyst!

We knew we needed multi-region Disaster Recovery capabilities. But we didn’t know the problems or obstacles to even get there. It was a only a dream.

There wasn’t clarity around how to solve those unknown problems or who should be involved. We knew it would be big as is spanned every team from low-level infrastructure to top-level product teams.

All the details were totally ambiguous.

This got me thinking: As I level up in your career, how does the level of ambiguity shift? How would I describe the evolution of ambiguity?

Breaking down Ambiguity into 5 Levels

As you grow throughout your career, you’ll see a natural evolution around the types and intensity of Ambiguity you’ll face. Starting with level 1 (low ambiguity) and moving to level 5 (high ambiguity).

• Level 1: Execute

• Level 2: Align

• Level 3: Solve

• Level 4: Investigate

• Level 5: Discover

Each one builds on the previous.

Level 1: Execute

At this level, the task is straightforward: the problem is clear, the solution is defined, and the key players are already identified. As a Technical Program Manager, your role here is to drive execution. There’s no need for brainstorming or troubleshooting. You’re essentially handed a playbook, and it’s up to you to make sure the team sticks to it and delivers on time.

Level 2: Align

In this scenario, you know the problem and the solution, but the team isn’t fully in place. As a Technical Program Manager, your focus is on identifying and rallying the right people to ensure alignment. You’ll need to figure out who has the skills, influence, or resources to make the solution happen. Once you’ve assembled the team, it’s about keeping everyone aligned and moving toward the end goal.

Level 3: Solve

Here, the problem is clear, but the solution isn’t. As a Technical Program Manager, you’re expected to take a step back and generate potential solutions. This is where your problem-solving and analytical skills come into play. You’ll work with stakeholders to brainstorm, evaluate options, and create a solid plan. Once the solution is defined, it’s up to you to build the right team and lead the execution.

Level 4: Investigate

At this level, the problem itself is vague, and you’re tasked with getting to the root of it and driving the solution to completion with the right people onboard. As a Technical Program Manager, you need to dig deep—analyze data, interview stakeholders, and collaborate with different teams to uncover what’s really causing the issue. Once you’ve diagnosed the problem, your next job is to propose solutions, form the right team, and ensure everything gets executed effectively.

Level 5: Discover

This is the most ambiguous scenario—you know there’s an opportunity to improve, but the specific problems aren’t even clear yet. As a Technical Program Manager, you’re in exploration mode. You’ll need to discover: assess the landscape, identify the biggest challenges, and figure out where to make the most impact. Once you’ve uncovered the issues, it’s time to devise solutions, build a team, and drive the project to completion.

Clarifying Ambiguity Improves Situational Awareness

This specific post doesn’t intend to tell you exactly how to handle each of these levels of ambiguity.

But the first step in becoming a high impact Technical Program Manager is growing your situational awareness. If you can’t articulate the type or source of ambiguity that associated with each program or project you drive, you may struggle to deliver clarity and make progress.

As you read through the levels above, compare them to your current projects. What level do they fall into? What can that teach you about your highest value contributions to the project?

📧 Perhaps we can dive into these levels in a future email with added depth of “tactics and strategies to handle each level”. Reply directly to this email if you think that would helpful content in the future!

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People

🤝 Arpit Shah, TPM @ Google

I’ve been following Arpit for a while now and we’ve interacted via comments on some of his great posts on LinkedIn. He regularly shares fantastic insights of his experience as a TPM, and how to improve your own skills as a TPM.

If you’re looking to increase the amount of TPM content on your LinkedIn feed, Arpit is a great person to follow!

Here’s one of his latest posts on Imposter Syndrome as a TPM:

Resources

🎉 TPM Summit, TOMORROW!

Don’t forget — The TPM Summit is TOMORROW!

Hear from incredible speakers from top companies such as:

• Jen Krieger: VP of Engineering Operations @ GitHub

• Lyly Ly: Sr Dir of RnD Operations @ Shopify

• Aman Bawa: Sr. Dir. TPM @ Salesforce

• Jane Chiu: Engineering Chief of Staff @ Coda

You can attend in-person or remotely.