Is a job a bundle of tasks?
A baker, bakes. A teacher, teaches. A designer, designs. These jobs have verbs attached to them, and that verb tells you roughly what a person's day might look like.
But many jobs simply don't give you that viewpoint. I'm a product manager. A product manager... manages products. What?
"Manage" could mean anything. "Product" is even vaguer. I've always felt it's an odd title, mis-calibrated with the reality of how I spend my days. When I tell friends or family about work, I always feel the need to explain my job.
I was out for a run the other day listening to Marc Andreessen on Lenny's Podcast. He set out his views on jobs and the future of work with the onset of AI:
"The atomic unit of what happens in the workplace is the task. A job is a bundle of tasks."
I jotted this idea down and I've been turning it over in my head since. I agree with him, I think - you could definitely define jobs as bundles of tasks. But that's not all they are.
Titles, tasks, and what's in between
- Job title. Carries information about what you do (roughly) - your training, skills, perhaps even your personality. On its own it doesn't mean much (e.g. you could have an impressive title like "Head of Strategy" with nothing meaningful to do).
- Tasks. A describable thing that gets done, probably a verb (research, write, map, decide, present) rather than skills (communication), attributes (diligent) or responsibilities (accountable for Food Safety Standards).
- What's in between. Context, judgement, empathy, authority, experience. Things that connect a discrete set of tasks into a job.
Think about the baker. They buy ingredients, combine them, mix and prove dough, bake things, sell them, clean up. Those are tasks. But they also just know when the dough is ready, get a sense the mixer might need replacing next year, and notice when a regular changes their order - then check if they're OK.
The bundles aren't fixed
Task bundles overlap. A designer, a business analyst and a product manager might all write, facilitate and present. Your bundle probably overlaps with more roles than you think.
Tasks shift about while titles stick. Imagine our baker starts selling online. Suddenly, they need to photograph bread, write product descriptions, package orders and arrange deliveries. Maybe they invest in a new dishwasher and hire a cleaner to free up the time - their bundle has changed - but they don't stop being a baker.
Some of that shifting around will just happen to you: new technology, organisational change, life circumstances. But you can deliberately reshape your bundle, too.
You can double down on a task you're unusually good at. You can deliberately find ways to spend less time on something you're not. You can add something that plugs an obvious gap, or something more tangential that creates an unusual combination (illustration + product management, public speaking + accounting, photography + baking).
Over time, those choices not only shape the job you're doing right now - but your whole career.