I am a Developer turned Solution Architect. One pattern I saw in my career path is that a lot of experienced developers (including myself) find our career plateau out even though we are technically quite strong.

We are good at learning and delivery but career decisions are mostly reacting to opportunities. Lot of advice out there but what I needed was a hands-on system to help make routine decisions to pro-actively control my career path.

I built a lightweight "control system". Really a few markdown files in a GitHub repo. The idea is to work through to come up with a self guidance system that is unique for ourselves and is very tactical.

Core Idea: - 5 worksheets (baseline, leverage, direction, positioning, execution) - Everything feeds into one roadmap.md file - Read it weekly, update monthly, review quarterly

The system forces you to answer: 1. What am I optimizing for right now? 2. What are the things that actually get results? 3. What do I not want to do? 4. What is my current direction and bet? 5. What signals should I watch for to indicate a need for change?

I've templated it here: https://github.com/balaji-techascend/career-roadmap

Would genuinely appreciate feedback from other senior folks - what am I missing? What would make this more useful?