A career mapping tool for wherever you want to go — growing in your current role, changing direction, pivoting to a new industry, or building a side hustle.
Role
Product, System
Year
2026
Scope
Career Intelligence · Data Visualisation · Navigation
Arc
Navigate your career.
Approach
01
Map the full space
Growth, pivots, side hustles, industry changes — every plausible direction from where you are now, not just the next rung on the ladder you're already on.
02
Quantify the distance
Each path has a real cost: skills to build, credentials to earn, relationships to form. Arc makes those gaps legible whether you're levelling up or starting something new.
03
Surface the leverage
Which single move opens the most doors — regardless of direction? Arc finds the highest-optionality next step for where you actually want to go.
The idea
There's more than one way up.
Arc treats a career as a navigable space — growth tracks, lateral pivots, industry switches and side builds, all drawn from the same starting point, each with the gap between you and it made explicit. Not a ladder. A map.
01 — Career Map
Name the summit. See the routes.
Enter where you want to end up and where you're starting, and Arc plots the climb — every stage with two honest routes to it, because there's never only one way up.
1 / 5
What do you want to reach?
02 — Leverage Moves
One move. Maximum optionality.
Not the most obvious move — the most optionality-preserving one. Ranked by how many directions each action unlocks, whether you're growing, pivoting, or building something on the side.
01
Ship a 0→1 product end-to-end
Unlocks founding designer, CPO, and founder paths. The broadest signal you can send to the market.
opens 5 paths
02
Take a 90-day PM embed
Bridges design→product without leaving design. Cheapest way to earn a product credential that actually sticks.
opens 3 paths
03
Own a design system at scale
Strongest signal for principal and head-of-design tracks. Makes your impact legible across the whole org.
opens 2 paths
04
Manage an intern or junior hire
First management credential. Required gate for design manager and head-of-design paths — and easier to get than people think.
opens 2 paths
03 — Decisions
Three calls that shaped Arc
Decision 01
Up is the only direction
Considered
A horizontal timeline — careers flowing left to right, the way résumés read.
Chose
A vertical map where every path climbs, whatever its direction.
Because
People feel careers as altitude. Drawn sideways, a pivot reads as a detour; drawn upward it reads as progress — which is Arc's whole argument.
Decision 02
The map is gated
Considered
Showing a fully-populated demo tree the moment you land.
Chose
Asking for your role and a direction before drawing a single node.
Because
A map of someone else's career is furniture. Thirty seconds of investment makes the reveal personal — and personal is what makes it stick.
Decision 03
Ranked by doors, not dollars
Considered
Sorting recommended moves by expected comp increase.
Chose
Ranking by how many future paths each move unlocks.
Because
Mid-career compounding comes from optionality. Comp-sorted lists quietly steer people into well-paid dead ends.
04 — What’s next
Earning the right to draw the map
The hard problem isn’t drawing paths — it’s being honest about them. Every comp figure here is a modeled range and every timeline a probability, and the product should never pretend otherwise: ranges over point estimates, confidence shown on every map, and “we don’t know yet” as a legitimate answer for roles the data doesn’t cover. A career tool that’s occasionally uncertain and always honest beats one that’s always confident and sometimes wrong.
01· How I'd measure it
Discovery rate
% of users who shortlist a path they had not considered before mapping — the reason Arc exists.
02· How I'd measure it
Timeline calibration
Do moves labeled 1–2 yrs actually take 1–2 yrs? Honest estimates are a feature; drift is a bug to fix in the model.
03· How I'd measure it
Non-linear share
% of maps where the explored branch is a pivot, industry switch, or side build — not just the next rung.