Ideal Job Description
Your concrete aim — the target you actually want to hit.
Your concrete aim — the job target. It takes the abstract ideas, vague aspirations, and subconscious drivers from your design work and states them plainly enough to shoot at. It's built to be fluid: you'll refine it against real market feedback, then refine it again. Everything here is sketching.
Every step has one honest line — a sketch, not a spec. That's the whole assignment. A finished job description at this stage would be a guess wearing a suit; the market research ahead is what earns it the details. If you only get through Step 1 today, you have a target your brain can see. That counts.
Title & Summary
The baseline parameters. Lower the activation energy and give your brain a target it can actually see. Be creative with the title — you're allowed to invent one that doesn't exist yet.
Responsibilities & Activities
What you actually do all day — not a job posting copied off the internet. The test: would you recognize this Tuesday as a good one?
Don't copy and paste a generic description. Your highest-energy activity is the one worth building the target around.
Environment & Culture
The conditions the work happens in. Most roles don't fail on the tasks — they fail here.
Compensation, Benefits & Lifestyle
The price of the transaction, and the life it has to fund. Write real numbers — a floor you can't name isn't a floor.
This step designs the target — it isn't the number you announce. Those terms stay in your back pocket until they've fallen in love with your offer.
Growth & Impact
Success and reward. What does winning look like inside this role, what does it build toward, and who is better off because you did it?
Alternative Vehicles
The five steps above describe one vehicle. But the point of this tool is the highway — and more than one vehicle can drive down it. Naming the alternatives isn't lowering the bar; it's what turns a high-stakes, all-or-nothing gamble into an engineering problem your brain can stop panicking about.
One line. Everything below has to keep moving down this road.
Ready, aim, fire — then back on the track. You'll ski fast through the market, stop, re-aim at a narrow target, and fire off one tailored application. This page is the bullseye you look at when you stop.
Get the first draft down today — messy allowed. Then treat it as a living target: real market research refines it, and the feedback loop keeps refining it after that. Bring this and your Career Plan to your session; that's where they get pressure-tested. Your entries save automatically on this device.
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