Macro Trend to Adjacent Job Mapping
Take a macro technology trend and systematically derive the support roles it will require, to find jobs and services that do not exist yet.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 84%
Steph Smith's method, presented on the show as Steph's list, starts from a statistic: about 85% of employment growth in the last 80 years came from jobs that did not exist in 1940. She then picks a macro trend that has crossed into dual adoption — consumers own it and companies are starting to use it too — and asks what support functions it will need. Drones become drone technicians, drone traffic control by analogy with aircraft traffic control, safety inspectors and charging installation. She applies the same move to broader trends like remote work, AI, automation and cybersecurity, yielding a chief automation officer whose job is enabling every employee to use existing technology, a head of remote, a cyber actuary pricing risks like deploying a celebrity's voice or open-sourcing an LLM, and a food engineer. Sean's version borrows an existing role from another industry instead of inventing one: podcasts need a band manager.
Origin
Steph Smith developed it across her trend-research work at The Hustle and now at a16z, and formalised it on this episode as Steph's list of jobs of the future.
Core principles
- 01Most employment growth comes from titles that did not previously exist
- 02Dual adoption by consumers and companies signals a trend is ready to spawn roles
- 03Anything widely deployed needs maintaining, coordinating and insuring
- 04Older industries already named the roles your new industry will need
- 05The best candidates are roles that are hard for AI to absorb
How to run it
- 1
Pick a trend at dual adoption
Choose a macro trend where consumers own the thing and companies are also starting to use it. Steph's stated trigger for drones is exactly this crossover; her broader list is remote work, AI, automation and cybersecurity.
Pro tip The crossover point is when support roles start to be paid for rather than volunteered.
- 2
Ask what breaks and what needs coordinating
If there are a lot of drones, people are going to need to fix those drones — that is a technician role. If many drones share airspace, someone has to sequence them. Run maintenance, coordination, safety and installation as four separate prompts.
Watch out Skip roles that only exist while the technology is a hobby.
- 3
Borrow the analogue from an older industry
There is aircraft traffic control, so why would there not be drone traffic control. Sean's version is that a successful podcast is a band, so it needs a band manager — a hybrid of business manager, agent and community builder — rather than a novel title.
Pro tip Naming the role after the established analogue makes it far easier to hire and sell.
- 4
Pressure-test the role against AI
Ask whether the role is anti-fragile or whether it disappears in three years instead of thirty. Steph explicitly flags that AI makes this harder to judge and that the strongest candidates are the roles that get more valuable as the technology spreads.
Watch out A role that only exists because a tool is currently clumsy will not survive the tool improving.
- 5
Staff it at a ratio, not as a one-off title
Sean's operational refinement is to embed the role rather than crown one executive — roughly one automation person per ten employees, paired with teams, running user interviews and shadowing people for a day to find what to remove.
Pro tip Do it early: ten people for three years builds enough habit that retrofitting the role is painful.
In the wild
Steph had floated the chief automation officer on an earlier appearance, arguing CTOs are consumed by infrastructure and security while nobody owns getting every employee to actually use available technology. Sam Parr acted on that conversation directly: Hampton's very first hire was an automation expert named Grant, a Zapier plus Airtable specialist, because the company wanted to grow big without hiring loads of people.
→ Sam reports it as awesome and credits the podcast conversation for the hiring decision.
Steph applies the method live on drones, which have hit dual consumer and enterprise adoption. Asking what the industry will need yields drone technicians to repair them, drone traffic control by analogy with aircraft traffic control, safety inspectors, and charging installation.
→ Four candidate jobs of the future derived in under a minute from one trend.
Common mistakes
Confusing a job title with a job
Sam calls out community manager as a nonsense title because most people holding it do not actually know how to make community. A title spreading is not evidence the role is well-defined, and mapping onto an empty title produces people who cannot do the work.
Copy-pasting the old structure into the new context
Steph's head of remote case is the warning: companies that shifted from office to remote just copy and pasted a bunch of things from the office and never learned to build a remote organisation from the ground up or work asynchronously. The role only pays off if it redesigns rather than ports.
Waiting until the habits have set
Sam notes that even ten people over three years creates enough entrenched habit that a newly hired automation person will not know where to start, and doing it with 10,000 people is close to impossible. The role has to be created before the process debt accumulates.
Is it for you?
Best for
Career-planners, recruiters and service founders looking for roles and businesses with a structural tailwind
Not ideal for
People needing income this quarter, since these roles are early and thinly demanded at first
From the transcript
“Yeah, so apparently, 85% of employment growth in the last 80 years came from new jobs.”
“before 2008, 2009, the idea of a social media manager did not exist. The idea of a UX designer did not exist.”
“It could be like drone technicians. If there's a lot of drones, people are going to need to fix those drones. Is there like drone…”
“I think maybe the easiest way to think about it is there's all these macro tech trends, right? Like remote work, AI, automation, cybersecurity, right?”
From the episode
Steph Smith: Jobs of the Future, Fractional Real Estate, Mouth Tape and More
Steph Smith