For a few years my job had a clean shape. I owned the relationship, ran the discovery, understood what the customer wanted, and brought in the technical people when the conversation got technical. Sales on one side of a line, engineering on the other, me managing the handoff.
Then a customer asked a question I couldn’t hand off.
It wasn’t about price or features. It was whether the thing we were proposing would actually hold up given how their systems were already wired together. A real “will this work for us” question. My usual answer, confident and a little vague, wasn’t going to cut it, and I knew it the moment I heard myself start to give it.
So instead I asked our solutions person to walk me through it properly, slowly, the parts I’d always nodded along to. And then I asked the next question, and the next. By the end I understood the answer well enough to actually stand behind it.
That’s the day the line started to blur for me. I didn’t decide to change my career that afternoon. I just stopped being willing to not understand. Everything since has been a slow version of that same choice.