Most of us enter this field the same way: We finish a program, someone hands us a list of job titles, and we go looking for the ones that interest us. That is a reasonable way to start a career, and it is how I started mine.
But for many I-O psychologists, the work that we eventually find does not appear on that job title list. Product. Strategy. Design. Customer experience. Go to market. Operations. The titles can make us feel as if we have wandered away from the field, even though the work still leverages our understanding of how people behave at work.
For a long time, I described my own path as a series of detours. Then, while I was talking with a friend and mentor, Shonna Waters, she offered me a phrase I had not heard before: domain entanglement. I found after some research that this is not an established construct in the I-O literature. However, it is a framing I am proposing in this article, built from that conversation and from my own experience. I offer it as something to react to and reflect on, rather than a validated theory. Whatever its formal status, the phrase gave me language for something I had been experiencing without being able to describe. Once I had it, the detours stopped looking like detours.
I use domain entanglement to describe what happens when an I-O psychologist works deeply inside another domain: Your training shapes how you see problems in the new field, and the field reshapes how you practice I-O.
Domain entanglement is related to boundary spanning, a well-studied construct about people who carry knowledge across groups, functions, and professions.¹ But the two differ in what happens to the person. As I interpret them, boundary spanning focuses on carrying knowledge across domains that remain distinct; domain entanglement, as I am proposing it, focuses on what sustained immersion in another domain does to the practitioner: how it changes their own judgment and practice, not just where their knowledge travels.
Think of the difference between visiting a country and living in one: A visitor can rely largely on the language they arrived with and return mostly unchanged. Live there long enough, and your native language comes back carrying new rhythms and borrowed words. Boundary spanning is the visit, while domain entanglement is what happens when you live there; you do not simply bring I-O psychology into another domain, you return with your I-O judgment altered by what the domain taught you.
This article uses my path through behavioral science, government channel strategy, and product marketing as one case through which to examine this idea. The case is personal but the question is broader: what happens when I-O psychologists take roles that do not “look” like I-O, but continue to practice the core of the field inside them? As current and future I-O psychologists evaluate their available career options, I encourage them to ask themselves if the work will fail if someone gets “people” wrong and whether the work has something to teach them, and consider taking that leap even if the job title does not read as “I-O.”
The Core of I-O Is Not a Job Title
SIOP describes I-O psychology as the “scientific study of working and the application of that science to workplace issues facing individuals, teams, and organizations.”² Its education and training guidelines are anchored in the scientist–practitioner model and include research methods, statistical analysis, professional and ethical practice, and a wide range of core content areas from motivation and teams to leadership, assessment, and organizational change.2
That breadth matters. The core of I-O psychology is not one topic, one intervention, or one job family; it is a disciplined way of understanding people at work and using evidence to improve the relationship between people and work.
Graduate programs assess that foundation in different ways, including theses, applied projects, internships, and comprehensive exams. Those requirements ask us to demonstrate that we can reason scientifically about workplace behavior, but they do not tell us where that reasoning is allowed to be applied.
I confused those two things for a long time. I treated a list of familiar job titles as if it carried the same authority as the standards of the discipline. It does not. A credential can establish a foundation but it cannot draw the outer boundary of every place that foundation might be applied.
The more useful test is not whether a role sounds like I-O. It is whether the work of the field is happening inside it: forming testable ideas about behavior; looking for mechanisms rather than slogans; attending to evidence, context, ethics, and unintended consequences; and using what we learn to make work better for people and organizations. That work can travel much farther than a title can.
My Case: Starting on “The List”
Ironically, I got off “the list” by way of the most on-list job I could have taken. I joined BetterUp in June 2021 as its first government hire, in a role called People Insights consultant. The work was behavioral science translated for enterprise customers, which was close to what I had trained to do.
What I had not expected was how much I would learn that was not specific to I-O. I was the company’s first government hire, standing up a vertical that did not exist yet. The first 2 years were an education in what the product actually was, how it got sold, what a customer would pay for it, and what it takes to build a business. I was doing an on-list job in a place where I could see the whole machine.
Then a channel strategy role opened, and the leader building it asked me to take it. The need was oddly specific in a way that suited me; the role required someone who could understand behavioral mechanisms and buyer decisions, then turn that understanding into partnerships, procurement paths, and a working channel. Most of it was new to me, but I took the role anyway and became responsible for building the federal and state government channel from zero, including the procurement infrastructure and go-to-market model for that vertical.
At first glance, channel strategy and procurement look like business operations, not I-O psychology. But the scarce input I provided, the thing this work needed most and had the least of, was judgment about people and systems. “Who” needed to believe “what” for a partnership to move? What made a buying process feel risky? Where did incentives align, and where did they quietly work against the stated goal? My I-O training shaped how I read the system.
Then the system changed how I read I-O.
What I learned in those 2 years came down to a premise I had never encountered in graduate school: An intervention, no matter how effective, will never reach a human being if it cannot be purchased. A contracting vehicle is not an administrative detail sitting downstream of the science. It is a boundary condition on the science. A well-validated program that an organization has no mechanism to buy has, in practical terms, an effect size of zero.
That was domain entanglement. I brought behavioral science into channel strategy, and channel strategy sent me back with a different understanding of implementation, access, and what it takes for an evidence-based intervention to matter in the world.
Off the List Again: Product Marketing
I had a baby in 2025 and returned to work that May. Anyone who has taken leave from a fast-moving organization knows what a return can feel like. In a few months, the products had evolved, the organization had shifted, and the business had moved in ways that I needed to catch up on.
Once I stopped scrambling, I noticed which part of my knowledge had survived. It was not my knowledge of the roadmap, the metrics, or even the people on the org chart; the thing that remained most intact was my read on how people behave when you ask them to change something about their work. That was still true, still useful, and still scarce. Almost everything else was more perishable than I had realized.
That was around the time the conversation about product marketing happened. The business had a need, and I knew very little about the discipline, but the substance felt familiar even if the title did not. Product marketing sits at the intersection of a product, a market, and the people being asked to believe, buy, and behave differently. I took the role in July 2025.
Within a few months, I had a way to describe what I was doing. A positioning claim is a behavior-change hypothesis. When a company says that people will do something differently because of its product, it is making a falsifiable prediction about human behavior. Those predictions are everywhere in the market, and they are rarely treated as things to test.
Learning to see them as hypotheses, and to ask what would have to be true and how we would know was not a marketing skill I acquired from scratch. It was an I-O skill I already had, pointed somewhere I had not expected it to be useful. In a company built around behavioral science, that instinct had a home. My job became translating the science we had into the claims we made.
Product marketing changed my I-O practice too. Intervention work often begins after someone has agreed that change is needed. Marketing exposes what happens earlier, when people are still deciding whether the problem is real, whether a new behavior is worth the investment, and whether they trust the person asking. I understand behavior change differently now because I have seen how people respond to the idea of changing before any program ever reaches them.
Again, the exchange ran both ways.
Why This Is Bigger Than One Career Story
SIOP’s Common Job Titles page sorts examples across academia, consulting, government, and industry. It is useful, and SIOP appropriately describes the titles as illustrative rather than exhaustive. Still, any title-based map will miss work that is organized around products, markets, customer systems, organizational strategy, or emerging functions rather than a traditional I-O label.3
The field is already making more room for that reality. TIP’s I-O at Work series was created to highlight roles and functions across industries and work environments, with the work itself as the focus rather than one individual’s story, and its first installment featured I-O psychology inside military talent management.4 These are not side stories about where unusual people happened to land; they are evidence that the field travels through functions that may use I-O principles explicitly, implicitly, or under another name.
That could be read as I-O psychology losing its shape. I think it can be read another way. When practitioners work outside traditional roles while remaining grounded in the field, they can strengthen their judgment, broaden the settings in which I-O science creates value, and make the field more visible to people who do not yet know they need it.
That visibility can run in both directions. SIOP’s Affiliate Program exists precisely so that people outside I-O can join to learn about the discipline.5 When an off-list practitioner sparks a colleague’s curiosity about how we think, there is a door for that colleague to walk through. The exchange that changes individual practitioners can, at scale, change who finds their way into the field.
The point is not that every off-list role is secretly an I-O role, it is that titles are imperfect proxies for practice. The field’s boundary should be protected by the quality of our reasoning and the integrity of our work, not by whether the job title is familiar.
Where Domain Entanglement Gets Harder
My path worked out, and I know how that reads. Taking an off-list role does not automatically deepen someone’s I-O practice. In fact, sometimes unfamiliar work does not sharpen I-O judgment at all. The practitioner becomes isolated from evidence-based practice and the professional community, their work becomes difficult to explain on a resume, and eventually they leave the field without having consciously chosen to do so.
There is another risk, too. “There was a need, and I stepped in” is not good advice on its own because it can sound like “say yes to everything.” Work that spans several domains is often absorbed into team-level results. Performance narratives struggle to describe it. Promotion frameworks built around depth can have nowhere to put it. And, unfortunately, enthusiasm does not solve any of that.
So what separates domain entanglement from quiet drift? I do not think there is one correct formula, but there are a few conditions worth evaluating.
Is your judgment about people a scarce input, or is the scope simply unowned? Channel strategy work and procurement can look like operations from the outside. In my case, the distinctive contribution was reading buyers, incentives, and systems, and setting those up for a new function. If an organization only needs someone to absorb loose work, the experience may expand your workload without deepening your practice.
Are you still practicing I-O, or only learning the adjacent craft? Growth comes from continuing to form and test ideas about workplace behavior inside the unfamiliar role. Learning another discipline is valuable, but domain entanglement requires a live connection to both domains.
Can you name the mechanism you are relying on? The mechanism matters more than the credential. If you can explain what you expect people to do, why, under what conditions, and what evidence would show you are wrong, you are using the toolset of I-O psychology.
Is the new domain changing your I-O judgment? Exposure alone is not the same as learning. The exchange becomes meaningful when the adjacent field reveals a missing variable, a new boundary condition, or a different way to understand how work actually happens.
Are you still tethered to evidence and to other I-O practitioners? I believe personally that is the condition most likely to fail quietly. Nobody in a product or go-to-market organization is guaranteed to ask what the literature says about a challenging question or concept. That question has to keep coming from us.
Can you translate the learning back? Until we can explain to an I-O audience what the unfamiliar work taught us about human behavior at work, the learning is not finished. This article is me running that test on myself.
Closing Thoughts
Boundary spanning tells us why it matters to connect across functions and professions. Domain entanglement asks a different question: what does sustained contact with another domain do to the way we practice our own?
For me, government channel work made me understand that access is a part of intervention effectiveness. Product marketing emphasized belief, trust, and adoption as part of behavior change. Neither lesson replaced my I-O training but they both made that training more useful.
If you are looking at a role that is not on the list and wondering whether it counts, I do not think the most useful question is whether the title reads as I-O. Rather, ask whether the work depends on getting something important right about people at work. Ask whether your I-O training will shape the work, and whether the work has something real to teach you in return.
If both are true, you may not be leaving the field, you may be helping it learn where else it belongs.
I would like to know whether this matches other practitioners’ experiences, especially from those who went off the list, or are interested in doing so. You can reach me at prakritisingh93@gmail.com.
Notes
1 Tushman, M. L. (1977). Special boundary roles in the innovation process. Administrative Science Quarterly, 22(4), 587–605. Ancona, D. G., & Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Bridging the boundary: External activity and performance in organizational teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(4), 634–665.
2 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. (2017). Guidelines for education and training in industrial-organizational psychology. Author. https://www.siop.org/wp-content/uploads/legacy/Educators/SIOP_ET_Guidelines_2017.pdf
3 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. (n.d.). Common job titles. https://www.siop.org/resources-publications/career-center/i-o-career-paths/common-job-titles/
4 Williams, M., with Breakiron, M. (2026). Contribute to the new TIP series: I-O at Work, featuring the vast opportunities and uses for I-O across workplace settings. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 63(3).
5 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. (n.d.). Affiliate membership. https://www.siop.org/membership/affiliate/
AI disclosure: Claude (Anthropic) was used to research prior TIP coverage and to pressure test this article’s structure and argument. All examples, claims, and prose are the author’s.
