Picking Teams
Figuring out which DS IC types fit your interest and reflecting on your career preference is essential, but they are just the two factors we would like to consider along with the following:
Whether you are interested in the product area
Whether you would like to work with the specific manager
Whether you would like to work with the team cross-functional partners (XFN)
Whether you have enough scope to grow the skills you want to acquire
Whether the team have enough work-life balance (WLB)
I normally would ask my mentees to rank list these 5 factors and make sure the roles/teams they are looking at satisfy their top 2–3 factors. Among all these, I would take about picking a manager and finding scope in the following posts.
Once you have done enough reflecting on your preference and the teams you have interested in, the rest is easier: you are to make a trade-off between top factors that you care about among product area, manager, XFNs, scope, and WLB, and ask hard questions on what is more important to you, and which team can offer the best based on your preference.