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Staff Engineer Path

Pillars of Staff Engineering/Individual Contributor Path

  • While there are many books and help available to guide on the people management path, there is ambiguity on what is expected from the IC. There are 3 pillars for the IC role:

  • Big-picture Thinking - It means broader view of the context, predicting the yearlong, post-execution needs.

  • Execution - It's messier at this level, you need political capital and influence to succeed.
  • Leveling Up - Raising the standard and skills of the engineers. This could be through teaching, mentoring, being a role model.

The pillars stand on the solid foundation of the technical knowledge and the experience.
The successful impact also require following skills (similar to building buttresses):

  • Communication and leadership
  • Navigating complexity
  • Putting your work in perspective
  • Mentorship, sponsorship, and delegation
  • Framing a problem so that other people care about it
  • Acting like a leader whether you feel like one or no

Big-picture

What do Staff Engineers do?
  • Staff engineering roles are ambiguous by definition. It’s up to you to discover and decide what your role is and what it means for you.
  • TPMs (Technical Project Manager aka Team Lead) are responsible for delivery, not design, and not engineering quality. TPMs make sure the project gets done on time, but staff engineers make sure it’s done with high engineering standards.
  • As  your time becomes more and more expensive, the work you do is expected to be more valuable and have a greater impact.
  • You’re probably not a manager, but you’re in a leadership role..
  • YES, YOU CAN BE AN INTROVERT. NO, YOU CAN’T BE A JERK.

  • 4 Skills that you need (compare with a restaurant)

  • Coding (Cooking)

  • Product Management (Menu item)
  • Project Management (Lunch/Dinner/B'day)

  • People Management (Manage Cooks, Chefs)

  • You’re also in a role that requires technical judgment and solid technical experience.

  • Be clear about your scope: your area of responsibility and influence.
  • Your time is finite. Be deliberate about choosing a primary focus that’s important and that isn’t wasting your skills.
  • Align with your management chain. Discuss what you think your job is, see what your manager thinks it is, understand what’s valued and what’s actually useful, and set expectations explicitly. Not all companies need all shapes of staff engineers.
  • Your job will take a weird shape sometimes, and that’s OK.
3 Maps

There are 3 maps you would need:

  1. Locator Map - Zoom out to know where the team is and what's its place in the org. This would isolate and remove the importance of the local problems.
  2. Treasure Map - It's the destination. You should be able to tell a compelling story of the treasure available at the destination.
  3. Topographical Map - Direction and navigation through the terrain to the destination. You should be able to see the path to get there and the challenges/wins that would happen on the way. What support and friction that you would run into.

The secrets to these maps lie in the culture. But What is culture?

  • Open or Secret? Does information available openly? Is interaction possible eg slack?
  • Oral vs Written : are decisions shared written down or orally?
  • top-down or bottom-up : where do initiatives come from?
  • Are changes made fast or slow?

  • Are the seats of power crystalized or liquid?

  • Practice the skills of intentionally looking for a bigger picture and seeing what’s happening.

  • Understand your work in context: know your customers, talk with peers outside your group, understand your success metrics, and be clear on what’s actually important.
  • Know how your organization works and how decisions get made within it. Try to get invited into that "the room" but then figure out the "shadow org" (un-written structures through which power and influence flow) - the one that meet unofficially and make decisions.
  • Build or discover paths to allow information you need to come to you.
  • Be clear about what goals everyone is aiming for.
  • Think about your own work and what your journey is.

Creating the Big Picture

  • If everyone is working off the same big picture, your work is done. If not, you need to create a big picture and share with all.
  • Technical Vision = what the future looks like after the work is done, problems are solved.
  • Technical Strategy = plan of action, challenges to overcome. It should cover:
    • Diagnosis = What's going on? Identify the pattern behind the noise, the essential characteristic of the situation.
    • Guiding Policy = What should be the guiding light when you face obstacles to overcome the diagnosis.
    • Coherent Action = Specific action (technical, process or people)
  • Documenting vision/strategy takes time (iteration, alignment) and could be a overkill when you can get the team on the same page in a single meeting.
  • If someone is already working on it, share the lead or follow their lead or step away.
  • Initial ideas -> write > talk to key people > revise (make decisions, trade-offs) until it's ready to publish/share with the broader group.