Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

Success will often mean interpreting business needs, communicating a clear direction, defusing a looming crisis, convincing teams to agree on tradeoffs, or just being a good influence.

If you’re already in a Staff-plus role, I hope these writings will energize you in your journey as a leader outside the management track. If you aim for such a role, I hope this book will provide pragmatic aid in its pursuit.

Being a Staff-engineer is not just a role. It’s the intersection of the role, your behaviors, your impact, and the organization’s recognition of all those things.

Architects are responsible for the success of a specific technical domain within their company, for example, the company’s API design, frontend stack, storage strategy, or cloud infrastructure. For a domain to merit an Architect, it must be both complex and enduringly central to the company’s success.

“The more senior you get, the less your job is about code.

It’s normal to end some days as a Staff-plus engineer feeling like you haven’t accomplished anything–keep at it!

We have recurring staff engineering meetings where we discuss problems that span teams which are both technical and non-technical in nature.

We only get value from finishing projects, and getting a project over the finish line is the magical moment it goes from risk to leverage. Time spent getting work finished is always time well spent.

To write an engineering strategy, write five design documents, and pull the similarities out. That’s your engineering strategy. To write an engineering vision, write five engineering strategies, and forecast their implications two years into the future. That’s your engineering vision.

You should write design documents for any project whose capabilities will be used by numerous future projects. You should also write design documents for projects that meaningfully impact your users. You should write a design document for any work taking more than a month of engineering time.

This idea also comes up in the idea of the “the first follower creates a leader,” but effective leaders don’t split the world into a leader and follower dichotomy, rather they move in and out of leadership and follower roles with the folks around them.