Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

First, leaders have a sufficiently refined view of how things ought to work such that they can rely on their distinction between how things are and how they ought to be to identify proactive, congruent actions to narrow that gap. Second, they care enough about the gap to actually attempt those narrowing actions.

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.

If there’s something you disagree with but only in a minor way, let others take the lead figuring it out. A helpful question here is, “Will what we do here matter to me in six months?” If it won’t, take the opportunity to follow.

Even if you disagree with their initial approach, someone trustworthy leading a project will almost always get to a good outcome.

Make your feedback explicitly non-blocking.

To become a senior technical leader, you must build a deep perspective on technology and architecture. To operate as such a leader, you must then develop an equally deep pragmatism and agnosticism to technical religion to remain skeptical of yourself.

most effective engineers go into each meeting with the goal of agreeing on the problem at hand, understanding the needs and perspectives within the room, and identifying what needs to happen to align on an approach. They approach each meeting as one round within the broader context of the project and their relationships with the folks in the room.

Listening through questions is a form of active listening with the goal of understanding the rest of the room’s perspectives. The act of asking good questions with good intent opens up a conversation, creating space and safety for others to ask their own questions. Good questions are asked with the desire to learn, and they are specific.

In a potentially contentious meeting, ask three good questions before you share your perspective, and you’ll see the room shift around you.

If you ever find yourself in a conversation with an unclear goal, then define the purpose.

If the folks in the room are too far apart, then identify a subgroup who are able to spend more time digging into it together or identify an appropriate party to escalate to outside of the room. If there’s simply too much stuff in the drawer, stop trying to shove it shut.

If these behaviors don’t come naturally to you, that’s okay; the opportunity to practice is all around. Every comment on a document is an opportunity. Every meeting is an opportunity. Every pull request is an opportunity.

In this case, a jerk is someone who withholds their consent from the group, isn’t willing to compromise, or doesn’t listen. This is someone who hasn’t learned that their career depends more on being easy to involve than being technically correct.

The two most effective ways to deal with jerks are: including someone they can’t be a jerk to in the meeting (like their manager or the CTO) investing heavily into aligning with them before the meeting, so they feel heard and are less likely to derail the discussion

It’s also useful to recognize that the authority created by your title shelters you from many of these folks, so whoever you’re experiencing is being less of a jerk to you than they are to others.

Shift your contribution towards asking questions.

If you see someone in the meeting who isn’t participating, pull them into the discussion.

Be the one to take notes. This helps destigmatize note-taking as “low status” and also frees up an alternative would-be notetaker to contribute more instead.

If you realize someone’s missing from the discussion who should be there, be the person to pull them into the next occurrence of the meeting.

By writing down the process of finding an answer, as well as the rationale for the answer, folks around us can begin to learn from our decisions rather than simply being directed by them

If a piece of feedback won’t meaningfully change a project’s success, then consider not giving it.

If you’ve cemented the final cobblestones to a Staff-plus role by becoming the “go-to person” for a key company leader, then you’ve learned that solving an urgent problem for an organizational leader is one of the surest paths to recognition.

As I talked to more and more Staff-plus engineers about career advice, the most consistent recommendation was to develop a personal network of peers doing similar work.

What’s been most impactful for me is having a lot of people who I think of as mentors, usually friends, former managers, and folks that I’ve worked with. I have a decent number of recurring monthly lunches, coffee chats, and dinners with people who’ve worked with me in the past, know me, and I trust. It’s those conversations about career challenges and growth that have gotten me to where I am in my career.

The thing that springs to mind is to find your peers or support network. Just like management, it gets lonely the higher up you go, and it’s important to find peers that will still challenge you, and you can brainstorm ideas with. It doesn’t even matter if they’re in your similar area of work or even are in different companies.

It’s also been really valuable for me to cultivate a good personal network of other senior engineers. I chat with them informally about whatever it is that we’re working on and thinking about. When you have personal connections, you can get very unvarnished views of the problems people are seeing and the solutions they’re considering.

There’s room for your words on the topic. If writing isn’t your jam, there’s room for your voice, and speaking at tech conferences is another effective way to become visible in the broader community.

If those both feel high-stakes, even starting a Twitter account or joining a couple of related Slacks (for example, #staff-principal-engineering in the Rands Leadership Slack) can be a good start.

Among the folks who didn’t mention developing a personal network, most mentioned creating an ambient network of learning based on keeping current with industry books and following industry leaders on social networks, particularly Twitter.

I use Twitter extensively, but I’m mostly a consumer and follow many people in tech. I usually follow people that I saw talking at conferences, or I worked with, and I find their content relevant to me.

I try to follow people on Twitter who I think are doing interesting things and from who I can learn. There are so many people doing interesting things and so much to learn!

If the idea of building a network this way feels uncomfortable then building an ambient network can be a good starting step in the right direction. That said, you’ll find the personal network more impactful, and finding an authentic way to build one is an important step towards reaching and remaining impactful in senior roles over the long arch of your career.

Find someone you respect and send them a short 1-2 paragraph email or DM with a specific question asking for advice. If they reply, thank them and send another question in six to twelve months. If they subsequently ask you for a favor or question, do what you can to help. If they don’t reply, don’t worry about it; just move on without comment. This works surprisingly well, and the worst thing that can happen is totally fine: they’ll just never reply.

Their first instinct in any presentation is to ask a series of detailed, seemingly random questions until they can pattern match against their previous experience. If you try to give a structured, academic presentation to that executive, they will be bored, and you will waste most of your time presenting information they won’t consume.

In most other scenarios, miscommunication creates latency rather than errors. Still, when you’re communicating with executives, you’ll often not get a second chance to discuss a given topic before the relevant decision is made.

When you’re communicating with an executive, it’s almost always one of three things: planning, reporting on status, or resolving misalignment.

Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized.

Situation: what is the relevant context?

Complication: why is the current situation problematic?

Question: what is the core question to address?

Answer: what is your best answer to the posed question?

Start by brainstorming your proposal into a series of arguments that support your answer. Once you’ve written them all down, group them into related arguments. Shape those groups into three top-level arguments, with up to three sub-arguments supporting each of those top-level arguments. Recursively apply this approach, ensuring each argument summarizes its at-most-three sub-arguments. Order the arguments within each group by descending importance.

Aligning with stakeholders before your presentation, sometimes called nemawashi, is extremely effective at reducing surprises.

Some will consider this a controversial position, preferring to measure every meeting by its action items, but this ignores the often more valuable relationship establishment and development aspects of these meetings.

Never fight feedback.

Focus on gathering feedback; don’t worry about whether you agree with it until you have more time afterward.

Successful folks look at informing executives as absolution: once it’s on the table, you can move towards solving it rather than hiding it.

A frequent piece of advice given to new leaders is to “never bring your manager a problem without a solution.”

Avoid academic-style presentations. The way you’re taught to present about topics in school is more-or-less the entirely wrong approach for presenting to executives.

There is no such thing as a permanent decision: almost every decision will be reconsidered multiple times over the next two years.