Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

Meetings with multiple failed reframings almost always end with scheduling another meeting.

Because many folks reach their first Staff-plus role by being the “go-to” person for the organization, it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent.

Most folks struggle to walk back from a formed opinion, and by gathering feedback early, it’s much easier to incorporate feedback and involve folks in the decision-making process so they can see the trajectory of your thinking in addition to the final output

If senior leaders don’t change their mind, then soon everyone will correlate bluster with success

Councel, give advice, provide context, but ultimately sponsorship includes letting them take an approach that you wouldn’t.

The only way to remain a long-term leader of a genuinely successful company is to continually create space for others to take the recognition, reward, and work that got you to where you’re currently sitting. It can be surprisingly uncomfortable, but don’t worry: there will always be new work for you anyway.

joining a couple of related Slacks (for example, #staff-principal-engineering in the Rands Leadership Slack) can be a good start.

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

your goal is always to extract as much perspective from the executive as possible.

If you go into the meeting to change their mind, you’ll probably come across as inflexible. Go into the meeting to understand how you can align with their priorities. You’ll come across as strategic and probably ...

Barbara Minto, whose The Pyramid Principle is the most influential work on effective business communication,

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

folks with the privilege of seeming like they are already part of the existing leadership team have a much easier time making the transition.

Once they’ve identified their sponsors, many folks see their work as complete: it’s up to the sponsor to do the heavy lifting. This usually fails! Sponsors are folks with more organizational capital than bandwidth to deploy that capital, and they’ll help you most when you align the pieces for them.

Owning your career isn’t only about asking for things. It is about that, but it’s much more about facilitating those things happening.

it’s important to remember there’s no single “room” to enter. Getting into the right room isn’t a one-time challenge to be faced. Entering rooms will be an ongoing, iterative career challenge. That means it’s worth getting good at!

Keep in mind that it’s your obligation to be understood, not the obligation of everyone else to understand you.

To get into the room, you have to work both the numerator and denominator: keep developing a unique and useful perspective while also becoming more effective at delivering that perspective within the constraints of a meeting.

You can often force a group towards your perspective by withholding your consent until thinking moves your way, but the group’s pace will slow to a halt, and you’ll likely get removed from it.

In terms of how to create this sort of visibility for yourself and your work, it could be giving a conference talk like Keavy McMinn or Dan Na, going on a podcast like Michelle Bu, turning a problem into a website and book like Katie Sylor-Miller’s ohshitgit, or creating a mailing list like Stephen Whitworth’s High Growth Engineering.

Inevitably, both meritocrats and proceduralists view their world-view as a moral position and depending on who you are and who the company’s leadership is, you’ll have a radically different experience.

Because most companies have mediocre Staff-plus interview processes, you shouldn’t automatically opt-out of poorly run processes, but you should consider which of those signals represent a line you’re unwilling to cross.

What are the interview formats, including what are they evaluating for? Do any of the interviews require specific preparation? Who are the interviewers?

Don’t allow momentum to pull you into a process that doesn’t support your goals.

Back in 2012, Patrick McKenzie wrote Salary Negotiation, which has since become the defacto guide to negotiating salaries for software engineers.

I’ve taken to using the word “energized” over “impactful.” “Impactful” feels company-centric, and while that’s important, “energized” is more inwards-looking. Finding energizing work is what has kept me at Stripe for so long, pursuing impactful work.

That said, my first piece of advice to engineers is that they should avoid pattern matching in ways that lead them towards work they don’t enjoy.

Draft No. 4, John McPhee:

Impro, Keith Johnstone:

Communication and building narratives are key. Make sure to write … A LOT. When thinking through problems or ideas, write it down (even if you don’t intend to share them). Usually when I can’t capture a problem statement or idea in a coherent, concise paragraph it means I need to do more research and / or I’ll have a rough time trying to convince others it’s a worthwhile investment.

”Delivering on an architecture strategy” from Pete Hodgson

“Stepping Stones not Milestones” from James Cowling

If you’ve ever wanted to know how the sausage was made from a leadership angle, maybe consider if you actually want to know how the sausage is made.

If you haven’t already, try to become the engineer that people want to work with.

Ultimately, staff engineers need to be able to think about engineering decisions as a series of tradeoffs, and articulating those tradeoffs is a skill that you can have from any perspective within the stack.

You have this really tangible goal of getting a promotion for so long, and then you become a Staff Engineer, and all of a sudden, everything is vague and ambiguous. You transition from solving somewhat clear-cut problems, to being responsible for finding the right problems, and then figuring out how to convince people that it’s important to solve them.

“You’ve probably already got the technical chops, what you need to do is work on your reputation at the company.” For better or for worse, you can’t get to Staff without a good reputation.

It’s important to develop a lot of self-knowledge to see when you’re pursuing something because it’s what you want and not because it’s going to be beneficial for the organization.

Would you share a piece of advice on reaching Staff that was particularly helpful for you? Early in my career, my instincts were to ask for projects that I felt I would be able to execute well on instead of projects with more ambiguity that would push me to grow. The advice I got was to push myself out of what I was comfortable with, and to ask for the hard projects on the team. To reach Staff Engineer, you have to know and do more than what you currently know. It’s important to always push beyond what you’re doing and not be scared of asking for things you think are too hard for you. This is tied into imposter syndrome, where you might not want to try anything until you’re absolutely sure you’ll excel at it. But you have to get comfortable with the fact that you might crash and burn. That’s okay, you’ve got to try it.

Matthew and I are very aligned on our principles, values, world views, emphasis on emotional intelligence, approach to execution, and philosophies.

But I spent a lot of effort as the company grew trying to stay aware of everything that was going on in engineering: the interactions between teams, the scaling pain points. I tried to have an unusually global perspective. That helped me know which problems were important to work on and especially what the one level removed important problems were.

It’s hard to keep all this context as the organization grows, but it’s even harder for someone who didn’t start building that global context when the company was smaller.

one of the archetypes of Staff Engineers that I’ve seen are people who don’t necessarily run grand projects themselves or do big things. But just are sort of incredibly effective gurus and routers who make the whole engineering organization run better.

At Slack, the Staff+ Engineering promotions need to have a promo package put together that illustrates with clear details and measurable information that a person operates at a certain level. The main areas of focus are: Technical Quality, Impact, Collaboration and Execution.

I’m a better manager because I know how terrible it is to be an IC on a poorly planned project, and I’m a better IC because I know how and when to sound an alarm when a project is going poorly.

I’ve also recently discovered and enjoyed reading Marty Cagan’s “Insights Blog,”

I sat next to Daniel Espeset for four years at Etsy and learned an immeasurable amount about coupling technical execution with cultural impact.

I’ve found that often people have some vague sense of wanting better without having a clear idea of what that thing they want is. I like to help the group decide on a shared understanding of where exactly they’re trying to get (it’s actually okay if we never get there) and come up with a general game plan of how to get there. This way we’re all marching in the same direction.

The vision alone isn’t enough, we need everyone to understand that vision and internalize it.

not only can different styles be just as good, but that sometimes putting together two clashing styles can result in much better results than either of us would have gotten on our own.