The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

by Tanya Reilly

I absolutely love how Molly Graham, most recently the chief operating officer at Quip, frames handing off work as “giving away your Legos”: There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they’ll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you. But at a scaling company, giving away responsibility—giving away the part of the Lego tower you started building—is the only way to move on to building bigger and better things. One key Lego-relinquishing behavior to watch out for is that you should be redirecting questions about the project to the other person, not proxying the information. That is: when someone asks you a question about the project, you may think that you have the current state. But answering the question makes you the point of contact, potentially undermining the colleague to whom you handed off the project. You might also have the wrong answer! Instead, give visibility to the person who took over the project: note that they’re the expert and owner for the topic and show that you trust them to make decisions. You’ll give the project owner a connection to someone new and any extra opportunities that come out of that connection. The next time the interested person has a question about the project, they’ll know where to go. And the project will be off your plate.