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As a staff+ engineer, you may sometimes feel like your role requirements can feel more fluid than necessary. Depending on a person’s history and a company’s expectations, the staff engineer role can fall into many different archetypes.
These can encompass:
- The tech lead: A position that focuses on the day-to-day technical leadership part of guiding a team.
- The architect: These engineers are systems thinkers who focus on cross-team technical strategy.
- The solver: A leader who deals with high-risk or complex problems that no one else can solve.
- The right hand: A partner to leadership. Often, this individual will work as a strategic operator alongside managers or higher-level executives.
When first starting out on the staff+ career path, you may be tempted to align yourself with one of these archetypes, but in doing so, you limit the potential for impacting the business and overall engineering organization.
Staff+ engineers, at the heart of it, do what is necessary to get things done. Sometimes this is not limited to the common archetypes and goes beyond engineering itself.
Key challenges moving between archetypes
For many, moving between these different sub-roles may feel daunting, especially if they’re in the nascent stages of their staff journey.
Someone who may feel comfortable in the technical execution elements may struggle to master influencing tactics. Others may find it intimidating to switch from deep technical work to organizational leadership, as the two require substantially different approaches.
But both of these challenges come down to the same thing: learning to recognize where the gaps lie. This can be applied to team dynamics by looking at whether the group has the right roles and whether they’re distributing responsibilities effectively. You may need to use your influence skills to set up team working agreements if they haven’t already been established, here. Spotting the gaps when it comes to organizational leadership works similarly. Evaluate the areas that are working well and the areas that aren’t.
Aside from pattern recognition in team and organizational gaps, another big challenge for staff+ engineers is the constant reprioritization of things on your plate. In large cross-functional projects, you spend a lot of time in meetings with various teams to gain alignment and with leadership to report status and discuss blockers. Because of this, it can be challenging to switch gears and enter “solver mode” when your calendar is stacked.
Often, this can make any given workday feel like you’re being sent into a raging fire. Being thrown into a project that you know little about with the expectation that you will diagnose what’s going wrong, come up with a plan to change it, figure out where you can provide the most impact, and do it under the pressure of a deadline can be overwhelming.
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How to overcome challenges in practice
Imagine you’ve got a new project that needs to be completed within a short timeline: the business wants to release a new feature in time for holiday shopping. There are six months until the holidays. Adequate time needs to be left for testing; the feature cuts across multiple domains, including subscriptions, checkout, payments, and orders. Multiple teams will be involved, and some are in different time zones. Given this, there will be added complexity around people management alongside technical complexities. With so many moving parts, it’s difficult to know what to attack first.
When faced with an ambiguous project or challenge to solve, think first about breaking it down into pieces and figuring out the best course of action for each. This involves planning and documenting the execution, delegating, and communicating with leadership or stakeholders. Familiarity with the organization and involving the right people are critical to success. If you’re new to an organization, you will want to build a network.
For this specific project example, time horizon, technical complexity, domain ownership, resources, and the breadth and depth of expertise are important.
Tackle the time aspect early on and draft the overall architecture and system design, breaking it down into smaller tasks. Clarify assumptions by asking why certain things are needed in a minimum viable product (MVP), or why a system is incapable of doing something. If necessary, share a draft of the new vision with the requisite domain owners to ensure there are no major gaps. This is the job of the architect, and should be done quickly while remaining high-level.
Once you’ve documented all the major goal posts of the project and aligned on the vision of the project, it’s time to dive into the more granular elements – taking on the tech lead archetype. Often, this will require negotiating with leadership and other stakeholders to pinpoint which pieces of functionality are feasible given the time frame. Here, focus on outlining the MVP and securing any additional resources needed to deliver results by the deadline.
You might find that the timeline requires adjustment to accommodate some of the work. It’s important as the tech lead to be the last line of defense for your team: make sure they have the space they need to complete everything in a reasonable amount of time.
When the expectations have been set and alignment is gained, the project shifts into execution. Adaptability becomes the most important at this stage because projects become very dynamic as they develop. Dwight Eisenhower famously stated that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Most, if not all, projects never go to plan perfectly, needing constant updates. It’s important to keep a pulse on this, always analyzing the velocity, identifying bottlenecks, and communicating early and often when things are going awry. This is the job of the right hand. You will continually come back to this stage, anticipating any potential issues and adjusting your role to maximize impact. Focus on identifying gaps and either filling them yourself or delegating them if necessary.
When things go wrong, don’t try to hide them from program managers or senior leadership by “watermelon reporting” (saying the project is green on the outside, while it is red on the inside). Highlight the issues and adjust the plan accordingly. The solver would step in here and ideally do the work themselves, or, if that isn’t possible, they might recommend someone from another team to be temporarily embedded to help get that work over the line.
To help surface cross-team issues more proactively, the staff engineer might also set up a weekly forum with technical owners from various other teams, allowing deep technical discussions around critical intersections of the architecture. This could be seen as a responsibility similar to the role of a technical project manager (TPM).
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Strategies for adapting to a new archetype
While every staff engineer approaches a project differently, the core aspect of creating the biggest impact is through adapting your role to meet the needs of the business and the project.
Situational awareness is key: identify areas where subject matter experts may need to be pulled in. Delegate responsibility to those individuals when needed, and ensure you gather all the necessary information to ask the right questions and make informed decisions about moving forward.
Additionally, look for opportunities to zoom in. There is a time and place for being high-level, acting as the glue between teams, and making sure they have what is needed to do their jobs. But be wary when things are seemingly going smoothly for long periods of time. Always validate that progress matches what’s being reported. Review pull requests to ensure that tickets aren’t just closed, but that the solutions are scalable and meet your organization’s standards.
Gaining trust from individuals across the organization, especially those you may not have worked with previously, helps tremendously. You can do this by keeping them looped in early, being accountable for the work you take on, being honest when things aren’t going to plan, and leading without authority.
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Final thoughts
Adaptability and autonomy together make up the most important traits of a successful staff+ engineer. The fastest way to grow and increase influence is to embrace the uncertainty and understand that the role is not static, but rather constantly changing. Staff archetypes are meant to be a guideline, providing options to technical leaders to make effective decisions on how best to affect the overall trajectory of an initiative, an organization, a team, or a specific system.
