Starting a new role on the Individual Contributor track comes with new challenges, especially if your role naturally becomes less team centric. Having a network of mentors, managers, and fellow engineers who can support your step into a staff engineer role is always a great resource. Still, early mistakes are often inevitable and sometimes unavoidable when you’re in a new position.

In this panel discussion, we will discuss some of the common mistakes that staff engineers make through the first-hand experience of our expert engineering panel. They will talk about their mistakes, the challenges they ran into and what they learned through the process so that you can avoid similar situations, or at the very least, have a blueprint for navigating them!

Key takeaways

• Learn the best way to approach a new staff plus role
• Understand where mistakes can be made and how you can avoid them 
• Gain practical knowledge on how to support yourself through your staff engineer journey
• What experts learned along their journey to senior staff engineers and what they wish they knew when starting out