Driving Leadership and Technical Quality as a Staff Engineer
Work on what truly matters to maximize productivity, especially as your career and commitments expand. Curate technical excellence to uphold your company’s architecture and software quality as it evolves.
Stay aligned with authority to be an effective leader over time. Time spent on completing tasks is always well-spent. Lead by following and embracing feedback. Take responsibility, offer solutions, and avoid academic-style presentations. Bring value to meetings, align with your manager, optimize for the group, and be prepared and present. Volunteer for tasks, ask insightful questions, and showcase your organizational impact.
Write and distribute long-lived documents like architecture docs. Engage in company forums and be a cheerleader for your team on Slack. Review program status with your sponsor and focus on continuous learning and self-development — support engineers’ growth through mentorship. Retaining executive officers requires nuance and restraint.
Staff-plus engineers’ duties vary based on team needs and strengths — guide in setting a technical vision. Prioritize business needs as you ascend in the organization. Advocate for technology. You don’t have to prove yourself with credentials when you have a title. Code review remains essential even without writing code.
Maintaining technical quality is a goal for engineering leadership teams. Focus on the core business while improving quality. Adopt best practices and measure technical quality. Establish a technical quality team and a quality program to ensure codebase quality and overall software excellence. Rotate team members to foster a culture of quality and alignment.
Approach quality efforts with a performance engineer mindset and set clear goals. Be mindful of tensions between centralized quality teams and supported teams. Prioritize effectively, support other leaders’ improvements, and provide non-blocking feedback.
