The Importance of Defining a Technical Direction
Develop a relationship with your manager where they implicitly trust you, and you implicitly trust them.
Staff engineering is not a role. It’s the intersection of the role, your behaviors, your impact, and the organization’s recognition. In senior positions, you’re accountable to the business and organization first and yourself second. Staff-plus roles are leadership roles, and the support system that got you here will fade away in leadership roles. To remain effective within a Staff-plus role, you must learn the art of staying aligned with organizational authority.
When building a product and company, setting a clear direction is crucial. It aligns everyone to work towards the same goals and makes more meaningful progress. Roadmaps are essential for shaping direction and defining time-based, goal-oriented, and thematic milestones. Teams should focus on completing enough projects to ship or meet the goal while avoiding burnout by bundling minor issues into larger projects and simultaneously working on a few projects. Having an approach makes working together easier, focusing on what’s important and making progress. It also helps determine which areas of the app should be prioritized over others.
Principal Engineers hold a higher rank than Staff Engineers. Yet, Staff Engineers are expected to define a technical direction for the team they are operating in. On the other hand, principals are expected to represent technical guidance for the whole department they work in.
