Creating impact outside of your team
At work I often get asked by other engineers how they can create impact outside of their team in order to progress in seniority. My answer is almost always the same, you need to be observant and spot aligned opportunities.
Opportunity is everywhere. Particularly in larger tech companies, where there are many ways to push positive change. Technical leadership, improving processes, building tooling, education, the list sort of keeps going.
But what I have found is that this actually creates quite a lot of noise. Especially at the mid-level of software engineering where you usually have the additional pressures of shipping features. It can be very hard to know where to position yourself to take the next step.
To cut through that noise, I have found that you have to be quite tactical with it. To me, this means aligning yourself with the perspective of the business. What are the current goals and what metrics are looking to be moved. Once you know that, you can start to home in on opportunities that match.
There are many ways to build business understanding, but to keep it simple, I’ve found the most effective way is talking to my manager, my manager’s manager, and my senior engineers who aren’t part of a feature team. This seems to give enough context to grasp the bigger picture, or at least a picture that’s big enough for what I need.
Two things normally happen from here:
- A natural opportunity emerges from chatting to them. For example, they might need help on a particular problem.
- If nothing immediate comes up, you’re now aligned with your leadership chain and can look for opportunities based on the information they have given you.
It’s this second point where you need to focus on being observant. You have to keep your eyes open for opportunities that have the potential for cross cutting impact that match business needs.
The way I have approached this in the past is to ask myself questions that tie to the business goal. I would then look for related opportunities or think through whether there’s something I could initiate that would lead to meaningful work. Meaningful is really important though, you don’t want to create noise or distraction. Just try to stay as close to your manager’s steer as possible and use that as guidance.
Let’s work through an example to make it clearer.
Say that you spoke to your managers and they told you that performance is currently the top priority and your senior engineers tell you that they want to improve monitoring. With this information, you can now start thinking about things like:
- Is there an existing performance initiative I could contribute to?
- Is there a performance focused working group that I could join?
- Are there improvements needed in how we measure performance in the codebase?
- Do our dashboards give all teams the visibility they need, or could I help standardise or enhance them?
- Is there tooling we could build or extend to help multiple teams spot performance issues faster?
You want to ask questions that could naturally lead to opportunities that take you outside of your team.
It does take a little bit of work so try to reserve some of your week outside of the day-to-day to give yourself time to think. If you do find something that you think could make a meaningful difference, bring it to your managers or senior engineers. You can then start strategising on timing and implementation.
This is the work you are looking for 🎉