204: How to Deliver Value Faster with Agile

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Off Topic: The Importance of Defining a Technical Direction

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 progress more meaningful. 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. Principals, on the other hand, are expected to define a technical direction for the whole department they are working in. 

Current Work: How to Deliver Value Faster with Agile

Agile Methodologies are not set in stone, and certain ceremonies help with reflection and improvements. There are others that, in some situations, reduce the fast pace of delivery. We also need to understand how to identify what is working and what is not working. At this point, there is no reason to *measure twice and cut once*. Sometimes what to measure or cut is not visible because the team or the company needs more direction toward what's important. We need a purpose to move forward at the organizational level. Individual contributors usually only have little to say in this manner. By modifying individuals, there will be team improvement and company improvement. We need to start with ourselves to promote similar behavior in others. It's important to note that providing value doesn't mean releasing a product or feature to the public. If something is valuable but has yet to be shared, it's not benefiting anyone. That's why in Agile, we strive to find ways to deliver the proper outcomes faster. This involves identifying smaller increments that can be deployed now instead of later.

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