7 Brutal Truths Every Technical Leader Must Master or Fail
Focus on what matters, curate quality, and stay align—the rest is noise.
Staff engineers are expected to guide their team's technical direction.
Principal Engineers hold a higher rank than Staff Engineers. Even these accomplished professionals may experience impostor syndrome.
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Setting a clear direction and effective planning are crucial for the success of both the product and the company. This clarity helps align everyone toward common goals. It helps focus on which areas of the application should receive attention over others.
As a technical leader work on what matters to make the most of your working hours, particularly as you get further along in your career and life's commitments expand.
Curate technical quality to maintain the quality of your company's architecture and software as it grows over time.
Stay aligned with authority to remain an effective leader over time.
Time spent getting work completed is always time well spent.
To lead, you have to follow.
Never fight feedback.
Don't evade responsibility or problems.
Only present a question with an answer. You can only create alignment in the room if you have a proposal for folks to align behind.
Avoid academic-style presentations. Refrain from fixing your preferred outcome.
Bring something valuable to the meeting. Stay aligned with your manager. Optimize for the group. Reduce friction. Come prepared. Focus and be present. Volunteer for low-status tasks.
In a contentious meeting, ask three good questions before you share your perspective.
Write and distribute more long-lived documents, like architecture docs or technical specifications.
Lead (and, to a lesser extent, take part in) company forums like architecture reviews, the company all hands, and learning circles.
Be a cheerleader for your team's and peers' work on Slack.
Learning and developing yourself is permanent. Learn through reflecting on your work, these are the questions that helped in the past to improve:
1. What are the high-leverage ways you've improved the organization?
2. What is the quantifiable impact of your projects?
3. Who have you sponsored/mentored, and through what accomplishments?
4. Showcase the glue work do you do for the organization?
5. What's the impact of that glue work?
6. Which teams and leaders are familiar with and advocate for your work?
7. What do they value about your job?
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It's common to feel embarrassed and discouraged when reflecting on your older work. Yet, this feeling is not an sign of failure; rather, it signifies that you are continuously learning and improving.
Use this as motivation; you are building upon your previous knowledge and experiences.
Focus on equality and continuous learning to foster a safe and inclusive atmosphere.
Legacy organizations may lose their best talent to more innovative companies.
Knowledge cannot be forced upon us; it must be shared freely. We typically get knowledge when we need it.
People are more inclined to share what they know when there is a genuine need.
To develop our skills and achieve a state of flow, we need to to take on challenging roles and projects.
Focusing solely on execution can limit growth potential.
Our starting point is trust.
Unless a policy or agreement explicitly prohibits it, assume that you can do anything.
More freedom fosters learning, and greater understanding leads to enhanced performance.
When we make ourselves indispensable, we hinder the resilience of our teams and organizations. Once a decision is made, share it along with the rationale and perspectives that influenced it to help learning.
Achieving consensus at scale can be challenging and should reflect the dynamics of adaptive systems. It is crucial to recognize that freedom and autonomy are vital for motivation.
By creating a safe environment where teams can experiment and learn from failure, extraordinary growth can occur.
We operate in a rapidly changing world where centralized control is often too slow and disconnected from reality.
Structural mediocrity can create inertia that hinders progress.
When dealing with a large organization, it's best to observe it rather than trying to understand it in its entirety.
Simon Wardley
Map what it is. Then think about moving it toward what you want.
Values play a crucial role in how group members interpret events and activities around them.
Generative organizations, are performance-oriented and focus on enhancing quality and processes. These organizations focus on company growth rather than exercising control over individuals.