Engineers at the Staff level and above are often expected to mentor and coach engineers who are in their early career.
At the same time, they’re also expected to work with engineering and product leaders in building effective solutions for their customers.
In the past years, the industry has created some very good material about how to do both of these. In addition to working with early to mid career engineers, product managers, designers and other cross functional partners, the engineers at Staff level are also expected to work with other Staff engineers. Often, such working peer relationships span organizational boundaries.
In this talk, I wanted to touch upon this slightly less talked about aspect of the job as a technical IC leader, which is creating peer relationships and working with other Staff engineers in shaping an organization’s technical roadmap. I’ll be sharing two case studies from my current and previous jobs and go into the details of what strong peer relationships between Staff+ engineers could look like and how they helped influence the organization’s technical decisions.
