Impact and (not) Career Ladder

Impact is a multi-dimensional aspect and each one of us can provide a different definition for what impact is. With impact, I define the ability to make a positive difference for the team, the organization, our partners/stakeholders, and ultimately for the business. This requires acquiring, possessing, and practicing a relevant set of skills and the ability to apply them effectively.

The goals of this post are to:

• Provide a perspective and structure for career growth opportunities that do not involve a “promotion” but involve an increase of influence.
• Establish the basis for career growth conversations. It’s the combined responsibility of the engineer and the manager to find opportunities where personal/professional growth overlaps with the needs of the business.
• Assist with the implicit bias that may interfere with IC growth if opportunities are left to chance.
• Address the incorrect perspective that in some cases the opportunity for growth beyond a senior IC role is a transition to a manager.

Sphere of Impact and Skills

Many times we over-index on climbing the career ladder. In other cases, we look at external opportunities to reach the next staff+ title. This makes us feel that we are making career progress. But in fact what the business perceives as career growth may not always indicate growth in skills that are long-term of value or for more senior ICs, specialized career paths do not always align cleanly with their goals. On top of that, career ladders can be biased towards a specific culture or people who develop the ladder, and they sometimes cannot take full advantage of our strengths. Finally, there are occasions where business can become a hurdle of moving up the ladder. Hence, the perspective I would like to introduce is to focus on impact and not on the career ladder.

We will define an engineer’s sphere of impact (the idea is not new, from past experience, it pre-existed at Netflix). The sphere of impact lists a set of skills valued that individuals can choose to develop to increase their impact. As engineers are expected to positively impact the business they will need to grow some skills to keep pace with business growth and technology evolution that is relevant to their domains. This model is an option for individuals to use as a starting point to facilitate conversations with their managers regarding the skills they wish to develop. The goal is to enable engineers to increase their impact. An important part of setting our goals is to develop in areas that we are less experienced in maximizing global success (multiplier skills) but it is equally important to succeed locally (core skills) within your current environment by prioritizing what we do well.

Fig.1 Core Skills are foundational skills build on top of the company’s core values. Multiplier skills are built on strong foundation skills.

At the center of the model are company values, and around them, we are building a set of core skills and multiplier skills.

• Core skills increase an individual’s own effectiveness.
• Multiplier skills amplify the effectiveness of the team or company and/or bring out capabilities in others, in addition to increasing one’s own effectiveness.

Core skills are foundational, while multiplier skills are built upon a strong foundation of core skills. However complete mastery of core skills is not a prerequisite for developing multiplier skills. An individual can work on building upon a set of core skills while developing new ones in the multiplier category.

Professional growth is the acquisition of new skills or increased proficiency in existing skills. As such, increased proficiency in and application of these skills creates opportunities for increased impact.

A point worth highlighting is the flexibility of the model. A high-performing team needs a blend of skills, which provides individuals the opportunity to focus on a subset of the skills listed here that are complementary to the strengths of their team. In other words, not everyone needs to be great at every skill.

Measuring Growth via Impact and Feedback

As an IC grows their career, the scope of their impact will increase. We will start by contributing to a feature in a project, understand the entire software lifecycle, owning a service, contributing to several projects, leading to an organization’s initiative, setting a product strategy, having an impact on the company’s technical direction, and finally exploit technology and business trends to chart innovative solutions which lead change in the industry.

Fig.2 Impact and Growth

Engineers are ultimately responsible for their career growth rather than relying on formalized career development programs. Career growth conversations typically happen between an engineer and their manager. The manager is responsible to share feedback and coach to help steer the engineer’s growth, as well as set the right opportunities for the IC to succeed in their career. As an IC, one is encouraged to solicit feedback directly from peers, managers, and other leaders on how they could grow their sphere of impact.

We can use the input of where we are receiving/giving feedback, what type of feedback, and how we are receiving/giving feedback as representative metrics of an ICs career growth. It is very important to note that feedback is a bidirectional process. For example, providing feedback to other org leaders is one dimension in calibrating our impact. It has to come together by receiving feedback from the same set of people we provide the feedback.

Fig.3 Bi-direction feedback as a correlation with impact

In the beginning phases of an IC career, feedback will mainly be given/received to/by the manager, or team members, and a portion of that may be focused on the specific project at hand. As the IC grows to contribute to larger scoped projects, the individual will receive from and give feedback to the manager and the peer team members. The type of feedback may also change as it will involve how one handles cross-functional projects or external community relationships through public exposure in domain conferences, engineering/computing affiliations, academic partnerships, etc. As the impact increases, the partners of the individuals will grow and may encompass members from other organizations or the skip-level manager, or even external community feedback. This is a natural outcome of developing partnerships that expand in scope as an IC grows their career.

One can find alternative metrics of career evolution, such as the role/function of the people that one tends to collaborate with more often. Eventually, building trustworthy relationships will increase our sphere of impact.

Breadth vs Depth

The career path is not the same for every individual. Some companies have different roles but in most companies, they appear in the same technical career track. In the section, we will identify a senior IC focusing on the breadth of technical work as “Cross-functional IC” and a senior IC that focuses on the depth of technical work as “IC Domain Expert”. Those focusing on the breadth tend to focus a lot on the people, writing documents, engaging with engineering managers, and business leaders. Hence the deep domain expertise skills do not grow at the same pace. However, there are a number of ICs that have instead decided to focus their careers on the depth of a problem (e.g. becoming an expert in distributed databases, performance analysis, or others).

Fig.4 Technical Growth Dimensions

There is no singular path to growth. One can grow in some dimensions or in many more dimensions.

If our long-term goal is to receive a promotion towards a specific role, we could approach that: (a) linearly by trying to expand your role a step at a time at our organization on the track to become someone that encompasses that role; (b) identify the gaps that keep us from becoming a strong technical leader then start using your current role to fill those gaps.

A typical “Cross-functional IC” would be skilled at being exceptional in a field that is important to a company, broad impact and leading without authority, being an effective communicator, provide clear vision and strategic thinking, has a proven record on executing at the senior leadership level and being a cultural ambassador. They also have a broad personal network and broad foundation from platform engineering to product engineering. That’s not even a complete list of relevant skills! There are many different skills that you can build out and you can find opportunities to practice them in your current role.

Engineering/Management Continuum

A career transition to management is a growth path but it is not a promotion. Transitioning to an Engineering Manager (EM) role is a role transition to a different track. In most cases, the transition will result in moving to a junior level in key skills that are not applicable in a technical leadership role and have a different market value.

EM focus on business leadership through building teams whereas senior technical leaders focus on technical leadership through building software and systems. It should be done thoughtfully and deliberately and with the understanding that the success metrics for a manager are totally different. In every company, there are many managers who can provide guidance as most of the EMs have had prior technical experience. They can share the reasoning for the transition from technical leadership to a business leadership role.

Fig.5 Engineering and Management: Role Changes

Occasionally, some of us that love technology and want to remain subject-matter experts in designing, building, and shipping cutting-edge technology products and systems, become managers. As we retroactively think about our careers in this continuum, we prefer to get back to hands-on engineering work and renew our technical skills, hence “since transitioning to management was not a promotion, returning to the engineering track from management is not a demotion”. There are many reasons, why such an opportunity should be given to EMs. ICs, who have served as managers, have learned to see technical problems as business problems. They have built a rapport with peer ICs and peer managers but also lateral teams like support, product, or sales. Ex-managers (or ex-directors/VPs) can many times help peer ICs with how to close the bias gap between business and technical leadership.

Many companies provide intermediary opportunities such as “Tech Lead Managers” or “Engineers with reports”, so we do not have to think about it as a pendulum but as a continuum. There is also a time-bound on how long one can be an engineer with reports. The motivation here is that it’s really hard to be an excellent manager and an excellent IC. So it’s important to choose which professional walk of life to specialize in.

In summary, many of the soft management skills could be transferable to a technical leadership role when transitioning from management to engineering and vice versa but any such a transition is a form of a career disruption towards a longer-term investment in one of the two tracks (engineering or business leadership).

Moving or Embedding Teams

Moving across teams, embedding in a different team for a set period of time or for a specific project, or joining another company is also a form of growth. For some, “embedding” may be a new concept. We practiced a lot in my teams and has worked great. So let us provide a clear definition:

Embedding is the process of an IC participating in the activities of another team (hosting team) within the same or across different organizations for a finite amount of time usually defined in a few quarters.

The purpose of embedding can be

• A stakeholder team needs exposure or training to platform offerings to meet specialized needs.
• The organization needs to fund a high-priority project and requires temporal resources to bootstrap the effort in a short time frame.
• An IC is interested in learning new technologies that another team is working on.
• A project transitions from the home team to the hosting team.

In many cases within the same company, there are a lot of interesting and hard problems to solve. Working on a different set of problems allows us to apply our skills to a different problem and business domain, work with a different set of partners and business stakeholders, and widen our horizon on how different parts of the company operate.

In general, ICs should be encouraged to discuss with their manager all the available options. You should feel safe to have this conversation. And you can trust that your manager and the leadership team have the best interests of your career growth and business needs in mind. Depending on the needs of your current team and the new/embedded team, the conversations and the transition paths will be tailored and may look a little different. You should work with your manager to make the best judgment and collaborate on the path forward.

Failures

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible and we must not see any failure as a divergence of our career progression but as part of it. Research shows that the best leaders are humble leaders. Failure fosters humility, which is not only necessary for leadership but self-improvement. Intellectual humility means recognizing that we don’t know everything and seek continuous feedback. It allows us to acknowledge our limitations, seek answers and accept new ideas. Over-indexing on our successes may be detrimental to our career progression. Failure can also inspire positive change. For example, a service that we built that has not had success can teach us a lot for a bigger contribution. Overcoming a failure can teach us resilience, and resilience is the one quality that will drive our careers moving forward. Experimentation would result in a number of failures before we create something that has value. To that extent, we should consider failures as part of the growth plan.

Setting Career Goals

Fig.6 Defining goals and action plan

Step 1: Define Goals

Take time to write up your goals and what you would like to accomplish in the next one to five years. A well-defined goal means it has success criteria and ways to measure the goals. Then work with your manager to prioritize that list based on your interests, team needs, and business needs.

Guidance on goal setting

There are many frameworks for setting goals but the most well-known one is the SMART (Specific, Attainable, Measurable, Relevant, Time-Bound):

1. Goals must motivate you: making sure that they are important to you, and that there is value in achieving them. Motivation is key to achieving the goals.
2. Specific Goals: Your goal must be clear and well-defined. They should show you the path and the end
3. Attainable Goals: If your goal is not well defined it will be hard to measure your success. Hence, include qualities, dates, and so on in your goals so you can measure your degree of success
4. Measurable Goals: If your goal is not well defined it will be hard to measure your success. Hence, include qualities, dates, and so on in your goals so you can measure your degree of success.
5. Relevant Goals: Goals should be relevant to the direction you want your life and career to take. By keeping goals aligned with this, you’ll develop the focus you need to get ahead and do what you want. Set widely scattered and inconsistent goals, and you’ll fritter your time — and your life — away.
6. Set Time-Bound Goals: Your goals must have a deadline. Again, this means that you know when you can celebrate success.

Step 2: Action Plan

Once you have identified the goals, translate those goals into actions. This is where your manager can be leveraged as a resource in iterating your career path. Your manager should be able to help you with the intersection of your interests and the business’ goals. Your manager should help understand where you can be most impactful and how wide your impact sphere would be (and what you should/can care about first). This is a collaborative journey so engage and participate! Examples include brainstorming ideas or new projects, educate your manager with your goals that they do not know about, engage with the community to identify how other companies have pursued similar goals.

Beyond

Every few months, take some time to refresh the document with your goals, align them with business priorities, and review it together with your manager. Make sure the relevance, value, and necessity of the goals remain high.

Career Progression Quick Reference

As we discussed earlier, the progression of a career is largely measured by the sphere of impact. The sphere of impact can be measured along different dimensions. For example, it can extend from local team to partner team to stakeholders team. The scope of impact also ranges from technical to cultural leadership.

This section is intended to provide quantifiable examples and observable behaviors on how the sphere of influence could progress on these dimensions. When you work with your manager on your career progression plan, you could use some of these as a reference.

Product Execution and Delivery

• High-quality craftsmanship.
• Domain expertise (breadth and depth). People come and seek your input because of your domain expertise.
• Operational excellence and automation.
• End-to-end ownership of projects and services.
• Independent project delivery.
• Strategic in planning and execution.
• Help to influence team execution tactics and norms; planning, stand-ups, 1on1s, etc.
• Project management and accurate milestone planning; comfortable leading cross-team or functional initiatives.

Product Definition and Partner Alignment

• Informed — Understand and gather requirements, collaborate and build relationships with partners and stakeholders, connect the dots between business needs and technical solutions.
• Definition — Document, communicate, farm for dissent with all partners, and align on product definition/scope.
• Customer Focus — Go beyond the symptoms and understand more fundamental needs & pain points on behalf of the customers. Successfully connect and deliver technical solutions to solve business needs.
• Alignment — Influence partner roadmap and adoption, alignment on the roadmap, prioritize execution based on business needs and values.

Technical Leadership

Impact:

• Influence the product vision and overall product strategy.
• Influence without authority.
• Building up context to start influencing solutions outside of the local team; peer teams, or the organization.
• Understand and influence industry trends. Aware of technical trends and impact on the team’s mission. Engages with external domain experts.

Curiosity and Passion:

• Interests beyond the local team.
• Build relationships across functional teams, understand challenges and opportunities for your organization and the company you belong to.
• Driven and seek out opportunities to make an organization impact and influence.

Judgment:

• Unbiased and trusted by partner teams.
• Effectively prioritizes and scales investment based on the overall org’s goals and impact on the business.

Communication:

• Communicate and bring all your context back to the team.
• Effective communications within the team and across teams to bring alignment and share context.

Relationships:

• Invest time to build internal relationships; 1–1s with colleagues
• Invest time to build broader relationships to understand the business context
• Comfortable sharing constructive feedback internally and externally; across team boundaries

Cultural Ambassador

• Demonstrate the company’s values and self-awareness as a stunning colleague.
• High EQ / EI, self-aware, confident but humble.
• Discover blindspots where the practice/culture can be improved.
• Model giving and receiving feedback ongoing basis and practice vulnerability.
• Advocate and practice inclusion recognizable by the team. Seek and listen to all voices. Be part of creating a psychologically safe environment for the team.
• Coach and mentor teammates. Inspire personal growth in the team. Attract external talent by inspiring them with our work and culture.