Look into the Future
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
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Things I discovered in the past week
In the spirit of gifts for the season, I've been checking flashlights like this Olight iMini2 and this Wuben X3.
The annual Tech Predictions for 2025 and Beyond by the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels.
During this season, as everyone gets time off and we start planning the last releases of the year, I tend to occupy my time with some year review and look at the year ahead.
As a staff engineer, I think more about the year(s) ahead. Having my head in the future is a side effect of my role due to having more access than other engineers to things like product roadmap, people allocation, or even something like people asking for help with solution design.
You see and hear more, but it's my responsibility to create a feedback loop from this information. Raise my hand, prevent a design trade-off that wouldn't benefit us for the next project, and provide feedback just in time for a design that might be easier to implement with help from another team looking into the same problem.
There's more than passive reception of information, we need to gain leadership trust that we're doing our job plus having insight and providing value from this insight.
We build trust with peers via 1:1s, group presentations, participation in meetings, giving feedback, etc. These activities signal to leadership that we're here to take action from all these sources of information.
This look "into the future" has allowed me to move a multi-year project by giving feedback to teams and adjusting project stories to help deliver little by little. While it's slower than actively getting a project, sometimes with large organizations, these "skunk works" get you the large changes.
Ultimately, these feedback loops created by our unique access to information are just a piece of the puzzle. We need to influence other teams, convince leadership, etc. All takes time and effort, but it's worth the investment.
Your turn!
How do you plan for the year ahead? Have you ever worked in this capacity with other teams? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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