Where you stand?
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. The weather has been nice for the past week, and we had a big race close to the apartment, so Sunday morning had a lot of traffic!
This week is short, mostly on thoughts around recent conversations, so I hope they also got you thinking. That way, you can help me reach a conclusion!
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I've been thinking and talking about roles and responsibilities lately. All those conversations can be summarized as understanding where you're in the organization to help inform your next moves!
When some engineers in their careers want to "grow," that often means a promotion, but generally, they want more interesting problems to solve.
Role positioning
This is one of the first questions I ask people to think about.
Sometimes, there's someone with the role you want but in a different part of the organization. That helps create an "archetype" for you. You can try to meet them once or twice or maybe have them as a coach or mentor.
It also helps you understand whether your desired role is viable in your current organization or company!
Dependency positioning
Other aspects of knowing where you are involved are things like when a project depends on different teams. You would need to know the other team. Do I know someone? Are we within their priorities? How do they take intake requests? Etc.
Also, it is essential to understand how other functions affect your team, such as if your team offers a "common platform" or some general service to other teams. You need to understand how/when projects are coming up, and help might be asked from you or your team.
Team positioning
Knowing where your team contributes to the organization's goals is one of the most important, especially if you're a manager!
It's essential to understand the responsibilities and goals and how they align. Otherwise, I've seen teams pivot constantly with projects because they think they know. That ends up burning people up.
Your turn!
How do you think about where you stand with regard to your role or team around your organization or company? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- I've started reading The Engineering Leader by Cate Huston.
- What I look for in empirical software papers is a post (and newsletter issue) by Hillel Wayne, about reading papers in Computer Science for research.
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