November 15, 2024
Read Time: ~9 minutes
<aside> 📌 At Empower, we seek individuals who challenge personal assumptions, value ownership and trust, and strive for excellence to inspire and empower their team. If this article connected with you, join our team!
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<aside> 📎 Transitioning from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer is a defining moment in your career—one that demands more than just technical expertise. At this level, your ability to influence, strategize, and lead initiatives takes centre stage. But how do you stand out and pave your way to the next milestone? In this post, we’ll explore three game-changing strategies to elevate your impact, showcase your achievements, and take control of your career trajectory. Whether you're eyeing a Staff Engineer role or aiming even higher, these actionable insights will help you unlock your full potential and accelerate your growth.
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wTBccUJlUhTEdt4PTcmT8
Transitioning from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer is a significant milestone that demands more than just technical expertise. At this level, technical skills are expected and no longer serve as a differentiator. Simply doing good work is not enough to secure a promotion. Instead, strategic career management, proactive self-advocacy, and effective collaboration become crucial. In this article I want to highlight 3 key areas that can help you find success in the progress from a strong senior contributor to a Staff Engineer and beyond.
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Consider an engineer named Jeff, Jeff consistently delivers high-quality code and meets all assigned deadlines. However, Jeff focuses solely on individual tasks and assignments and avoids considering the broader context or collaborating with other teams.
Jeff - “It’s the product owner’s job to make sure I’m working on the right thing, I assume she’s done proper analysis. I’m here to execute, not to analyse and herd a bunch stakeholders.”
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When a critical project encounters delays due to inter-team dependencies, Jeff continues to work in isolation, missing opportunities to address the root causes affecting the organization. Despite technical excellence, Jeff’s lack of ownership and broader impact results in him being overlooked for promotion to Staff Engineer
By taking ownership and driving initiatives that have a broad impact, you position yourself as a leader who adds significant value to the organization.
How broad and impactful do these initiatives need to be to be considered as such?