One piece of advice my mentor gave me when I wanted a promotion is to tell a story that you’re consistently executing at the next level. Generally, in tech, you must demonstrate that you’re performing at the next level to get promoted.

But I sometimes thought that accruing “wins” was enough or that the management chain would magically recognize the projects I delivered successfully.

The reality is that sharing an itemized list of projects delivered, or tickets closed, is not enough when these packets go into the review groups for promotions.

Most of the time we would like for the promotion “ladders” to be checklists where we go item by item and make sure we “did that”.

Hello!

Long time no see. I hadn’t been writing for a few weeks, something like not feeling right. Probably from all the layoffs within the company I work for.

At this point, all tech companies have gone through their round of layoffs, some multiple times in the past 18 months.

I hope you’re doing well! And now to the topic at hand.

This past week was hectic for me, with lots of running around wrapping up roadmaps and goals for the year and helping managers understand the scope and dependencies with external teams. Or even figuring out if there are other ways to solve a goal or if some other group has already built a solution we could improve upon.

When we talk about reaching the next level of the engineering ladder, it generally comes from doing high “leverage” activities. I understood the idea, but from time to time, I failed to choose only high-leverage tasks. That isn’t good in itself. I learn from my mistakes and try again.

Recently, with losing teammates due to different circumstances, I have had to think about short-term goals with fewer people. But also about long-term sustainability and the impending fear of losing 75% of staff overnight. 
 Even in the face of fewer people helping with all the work we have to do, I’m always amazed by the resiliency of the people in my organization and how much it plays a part in building great products.

High-leverage activities look different as you climb the ladder, and more work requires influencing others. The activities look more like 1:1s, advice, feedback, or can you run a program from start to finish, manage uncertainty or risk in your programs, or even identify new areas of opportunity for the product or the business?

During the weekend, my mom returned home after spending three weeks with us. Yesterday I wasn’t feeling in a writing “mood,” but I wanted to keep to my promise of weekly writing practice, so here we’re!

I hope this writing doesn’t sound too uninspired, but I still think that’s life, especially if you’re trying to record thoughts week over week. I don’t know. Let me know how you feel about pushing through this sort of “rut” we find ourselves in from time to time.

As we start this new year, the team has been working on the year goals, alignment of OKRs, and all that jazz. Interestingly, it always makes me go into these introspection moments, but also, I’m not too fond of the whole rush to deliver the goals, feels like a juxtaposition.

During these reflective moments, I was thinking about how to avoid these “headless chicken” situations. Stumbling to work through all the documentation required to present, be reviewed, and approved.

Meetings

With a recent post about Shopify canceling all meetings of more than two people, the discourse came around the topic of meetings, and how they’re seeing as the problem or time sucker for doing our work.

The Pandemic shift

With the pandemic, we had to all go home and figure out how to cope with all this communication we used to have in person, in hallways, walking to someone’s desk, etc.

I’ve been thinking about how to write this year in review as the year has ended. Things like do X lessons learned this year, but I couldn’t settle on a number that made sense for me, 12,36, 52, 1 thousand. What are the lessons learned? Right, start from there. Did I learn anything? I want to think I did.

I’ve learned or experienced during ‘22, and they were meaningful to me. Without any order, just the stream of thoughts.

1. The value of a mentor
2. Learning to learn
3. Proactively try to grow others
4. executive presence
5. learning to execute at the next level
6. choosing the right tasks and projects to grow
7. Ask more, listen more
8. Radiate intent; see it through
9. work with others to delegate more effectively
10. learn to work with other people to help with their personal growth
10. make a writing habit
    1. stick to it
11. Share more openly, learn in public
12. manage relationships up/down/left/right

Failing constantly

Growing Others

introduction, past week’s recollection

This past week I was part of an incident analysis for most of the week, as well as identifying remediation actions to take. During the conversation, I realized that the same group of people participated in these incident conversations.

This has the unintended side-effect that tribal knowledge doesn’t spread across the org. While it gets documented, not everyone goes back to read what happened, but that’s a topic for a different time.

This week I chatted with my manager, who told me she generally sees me working on things where “filling the gap” is needed. So I found it apt to finish this issue and send it.

I’ve been thinking more intentionally about what I bring to the proverbial (or remote?) room or table when I’m working or taking on some new work.

I’ve started to take a step back and look at what my peer coworkers take as their tasks and which gaps need filling.

This assessment of a program is my initial way of helping or acting as a multiplier to work rather than adding more of the same tasks that are already getting done. Primarily if I can coach or work with other people so they can take over the role eventually.

I’m visiting San Diego for GraphQL Summit. So I’m writing this from a hotel room. I think I panicked on the first day of the conference; perhaps I’ve been away from people for far too long. Being a shy extrovert is always an exciting experience, not one dull day.

But I’ve been thinking about this topic as I tackle more and more problems. Or become assigned as “lead” of something. I’m still learning the ropes of what it means to choose impact as a priority or having leverage.

As I’m included in more “rooms,” as we like, I’ve felt pressure, on my admission, to keep doing what I was doing and more. That meant stretching myself very thin, and I’ve regretted it for the most part. There’s only so much work to be allocated in the working hours, and moving into rooms with more senior leadership, the expectation of what I bring in and out of the room is less about “closing tickets” or pushing code.

What got you here won’t get you there

I’ve had this topic a few times in the past week, around how I handled it and if I had any tips. I think there are several ways I’ve tried to handle this over time, and I’ve been partially successful or failed, but I’ve learned a few things about myself.

I’ve noticed that I need to switch but mostly on noncoding work, and also because of urgency on my mind. So what I need to do is to funnel my energy throughout my day proactively. Either by leaving my tasks for the next day ready at the end of the day or setting time for focus during the week.

With my public calendar, it’s hard sometimes to schedule time for myself, so I try to delegate tasks whenever possible, but since I’m not a manager. I need to work with managers to find an appropriate person and to help them tackle the job.

I would not want to dump work on people. I like to set them up for success. Whenever I’m involved in multiple programs, I prioritize for myself or use the Eisenhower Matrix to better work with the programs. Otherwise, for each of them, they’re priority number one.

Change is always hard, but more recently, lack of clarity has been giving me headaches! It creates such a deep “fog of war” that nobody is able to give a step in a tangible direction or take a holistic approach towards a solution.

I’ve been thinking about problem discovery, and how much is “enough” to go forward. Do we need to define all? Might be too much. Do we need no definition at all? Might be too little, and repeat the errors of the past.

For the past few weeks I’ve been researching for a specific program, but rather than start and try to come up with a solution, I took the first step toward understanding what is the current state, and what has been attempted in the past. Why past attempts didn’t work? What even triggered past attempts?

During my journeys, I’ve noticed that while several groups discussed “the problem”, everyone tried to solve it through the tools available to them at the time, but also not having clarity around the overall issue that was affecting everyone. They solved their localized version of the problem.

It’s Labor Day here in the US. My wife made a quick trip, and I’m alone this long weekend. So I’m writing this new issue next to my dog while he sleeps on the bed.

This past week I came across the idea of radiating intent from this post Don’t ask for forgiveness, radiate intent by Elizabeth Ayer. I liked the idea because I’ve fallen into the scenario she describes “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”.

As I thought back on these past cases in my life, I felt that there was inaction on the organization to do something, so I stealthily did it, whatever it was, building a new service, setting up infrastructure configuration, or creating a shared library, etc. These are the things a single person can pull off without openly communicating it.

But in the last week, I wanted to drive larger-scale projects, and for those, I couldn’t do them without radiating the intent. Otherwise, it would be hard to reach specific teams of broader scope. Since I had never done that before, it was a scary thing to do for me. But it was an exciting moment to reflect on why I was scared. Why do I find it hard to send that email? Send that slack message?

Per the usual night’s restlessness, I’m lost for words. I’m looking, not for inspiration, but for motivation. motivation to start and carry on my goal of writing weekly.

not because of some influencer or even lofty goal, but rather because I wanted this newsletter to be a sort of cathartic exercise for myself, as well as letting me practice writing down my thoughts and thinking about all the failures of my week.

I hope you’re drinking enough water, this weekend I got myself one of those 1/2 gallon water bottles, hopefully, I can achieve my random goal of drinking enough water.

this past week, I kept getting myself again and again into this topic of strategy and wondering how to “sell it” correctly

As I was trying to write this newsletter and going through what I had done during the week.

Writing is always tricky in front of the proverbial “blank canvas.” And this week had been a bit over the everyday stress. So I was still finding the ground while writing this.

This week I’ve been rethinking what I work on first because I let myself be swayed by the urgent things instead of correctly prioritizing or delegating.

While working through some programs that have problems and require both escalations and doing a bit of convincing and storytelling, I thought this week’s issue might be a good outlet for my thoughts around managing up.

For the past few months, I’ve been part of a few programs where another organization within the company wanted and needed to change our system to create a new expected output.

Generally aimed at growth or reducing churn meant tight timelines and expectations were high. The first time through this exercise, the different engineering folks discovered multiple things.

Not every team was ready to start receiving a new stream of work from a different team, from things like documentation, PR standards, unit tests to training the folks in the tech stack, and sharing context for design choices, as well as taking time to do code reviews or pairing sessions.

Lastly, the code this team wrote was still supported and maintained by the receiving teams, meaning that this group of people was never on-call for the code they added.

During the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I work away from my manager for long period of times, where I’m still required to provide a proxy to her org, or guidelines as she would provide them.

Under these scenarios, I’ve come to start communicating with her asynchronously, but also I’m looking for alignment with her. I could/should not provide with incorrect guidelines, or opinions that would eventually contradict her in some manner.

Alignment becomes more important, the more autonomy that is given to you. Because having autonomy doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want, at the end of the day, you and your manager are accountable for where you’re spending your time, and effort.

I try to constantly share what I’m working on during the week, and what I have in my “back-burner” after immediate tasks are done. I also try to specific questions, like things she or her peers in the org are caring about, that might impact any of the initiatives I’m looking into.

Mind the spec

The first month of the year has gone by. I still feel like the year hasn’t started. For some reason, everything has been very slow-moving lately at work. Or so it feels, perhaps I’m no longer in the right rooms?

For the past few months, between the end of last year and this year, I’ve been deep into the weeds of gathering all the existing API specifications available in my organization. Having a heterogeneous set of APIs altogether puts a lot of the organization’s “personality” into perspective.

Collecting these API specifications has been a journey and showed me the lack of guidance and standardization over the years. By reading the auto-generated specifications, you start noticing the personalities of the different teams that built the APIs.

This week I had my “mid-year” conversation with my new manager. As we were having this conversation, we talked about being aligned on vision, as I’m now a direct report of her, discussed managing up to avoid creating “drag” and instead help within the org’s success.

Every time I have this conversation, I understand the next level and keep growing in the “Individual Contributor” ladder. Seniority keeps getting redefined as I know more of what I need to do and what the organization expects and needs from me.

These past few weeks have been very tiring, and I had to work a few more hours than expected. But I also took the time to research tools like Foam or Obsidian. These tools allow to build and manage knowledge via markdown files and links.

This year, like every year for the last six years, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts and generate something out of them—either this newsletter, or my blog, or even documents that can be shared at work.

But this time, I think I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. Given the rise of note-taking apps supporting backlinks (or wiki-links), like Roam, or even iA Writer, Bear notes, or Obsidian. I decided to try out if this manner of using notes was better suited for my style. My style is having many markdown files scattered around, but this time I can link between them more effectively. Allowing me to “view” and understand the relationships and how I’m coming back to specific topics, especially if you connect from your “daily note” and weekly notes, etc.

Now to “actually” produce something, I’ve been investing in lowering the bar from a random markdown file in a repository to a shareable URL. For now, that looks like this:

I recently saw this tweet getting on my feed

It’s a really interesting sharing, because I’ve been on the other end of that tweet. Chasing people down, declaring being blocked by code reviews, and even seeing managers take it up a notch by adding “code review” as a state in the Jira tickets so they could track how long are tickets “stuck” in that state. Declaring, “Monday’s” are for code reviews and such other things.