There’s a progression in a Software Engineer’s career, but the job title doesn’t really help us to understand the broader journey.
Jnr/Mid SWE is about Applications and Infrastructure Snr/Staff SWE you add People and Delivery HoE/CTO you add Strategy, Culture and Risk
There’s a through-line in all of these, that grows in intensity through the progression:
As a Jnr/Mid, we learn to ask “Why are we doing this?”. You know, “Tell me about the problem we’re solving, or the benefit we’re hoping to get”.
As a Snr/Staff, we build patterns and ceremonies in our teams that assume this information is required, not something we can ask for.
As a HoE/CTO, we now know that our role has to own and drive: “This is how we’ll measure success, so we know where to spend our time”.
Unless your company somehow exists outside capitalism, this will generally have to somehow connect back to Revenue/Growth. In a concrete way. But this is tough; most weeks for most engineers don’t sound like this: “I shipped it last week, revenue went up this week because of my PR, party time!”
Engineering’s DORA is one example of how we can do engineering measures of value that I quite like, but it’s not enough. We then need to understand the Product’s measures of value, and not only connect those to the work we do, but build communication patterns that help our teams deeply understand the problem we’re solving for the customer.
When we have Whys defined in “current state” and “desired future state” that is quantifiable, we can have great quality conversations about Priority, Sizing, and maybe even Outcome.
Oh yeah, and as a Founding Engineer, you own all of these on Day 1 🤣
I reckon the best way to learn is to (co)found a company, second-best is to ask your company for an internal mentor, or external coach.