Software Engineering at Google

Chapter 6. Leading at Scale

Written by Ben Collins-Sussman

Edited by Riona MacNamara

In Chapter 5, we talked about what it means to go from being an “individual contributor” to being an explicit leader of a team. It’s a natural progression to go from leading one team to leading a set of related teams, and this chapter talks about how to be effective as you continue along the path of engineering leadership.

As your role evolves, all the best practices still apply. You’re still a “servant leader”; you’re just serving a larger group. That said, the scope of problems you’re solving becomes larger and more abstract. You’re gradually forced to become “higher level.” That is, you’re less and less able to get into the technical or engineering details of things, and you’re being pushed to go “broad” rather than “deep.” At every step, this process is frustrating: you mourn the loss of these details, and you come to realize that your prior engineering expertise is becoming less and less relevant to your job. Instead, your effectiveness depends more than ever on your general technical intuition and ability to galvanize engineers to move in good directions.

The process is often demoralizing—until one day you notice that you’re actually having much more impact as a leader than you ever had as an individual contributor. It’s a satisfying but bittersweet realization.

So, assuming that we understand the basics of leadership, what it does it take to scale yourself into a really good leader? That’s ...