The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 15. Building Your Network

In most of my roles, I’ve learned more from my peers than from my manager. Even when you get along well with your manager, your peers’ perspective will usually be closer to yours than your manager’s. Once you transition into an Engineering executive role, you’ll still have peers, but they’re a different sort of peer. They will look at problems from a very different perspective than yours. If you ask the head of Product for feedback, they will give it, but it’ll come from a Product perspective. This will make your peer executives’ feedback valuable, but valuable in a very different way from the peer Engineering leader feedback you’ll have gotten in previous roles.

When I started my first Engineering executive role, I spent time building a learning circle of industry peers, which was fundamental to my success. Whenever I got stuck, I was able to quickly poll their perspectives and find new ideas to address my problem. Whether you build a learning community or rely on cold outreach, building your Engineering leadership peer network is one of the most valuable steps you can take as a new Engineering leader and will significantly speed up your rate of learning.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• How to leverage your network effectively

• The unfortunate truth that there isn’t a cheat code to building your network

• How to build your network slowly over time

• Other valuable networks to cultivate outside of engineers

By the end, you’ll have a clear plan for ...