The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 3. Creating the Big Picture

Here’s my favorite story about a group that was missing a big picture. An organization I was in had an upcoming all-hands meeting. People could propose topics in advance, and there had been a question about a critical system—let’s call it SystemX—that had caused some outages. I’d been tagged to respond. While I prepared my talking points, I got three almost simultaneous DMs:

• The first: “Please reassure everyone that we know SystemX has been a problem, but we’re staffing up the team that supports it and adding replicas to help it scale. We don’t anticipate more outages.”

• At the same time: “So glad someone asked that question! We should emphasize that SystemX has been deprecated and everyone should plan to move off it.”

• And: “Hey, could you tell everyone that I’ve set up a working group to explore how to evolve SystemX. We’ll announce plans next quarter. If anyone wants to join the working group, they should contact me.”

The public forum would have been a great opportunity to spread awareness of any of these three very reasonable paths forward. But why were there three different plans?

At the end of Chapter 2, we finished uncovering the existing treasure map of your organization. If your group already has one of those—a single compelling, well-understood goal and a plan to get there—your big picture is complete. You can jump to Part II, where I’ll talk about how to execute on big projects. But a lot of the time, staff engineers find that the ...