The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 5. Leading Big Projects

What makes a great project lead? It’s rarely genius: it’s perseverance, courage, and a willingness to talk to other people. Sure, there might be times when you need to come up with a brilliant and inspired solution. But, usually, the reason a project is difficult isn’t that you’re pushing the boundaries of technology, it’s that you’re dealing with ambiguity: unclear direction; messy, complicated humans; or legacy systems whose behavior you can’t predict. When the project involves a lot of teams; has big, risky decisions along the way; or is just messy and confusing, it needs a technical lead who will stick with it and trust that the problems can be solved, and who can handle the complexity. That’s often a staff engineer.

The Life of a Project

In this chapter we’re going to look at the life of a big, difficult project. While projects come in many shapes, as we saw in Chapter 4, I’m going to focus on the kind that lasts for at least several months and needs work from multiple teams. For the purposes of this chapter, I’ll assume that you’re the named technical lead of the project, perhaps delegating to some subleads of smaller parts. I’ll assume that nobody who is working on the project is reporting to you, but that you’re nonetheless expected to get results. There are probably other leaders involved: you might have project manager or product manager counterparts, and there could be some engineering managers, each of whom has a team working on their ...