Senior Engineering Traits: High agency and ownership
Taking ownership of a hard problem space and driving projects forward are key traits that separates a high agency senior engineer from others. In this blog, I unpack my intuition on these.
Here is the upfront secret about senior engineers.
They need to show high ownership over a meaningful technical scope. The definition of scope varies based on your specialization, context or discipline, but it’s usually a product, technology or infrastructure that is deemed valuable to the business.
What do I mean by ownership?
It is the act of understanding the nuances of the problem space deeply, establishing yourself as the go-to-expert, setting the right goals and priorities, crafting a roadmap and then working backwards from customer impact.
You may push back by saying that even mid level engineers have ownership over their own frameworks, tools, infrastructure, components, app/service etc … etc …
What is so special about a Senior engineer’s ownership level here?
I think it boils down to complexity and ambiguity of the problem space. Leaders generally expect their senior engineers to be able to hold their own in their chosen domain, be able to build clarity over unknown areas and solve hard problems.
Another way of thinking about this is that you own the impact and are a stakeholder. If the project fails, you also fail with it and are accountable.
The F word here can be scary depending on how you look at it. Each failure is an opportunity to learn, reflect and get better at not making the same mistakes again. It’s anyways much better than not trying at all. Even if you fail, at least you’ve been in the race.
Let’s dive a bit deeper and understand how you can personally cultivate an ownership mindset.
Do you care in the first place?
Before reading further, ask yourself do you actually care about this?
You can be an adequate senior engineer without showing strong ownership as well; your career growth may naturally get stunted though. If you do choose that path, make sure you are really okay with it.
One natural way to have more ownership is to care; pick something that you either are intrinsically motivated and passionate about or something that solves a real need or pain point for your org and company. Such scopes are often higher risk and higher reward in nature.
Learn deeply first 🌊
You should know your space deeply first to be able to take ownership.
Learning the fine art of how to learn well, asking the right clarifying questions at the right time and not stopping until you have a pretty good mental model of the space is the right first step.
If this is not the case for you, this is the first thing to start with.