New podcast series explores staff+ engineering

A few years ago, we started a podcast about engineering leadership and management – what it takes to be a manager at an IT company and lead a team of developers. Read more about the topic here; the podcasts – the old series and the current one – are available on all streaming services.

Before I go into further details on the topic – staff+ engineering – let me first say a bit about how the idea came about.

I used to be a hands-on developer myself. But now I’m an architect, so I’m interested in a slightly different path. Which one? Once a person reaches a certain level in their career, they have a choice of three directions they can take.

• The first is the management path, which is pretty obvious and people tend to push you this way. The number of managers is proportional to the size of the organisation. This means a growing company needs to find new managers.
• The second option is to be a hard-core developer, a so-called true individual contributor – someone who is deeply specialised in one narrow field, such as database technology and the like.
• And the third option is called tech leadership or staff+ engineering. These are people who help others grow and improve but put more focus on technology rather than people management.

And this is the topic that we’ll be talking about with our guests in the new podcast series. We want to explore what such a non-traditional field means to them. What was their journey to becoming a staff+ engineer?
The first episode with Productboard’s own Ralph McTeggart is about the transition from a traditional manager of managers. In the second episode, with Hussien Khayoon from Shopify, we talk about mentoring, which is an important component of this role. The third episode was recorded at the WebExpo 2023 conference not long ago, and it’s somewhat unconventional – a panel discussion about how to actually land a staff+ engineer position – what you need to do to prepare for taking on this new role and how to convince your boss that you’re ready for this challenge. The guests were Dmitry Belyaev from Booking.com, Alice Rum from SentinelOne, and Tomáš Růžička from Productboard.

In this second season of our podcast series, we want to focus on general experiences that people have gathered, as well as specific topics and tips on how we can help others grow and improve. We would like to publish a new episode about once a month. Guests will be both our colleagues – there are about 15 staff+ engineers at Productboard – as well as interesting people we’ve met at conferences or on any other occasions, who have caught our attention and agreed to share their experiences and story.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know what you’re interested in and what you’d like to know more about. And of course, I’ll appreciate tips on interesting guests we could invite!

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