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Search experiences: Anatomy of a Frontend Staff Engineer project

By Erik Uzureau, Frontend Staff Engineer @ Datadog

Some good reads:

Staff Engineering comes in many flavors, each with its own way to solve problems. Staff projects often span multiple years. Let’s explore the classic case of one of them.

First is about finding a strategic opprtunity that significantly improves the bottom line and that cannot be solved by hierarchical means. These problems that evade the usual communication channels are cross-organizational. The best way to find opportunities is to carefully listen users and teams; they undergo the most friction with your products, whether it manifests as technical debt or pain points.

Second, after a significant opportunity has been validated and assigned to the Staff is conducting research. Perhaps the opportunity is present in other products in the portfolio or solved somewhere else. This can grow the impact of the opportunity or reduce the implementation to connecting the right people together. Remember: carefully listen to the teams and their advice. Use git blame to find relevant contributors and discuss with them!

Third, start working on the opportunity. To that effect, create a team of motivated individuals, show your plan and spark interest. Prioritize features and use all the knowledge at your disposal, including insights derived from data. Prepare yourself to presenting to executives with one-pagers that include the problem, architecture, steps, milestones, scope. Anything that is relevant to the opportunity goes in the communication. Such communications are important and must ultimately be shared to everyone.

Use any presentation occasion to spread the word, share progress and show early versions. In parallel, sieve through the code to find similarities, owners and understand what makes each solution unique. Engage with shareholders as early and frequently as possible. Critical mass will be reached once enough colleagues are in on the opportunity, once it has been made public enough to be worth following internally.

Fourth, once the work bears its first fruits and sees its first users, many more opportunities reveal themselves! Say you create a cross-product search feature: you can unlock auto-complete, auto-correct, deeper integration with other products of the portfolio and next-token predictions. Being a Staff Engineer is also about facilitating and cultivating creativity.

Staff Engineers are individual contributors who become managers, product owners and recruiters but still contribute code. They submit the opportunity to create a team for a project to the organization and handle the administrative tasks. Staff Engineers work many jobs, but they can’t possibly know everything and must rely on knowledgeable colleagues to bridge the gaps.

Lastly, opportunities get traction and lead to user satisfaction. The Staff Engineer’s team grows thanks to the positive results and this trust grants it budget for the next initiatives. It is crucial that the members of the team receive proper recognition for their contributions. Will come a time when you must move on to a different assignment, so always keep your lines open in the organization.

Questions and Answers

Are projects always so long?

While multi-year staff projects are fairly frequent, they’re not the only efforts that require the wide skill gamut of a Staff Engineer. Some projects can be extremely short, some Staff Engineers represent an effort, etc. In a way, each Staff is unique.

How is Staff time usually allocated?

Between 30 and 40% of research including code, documentation and engaging with stakeholders. The project startup phase easily takes the rest, with some side tasks here and there. The rest of the team is not as impacted by this phase, which requires a lot of leg work to make the opportunity happen.

Is the project duration planned?

Not initially as the opportunity is being qualified but given the scope of Staff projects, it is widely known that these are lengthy projects that sometimes start as best-effort non-critical features.

Is the Return on Investment part of the research phase to qualify an opportunity?

The real trigger is the motivation stemming from end user and developer pain points and frustrations. Sometimes, an internal hackathon may reveal ideas worth exploring further. The real return on investment is complex to predict because of how multi-faceted and transformative these projects can become.

How do product Vice-Presidents react to Staff Engineer projects?

Because intentions are communicated early, often, transparently and in an easily digestible format (one-pager), projects rapidly gain support from VPs.

Staff Engineers at BackMarket and Doctolib: similarities and differences

By Théotime Lévèque, Principal Engineer @ BackMarket
By Nicolas Martignole, Principal Engineer @ BackMarket

A Staff Engineer is a highly skilled technician with the vision of a systems architect who tackles issues which cannot be solved in conventional and hierarchical ways. They additionally mentor individuals and are evaluated relative to their overall impact in the organization since they do not belong to any product team.

In some organizations, the Staff Engineer track is the technical branch following the Senior Engineer level. It sits next to the Management track, wich which Staff have equivalent roles. The technical flavor and the cross-organizational nature of Staff role requires it to work in “suggestions” and not “orders”; by nature, Staff Engineering is an influence role which implies practitioners need to build up their reputation. By contract, Vice-Presidents act over a given scope, team and product strategy.

Life of a Staff Engineer

French culture is late on Engineering Management and unfit by nature for Staff roles. By this token, Staff Engineers ought to be solid technical leaders first and foremost. This requires them to build an extensive network throughout the organization, meet all sorts of people and tackle complex issues while keeping a distance from them, otherwise they would risk joining that team.

The Staff Engineering track does not stop to one role, though. Staff Engineers may become Senior Staff Engineers, then Principal Engineers. Principal Engineers are expected to have higher organizational influence, technical and strategic skills. They know how to produce results from a technical vision in the span of months to years, anticipate blockers, handle internal communications and so on.

Given their wide set of responsibilities, individuals in this carreer track lack time to implement everything by themselves. They must leverage everything at their disposal to avoid working late hours and burning themselves down. Lunch can be a good occasion to slip ideas through or to get to know someone new. All hands style meetings are great to spread the word. Additionally, a clear schedule yields significant results: use calendar colors to identify activities, group one-to-one sessions together, create focus meetings, etc. Those regular one-to-one sessions are to be scheduled with directors and other Staff Engineers.

In a nutshell, this role is about having impact through other people, either by promoting their work or by delegating tasks.

Relationship with the Chief Technology Officer

Staff Engineers directly report to the CTO. While conventional teams in the organization take relatively defined subjects, Staff Engineers work on fuzzy or unclear, more often than not non-technical issues. Most of the time, it’s about steering decisions or connecting the right people together.

Working efficiently with CTOs requires being prepared for every situation: having the tools, an exhaustive network, consistent meeting notes, intuition, ability to come up with plans and solutions, a map of the employees, their current assignment, their skills, dependencies and current blockers. Being able to explain problems to a diverse audience while striking the right tone is key to getting people on board.

Unlike CTOs, Staff Engineers can reach everyone within the company while CTOs also develop relationships with customers and service providers. As such, when CTOs leave the company, Staff Engineers are not automatically promoted. In fact, they become the most valuable people in the organization because they charted the maps of the organization, products, systems and its past, current and future projects. The new executive will have to build their network with the help of the Staff and Principal Engineers.

At this point, the hardest thing is not for the new executive to ramp up, it’s to find the right one for the role.

Some advice

Whether you work in this career track or aim to, there is a set of recommendations you should follow:

  • Always apply feedback received from the CTO. They are the direct report;
  • Prepare a list of simplified topics with the same structured approach: one-pager, pros and cons, opportunities, risks, paths forward, actions;
  • Record, structure your knowledge and share it with the leadership even if it goes against your beliefs;
  • Listen actively, the time of your contacts is limited, use it efficiently and ask about mental load. Request their priorities, initiatives, challenges, projects, provide help. Inquire about legacy stuff or heavy loads to lift;
  • You are the CTO’s counter-power, maintain this position consistently but understand issues from both sides. If the CTO does not like being contradicted, even diplomatically, they may not be running a healthy organization and surely don’t need Staff Engineers on board;
  • You are best positioned to contribute to the strategy, do not follow the beaten path. Work on Objectives and Key Result documents, roadmaps, technical projects, chapters;
  • Being a Staff Engineer is not the only avenue to maximize organizational and technical impact: Senior Engineers, Engineering Managers and CTO do as well;
  • Soft skills are as important if not more than technical skills, especially patience and empathy.

Questions and Answers

Who finds missions for Staff Engineers?

Themselves. Seniority comes with expectation: Principal Engineers navigate through the organization in search of opportunities. They are autonomous agents evaluating risks and rewards. The role does imply driving projects from inception to finish and managing programs.

How is the role perceived by tech contributors?

The role is notoriously hard to explain as it works like an individual contributor role but requires influence to get work done. Staff Engineers have no or low authority unless they work on an incident or a critical issue. Because of this, they must remain transparent.

How do you stay sharp when you are assigned many simultaneous projects?

Delegate as much work as you can but keep tabs on everything. Remain available and transparent at all times. Keep the most sensitive topics to yourself. Context switching is unavoidable therefore you must find ways to dampen its effects by being focused, organized and thinking about the end of a task or project at the very beginning to avoid the lingering sensation of the lack of proper closure.

By the same token, don’t stay too long on the same project or you will lose potential. Keep a list of current and future topics, for which you will frequently evaluate the best next actions and their impact. Be ready to distribute your subjects at any time and learn to say no.

Some of your projects will falter or fail; you must accept this.