Recently I had a conversation with a good friend of mine. Rachael Stedman is a great engineer and manager, and we often talk about how to help each other improve. With permission from her, I’m reposting this with very little editing.
rachael: Does this mean you’re still happy as an ic? What kinds of things are you doing / owning as a ic?
polotek: I'm happy with the work I'm doing. There are definitely some frustrations. Most of those I chalk up to a gap in leadership. So I'm working on what it takes to gain that influence as an IC.
rachael: As a manager I’m realizing how meaningful it is to have strong IC leaders to partner with
polotek: Right now I'm helping to upgrade our frontend. Which also entails making a lot of decisions about standard patterns. And hopefully I can spend time really helping the team level up.
rachael: That sounds great - how are finding making those kinds of standard decisions - is it hard to get buy in?
polotek: Oh yeah. There's no process. And no real venue for getting the right people to engage with the details. I think we've talked about this before. There are a few stages to trying to get things done. Engagement, decision-making, and adoption of decisions. Each one is difficult.
rachael: Lol I think the most I know about getting alignment I learned from you. And repeating yourself
polotek: The reality is if you really want to push something forward, you have to go around to all the key stakeholders and get them to make time individually.
rachael: Yeah, my new pet peeve is when people use “disagree and commit” to push things through without actually getting alignment. I like the breakdown: engagement, decision-making, adoption. Interesting word choice: engagement. Engage each stakeholder? Engage with criteria? Engage with... data? Other things?
polotek: Yeah. It's probably over-used. But it comes from a place of accepting that people aren't always paying attention to you. You won't get what you need out of them until you get them to actually pay attention.
A lot of times I see people put something out there, in a document or a slack message or whatever, and they're confused about why it didn't result in any feedback or activity. The reality is that unless you help people understand why it's important, they may filter it out of their attention and expect someone else to deal with it. Because we're all busy, we're all constantly doing that filtering. So you can't just put something out there, you have to get people to engage with the conversation you're trying to have. Engagement.
rachael: Oooh well said