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Last time we talked about staff engineering archetypes and shapes, and I asked my readers to do a bit of an exercise on what shape they are or would like to be. This week, we are going to deep dive into cross-functional ICs, often T-shaped engineers that work across many teams or domains to solve problems. While staffeng.com does a good job of describing tech leads, architects, solvers, and right hands, we’re going to introduce a new set of archetypes specifically focused on cross-functional problem solving.
Multi-Faceted Enablers
Program Focused Facilitators
Serial Rotators
In Part 2, we deep dive into multi-faceted enablers!
Multi-Faceted Enablers
Experts at multitasking constantly balance multiple projects at once. They focus on connecting the dots across people, teams, and projects, with a deep business understanding and enough technical depth to effectively lead technical teams even outside their core domain of understanding. They tend to prioritize:
A primary project - Where they spend 50% or more of their time. Here, they are usually the informed captain (or more commonly understood, the Directly Responsible Individual). This doesn’t mean they are making every decision or writing every line code, just that they are the primary responsible person for the overall success of the project
Secondary projects - Anywhere between 1 to 3 projects where they spend 5-15% of their time. Depending on the project maturity, they may be the primary driver or a key participant in the work.
Tertiary projects - The enabler could be monitoring dozens of projects. They may drop in to provide feedback on a strategy document or connect with peers who may be working on something similar to speed up execution. They may also be looking for the moment at which they need to be more involved and graduate this to their tertiary projects list.
The reason they have many projects is to move through them as blockers surface, and the rhythm of the business dictates what’s most important. As an example, I tend to prefer 1 high-complexity/long-time-horizon project, with 1-2 shorter-time-horizon projects. As blockers surface, I quickly transition my time/focus to that non-blocked project. I find working on projects in “sprints” tends to elicit the most impact, to minimize context switching while I’m hitting a milestone in one area.
In a future post, we’ll provide some songs on how to structure your time across a quarter when you work on multiple projects for maximum flow.
This archetype tends to constantly look for opportunities to apply glue or grease to projects, bridging people, technologies, technical decisions, and business goals. They are forever performing a gap analysis across all these things.
How Multi-Faceted Enablers May Spend Their Time
Here’s what a calendar may look like for a multi-faceted, cross-functional enabler:
1:1s are mostly stacked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I prefer to “stack” similar meetings to minimize cognitive load during a work day.
Complex work == long focus blocks (at least 3 hours ideally)
Reading is prioritized beginning of the week as it may shape/change information tactics for the rest of the week
Technical Work Blocks - Hands-on! For me, this is often building prototypes, performing security assessments, and workflow/technical program buildout work.
In the Primary Project blocks, sometimes, it’s creating updates, sharing context, and ensuring your stakeholders have visibility on progress, blockers, and where you may need help.
Research/Assessment work - right now, this is genAI for me. I'm using it to try to automate 10% of my work (soft goal…trending unlikely but still going for it).
Measuring Success as a Cross-Functional Enabler
This seems difficult, and when you speak to many engineers who work in this field, they tell me they struggle to convey their impact to management.
Focus on Outcomes over Work Products - You can say you ‘built a DDoS testing tool’, but so what? If you say your virtual team built a DDOS tool that helped validate resilience to the top 5 most common attacks, while also identifying X gaps which were resolved within N weeks? Now we have a date story that ties into the value you brought versus the tool you built to do it.
Use OKRs - They get a bad rap, but they work. For your projects, have a key objective and results you can use to measure your progress against the objective. It gives you a framework you can also use to collaborate with product and program managers (more on this in a future post).
Use quantifiable data when you have it, but don’t shy away from qualitative data. Over vibes are definitely helpful, but sometimes, just asking your stakeholders if the work you did was valuable can be helpful. I rarely use qualitative data by itself, but I often use it when executing programs using tactics like swarms or time-boxed hack days (so that I can see if the execution model was deemed effective by participants).
Build quarterly (or some cadence) work plans, and share them with your stakeholders. A great way to know that folks understand your work is to ask for feedback on your plans. Do they agree on the focus areas and outcomes? You may be missing something!
Please understand that this role is sometimes hard to quantify in a way managers are used to measuring work. You may be leading a v-team whose goal is to do something they have never done before, and it may result in failed starts, pivots, change plans, and sometimes just totally fail. You may be coaching team members versus directly contributing, resulting in them being more effective at their jobs, but that can be hard to directly demonstrate. You may transition off a project that was going well, and when you leave, it unravels or fails to continue. Each of these cases is a great opportunity to learn, and transparency is key with your manager. If you maintain good communication, attention to success metrics, and pivots, a good manager will understand that not every project will succeed, and some are hard to manage.
Practice This Week - Structure Your Calendar
This week, I want you to focus on structuring your calendar with some techniques I use as a multi-faceted enabler. We’ll do a full series on calendar management but I guarantee you that if you give these simple steps a shot, you may be supprised at how much more productive you are!
For your primary project, ensure each work block is at least 3 hours long
For themed activities (e.g. 1:1s, other projects, stand-ups) try to move them into consecutive blocks to minimize cognitive load between tasks.
Carve the first and last hours of every day for windup and winddown. This allows you to catch up on reading and emails that may influence your work and write down what you’ve been working on so you can share it with stakeholders and your manager.
Cancel or decline any meetings that may be okay to catch up async. You can email or Slack the person and ask them to record the session. This allows you to choose when to engage versus have them interrupt your flow time.
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Let me know in the comments if this is the archetype for you or if you read this and thought, hell no, this sounds awful!
-S.B.