I’ve been reading through the Staff Engineering book over the past few weeks. I finished it yesterday and will probably read through the interviews again in 6 months or so. One of the take aways (there were many) is that an experienced team member should be able to lead any meeting. That doesn’t mean talk the whole time, or dominate the conversation to get their way….but know enough about what’s happening to get the conversation moving a long.

I have done this in two ways recently.

The first was last week when I was supposed to run retro. I had completely forgotten that it was my turn, and had to come up with (thats a clever way of saying “copy and paste”) a miro board, and then facilitate the team through a retro.

The second was this morning. I am leading a team run of the educative.io OOD course. Last week the whole team was here, so it was easy to fill up the time. This week two team members didn’t make it, and one was unable to talk on the zoom.

So, how was I able to do this?

You don’t need to be an expert on anything in particular to run meetings, but you do need context and a sense of what conversations need to happen. Also, a willingness to provide guardrails to sometimes ensure that the meeting goal is being achieved, and other times to let go and realize that the current conversation is more important.

This is what I did to develop this ability

  • develop team context
    • know what your teammates are working on, how those things go together
  • develop cross team context
    • understand how a cluster of teams (core teams for example) are working, and how those goals tie together
  • develop company context
    • what does your organization currently value, what it the current top two goals
    • what skills and behaviors does your organization value from a person in your role
  • pay attention to what is happening in general dev conversations
  • take detailed notes

The general ideas above can be summarized by saying, be attentive, present, and seek opportunities to get experience.