How to show oneself as equally responsible for a project?
Been on my current team for a half now and working with a teammate on an XFN heavy project. Both of us are E5. While we have split the work into different areas and are owning each area, my teammate is more tenured and has more context on certain common parts of the system, and therefore ends up participating more in the conversations in meetings. As a result, many XFN partners are now seeing my teammate as the lead for this project and independently reaching out rather than communicating with both of us. Skip is also pinging my teammate separately and in XFN groups. How can I take charge and establish myself as an equal owner of the project? Have tried to ramp up as much as possible on the common components and haven’t brought it up to my manager yet, but want to make sure I don’t get dinged in performance review for not driving enough direction. Many times, I’ll message my teammate to discuss an aspect of the project and my teammate will ping my idea immediately to XFN. I’ve brought up establishing clear areas of ownership with my teammate which we seemed to be on the same page about, but things haven’t improved. I have also written most of the docs for the project so hoping to leverage those for direction but want to make sure I don’t get dinged for this dynamic.
Discussion
(1 comment)- 3
18 days agoEngineer @ Robinhood2 project leads/DRIs doesn't really work. With 2 people, there's a decision to be made on who to go to and people like thinking less about decisions. It'll make things confusing and add another layer in discussions on who's doing what (which often leads to confusion on who's doing what). One of you will rise (which is your teammate due to their longer tenure and domain knowledge) to be the lead. You're treating it like a competition but you have less resources (trust, tenure) so you're fighting a losing battle. Even though you're both E5s, not all E5s are created equal. Similar to the Olympic finalists: they're all skilled, but in the end someone walks out with a gold medal.
If you're mainly worried that you're dinged on direction but haven't talked to your manager yet about it: let's just start with that. If you're more worried about it, talk to your manager more. Focus the discussions on the impact you're having and the impact your manager expects from an E5: make sure that you're both aligned on your performance.
If you're also worried that your ideas are getting sniped by your teammate & they're getting credit, then you might be talking in too private of a medium. The more public something is, the less chance there is of foul play. Start the convos in some project/team workplace and let the convo evolve from there: that way, your ideas are more public and documented so that it can be directly tied to you. It's much harder to snipe something when there's written proof it belongs to someone else.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ping me in Slack or schedule some time with me if you want to dig more into this: you aren't the first FAANG-y E5 to run into these issues, and you won't be the last.
