Transitioning to a High-Impact IC: How Do I Close the Gap Between Expectations and Reality?

What specific skills should I focus on mastering to increase my impact?

There are two pillars where you can increase your impact: project scope, people scope, and business impact. Project scope is how technically complex a project is to execute. People scope is how many engineers, PMs, etc. are involved in the successful execution of the project, and business impact is whether the project is moving the right metrics forward that will advance the business forward.

How can I get involved in or initiate projects that are high-visibility and directly impactful?

You can look for engineering pain points (inefficient processes, wasted time, wasted money) or product opportunities (streamlining processes for users, making it easier for users to achieve their goals). From these initial ideas, you can start talking to other engineers/PMs to gauge whether these are indeed large issues. This will also help you to grease the wheels and get them thinking about the problems. It helps if you can do some data analysis to back up your hypotheses.

What strategies work best to ensure your contributions are noticed by leadership?

If you can give regular updates in communication channels (Slack, email, recurring docs), your project will be top of mind.

How do you cultivate a leadership mindset as an IC, even without a formal leadership role?

It helps to be involved in the complete, end-to-end execution of a project. Make sure all of the requirements for a project are ticked off, projects are tracking to a timeline, constantly unblocking people, and resolving open questions.

This question is hard to answer without more details.

Can you share what feedback you've received from your peers/managers? What company/domain/tech stack do you work in?