How can I create impact beyond my team?

Question

In order to get promoted to Senior 2, I need impact across the engineering team. A principal engineer led an initiative around writing better user stories that was very successful since it changed how engineers and PMs define and coordinate their work. How do I find good projects with a wider breadth of impact?

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

As your example demonstrates, good projects don’t need to be technical.

Identify problems by looking at meeting notes from various teams and understanding what their concerns are. Find problems that apply across teams and solve them.
How to get buy-in on those problems: meet with people and make it clear what you’re doing. You want to get a soft commitment that they’ll use your work and it will indeed help them.

Also, keep in mind that making people aware of your work is critical for impact across teams. Standup updates are NOT enough: you should send regular updates or hold meetings to ensure people are aware of your work, and why they should care. Sometimes the issue is not your work on its own, but your marketing of the work.

How can I create impact beyond my team?

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