Three Maps

As a staff engineer, you need a broad view. You won’t make good choices about what to work on unless you can step outside your day to day and see where you’re all supposed to be going. These three maps are useful tools for thinking about work and asking yourself questions about where you are, how your organization works, and what you’re all trying to do:

The Locator Map: your place in the wider organization and company.
The Topographical Map: all about navigating the terrain.
The Treasure Map: a destination and some points on a trail to get there.

The Locator Map: Getting Perspective

The more time you spend absorbed in any domain and learning the nuances of the work at your scope, the richer and more complex it will become for you. As you understand peope, the problems, and the goals, you’ll become more focused on them. That focus brings depth and understanding, but it comes with some risks, especially for staff engineer, for instance:

Prioritizing badly
Losing Empathy
Tuning out the background noise
Forgetting what the work is for
…

Seeing Bigger

Open up your company’s org chart and look at where your group and others you care about connect the rest of the organization. When you extend the amount of the map you can ses, your own group might seem a lot smaller, and your “You are here” might feel far from there the action is. Here are some techniques for seeing the bigger picture:

Taking an outsider view. A new person can always see the problems. They haven’t been around for the gradual change and the boiling frogs: they’re jut seeing the raw situation as it is.
Escaping the echo chamber. When you find yourself in an echo chamber where everyone you meet holds the same set of opinions, it can be a shock when you connect with peers in other groups and discover that some of their views are just different.
What’s actually important? As an engineer, it is easy to get absorbed in technology. But technology is a means to some end. Ultimately you’re here to help your employer achieve its goals. You should know what those goals are. You should know what’s important.
What do your customers care about? Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy.(“Nines” here refers to service level objectives(SLOs)). If you don’t understand your customer, you don’t have real perspective on what’s important.
Have your problems been solved before? Remember that your goal is to solve the problem, not necessarily to write code to solve it. Take the time to understand what already exists - inside and outside your organization - before building something new.

The Topographical Map: Navigating the Terrain

Geologist study plate tectonics, the way the huge pieces of the earth’s lithosphere move against each other over time, forming mountains and trenches and creating earthquakes and volcanic activity. Team tectonics have similar properties. As domains of responsibilities smash against each other, they form an organizational terrain, complete with overlaps and conflict, ridges and chasms. Reorganizations can disrupt communication between groups that need to work closely together. Teams that are under a heavy load can entrench and put up barriers. A new senior leader can cause an earthquake that reshapes the landscape overnight.

Rough Terrain

Let’s explore some of the difficulties you’ll face if you set out on a mission without a detailed map of the terrain.

Your good ideas don’t get traction
You don’t find out about the difficult parts until you get there
Everything takes longer

Understanding Your Organization

Engineers sometimes dismiss organization skills as “politics”, but these skills are part of good engineering: considering the humans who are part of the system, being clear about the problem you’re solving, understanding long-term consequences, and making trade-offs about priorities.

What’s the culture?
- Secret or open?
- Oral or written?
- Top-down or bottom-up?
- Fast change or deliberate change?
- Allocated or available?
- Liquid or crystallized?
- Power, rules or mission?
Noticing the points of interest
- Chasms
- Fortresses
- Disputed territory
- Uncrossable deserts
- Paved roads, shortcuts, and long ways around

What Points of Interest are on Your Map?

How are Decisions Made?

Some decisions seem to emerge from conversations without anyone really declaring that they’ve decided. Others happen more formally, but a room you’re not in. If you don’t understand how decisions are made in your organization or company, you’ll find yourself unable to anticipate or influence them. You might also find that you think you hold the same opinions as everyone else about what should happen next, and then find that suddenly everyone is advocating for a different path. If you consistently feel out of the loop, that’s a sign that you don’t understand how decisions are made and who influences them.

Where is “The Room”

Figure out where decisions are happening. If you’re not seeing how your organization works, ask someone you trust to walk you through where a particular decision came from.(Be clear that you’re not fighting the decision, just trying to understand the inner workings of your organization.)

There might not be a “room” at all. At the most extreme ends, major technical pronouncements might get made in one-on-ones with most senior leader, or they might be intended to be entirely bottom-up(and therefore often not made at all). But if there is a “room where it happens” for the kind of decision you’re interested in, find out what that is and who is in it.

Asking to Join In

Once you discover a meeting where important decisions get made, it is natural to want to part of it. But you’ll need a compelling story for why that should happen. It seems obvious, but your reasons should be about impact to your organization, not to you personally.

If you do get an invitation, don’t make anyone regret inviting you. If you don’t get in the room, don’t take it personally.

The Shadow Org Chart

Shadow org chart is the unwritten structures through which power and influence flow. The shadow org chart helps you understand who the influencers of the groups are, and it’s probably not the same as the actual org chart. These influencers are the people you need to convince before a change can happen.

There are also “connectors” who know people all across the org, and “old-timers” who, regardless of rank or title, wield influence just from being around a long time. These folks are likely to have a good pulse on what can and can’t work, and the people who do have rank or title will likely trust them and rely on their good judgement when making decisions. If you can get their buy-in, you’re making good progress.

Keeping Your Topographic Map Up to Date

There’s a lot of information to keep up with. But you need to know it all, so you need to know what to look for. Here are some ways you can stay up to date"

Automated announcement lists and channels
Walking the floor
Lurking
Making time for reading
Checking in with your leadership
Talking with people

If the Terrain is Still Difficult to Navigate, Be a Bridge

The problems that slow down tech organizations are most often human ones: teams that don’t know how to talk to each other, decisions that nobody feels empowered to make, and power struggles. The more you know the terrain, the easier it will be to bridge gaps by sending the email summary nobody is sending, introducing two people who should have spoken a month ago, or writing document to show projects connect to each other.

When you can, define the scope of your job so that it crosses the tectonic plates and encompasses all of some system or problem domain, not just the part belonging toa single team.

The Treasure Map: Remind Me Where We’re Going?

The treasury map gives us a compelling story of where we’re going and why we want to go there.

Chasing Shiny Things

It’s easy to overfocus on short-term goals. But think bigger. Where are you trying to get to? Why are doing any of this? If you’re only thinking short term:

It’ll be harder to keep everyone going in the same direction
You won’t finish big things
You’ll accumulate cruft
You’ll have competing initiatives
Engineers stop growing

Taking a Longer View

If everyone knows where they are going, life gets easier. There is no need to keep tight alignment along the way. Each team can be more creative in figuring out their own route, with their own narrative for the problem they’ll need to solve to get there. They’re less likely to go down wrong paths, and they’ll have enough information to make decisions, reducing the amount of hedging and technical debt they need to incur. They can celebrate the wins along the way, while remembering that there is a long-term goal and that the real celebration won’t happen until they get there.

Why are You Doing Whatever You’re Doing?

When you’re choosing a technology to invest in, often that’s because it’s an unavoidable step on the path to something else. When you know the real goal, you can step back and evaluate whether any proposed work will get you closer to it.

It may take you time yo dispel the fog of war and uncover the true destination of your journey. Once you do understand it, don’t keep it to yourself. That means telling the story to other people and letting then understand why it matters. Your story should show where you are, where you’re going and why you’re taking the steps that you are along the way.

If the Treasure Map is Still Unclear. It might be Time to Draw a New One

If everyone’s working from the same treasure map, your job here is done. But if you discover that there are multiple competing paths or no plans at all, you might need to help the group choose a destination. By spelling the facts out and sharing them, you’re forcing the conversation(or, perhaps, the argument) into the open. But after asking all of the questions tracing the tech tree, encouraging the people who disagree to talk with each other, and thinking really hard, you might still conclude that no one has actually chosen a long-term destination yet, or that there are multiple competing destinations.

In that case, there’s nothing more to be gained from clearing the fog of war from the map: it’s time to create a new map.