Forming relationships with the right people in your organization is a critical part of understanding where and how you can generate impact as a Product Staff Engineer. But who are these people, and how do you form these relationships in a meaningful way?

Why form relationships?

Building relationships with the right groups and individuals in your organization is an important part of the role for any Staff Engineer. These relationships keep you informed on whats going on around your organization, helps keep others informed on what you’re working on, and maybe most importantly, opens doors for you to be involved in planning and decision making.

These things are catalysts for identifying where and how you can exercise your expertise and influence to generate impact.

Who to build relationships with?

Some of these recommendations will exist no matter the size of your technical organizations, while others may only exist in larger organizations.

Product Management

If you have a product, you probably have Product Managers. Building relationships with the Product leaders in your organization is an important asset for Product Staff Engineers.

Product Managers are responsible for the success of the product through defining strategy and roadmaps and planning feature work. Staying close to the long term vision for the product can help you guide near term solutions that will unlock future work.

You also have an asset that benefits Product Managers - the ability to provide “t-shirt” sizing, or cost estimates for upcoming work, and to identify potential blockers or technical debt that might need resolving first.

Engineering Leadership

This should be an obvious one - keeping close and productive relationships with engineering leadership (Engineering Management, Directors, VPs, the CTO, and your fellow Staff+ engineers) is an essential tool.

These are busy people, so you don’t want to block off their calendars or distract them without purpose, but that purpose could also be as simple as checking in on a targeted technical topic or as deep as discussing new technical initiatives.

The higher up the org chart that you go with these individuals, the more value you will need to provide. At the highest rungs, such as the CTO level, you may not be able to catalyze this relationship on your own. You may need to already be providing significant value or have generated enough influence for this relationship to form.

Product / Business Analytics

A niche relationship, but a useful one in the product engineering space. These individuals instrument and monitor metrics that track the health of the product.

Your org will likely have a business-critical suite of metrics that are measured quarter over quarter and year over year, but you’ll likely also have more specific business metrics that track more granular feature sets.

Building relationships with Product / Business Analytics experts can help you understand how users are interacting with the product and help inform decision making around technical investments.

Adjacent Teams

This is especially useful if your duties as a Staff Engineer are tied closely to one product team or a grouping of teams.

There is a lot of value in building trust and relationships with teams in domains that are adjacent to your own. For example, if your team owns the subscription component of your product, it could be very useful to be close with the Payments Platform team.

These relationships not only make changes and new functionality in shared domains less opaque, but also helps to organically build a more unified vision across domains over time.

Trusted Engineers

A Staff Engineer cannot and should not try to solve every problem on their own. Delegation is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, and is a skill that requires exercising.

Through day to day work and mentoring experiences, identify engineers in our organization who you believe are ready for elevated responsibilities, and who you can trust to do the work that needs to be done. Look for engineers who are ready for growth opportunities and who you believe are capable of taking on the work.

This is a vector for scaled impact as a Staff Engineer. Hoarding work, especially work that does nothing to help you grow, will slow you and your organization down. But delegation spreads growth opportunities around and parallelizes the work that needs to be done.

Celebrate the success of these engineers and help guide when you believe things might be going off track, but otherwise let them succeed. Even if their approach might not be exactly how you would do it, it’s important to guide and not to dictate.

How to maintain relationships?

This is the hard part. Maintaining these relationships so that they don’t atrophy is time consuming and can be a bit disheartening if the interest doesn’t seem to be reciprocated. Here are a few general ways in which you can make sure these relationships have the best chance to stick:

Prioritize them appropriately. Identify which relationships are the most productive and impactful, and prioritize those over others. Perhaps your Product Manager finds weekly 1:1 meetings with you very informative, and you find a lot of value in being able to provide feedback on upcoming product initiatives earlier on in the process. On the other hand, your Business Analytics partner is often busy or distracted when you reach out to them. In this case, prioritize your relationship with your Product Manager, and consider finding an alternative approach to making your relationship with Business Analytics more appealing to them.

Find the right cadence. Nobody wants to show up to a weekly meeting and find out that nobody has anything useful to discuss this week. Find the right cadence for each relationship, and reevaluate as you go. Maybe you have weekly meetings with Engineering Leadership that are high value, but your Product Manager really only has new topics for you every other week. Find this cadence and check in over time to ensure that its still the right approach.

Don’t waste anyone’s time, including your own. Again, nobody wants to show up to a meeting and find our that nobody has anything useful to discuss. Come prepared with topics, or cancel the meeting before it happens. If meetings aren’t working no matter the cadence, consider an alternative approach like sharing useful updates via Slack as they come up. If you aren’t providing value, forcing time on someone’s schedule is likely to do more harm than good to that relationship.

These are just a few strategic ways in which you can maintain good relationships with the right people in your organization. This list is not exhaustive, and these alone are no substitute for basic human relationship building (be friendly, value others, and listen).

Wrapping up

In this write up, we’ve detailed a few important relationships that a product-focused Staff Engineer should nurture. These are not a substitute for basic relationship building within your team and organization, but are powerful additions to your network.

Beyond all, a Staff Engineer must be trusted by others. Building and nurturing relationships with those who can help hone your focus on the product will allow you to make more informed, impactful decisions and build the trust and influence necessary to be a technical leader in your organization.