Connections: Software Engineering
- Shift Your Focus: Spend more time on architecture, design reviews, and cross-team coordination instead of routine tickets. I stopped doing worker-bee tickets; now I design and build systems that scale.
- Document Influence: Keep a brief log of design decisions, trade-offs, and measurable impacts to use in reviews or when marketing your services.
- Develop non-technical skills: Practice presenting trade-offs to product and leadership, negotiating priorities, and planting ideas with stakeholders so they adopt them as their own.
- Create Leverage: Build reusable patterns, libraries, and standards that reduce repetitive work and increase your visibility. Use generative AI to accelerate creation of these assets, not to replace them.
- Mentor and delegate: Teach teammates to execute and use generative AI to produce clear specs, acceptance criteria, and example implementations so they can deliver without handholding.
- Be intentional about visibility: Run architecture reviews, present designs, and brief stakeholders regularly so your influence is obvious and credited.