Personal and team visibility play a large role on the influence and impact you have at work.
Perception is reality
This saying should be no surprise to anyone. Often in engineering teams we “like” to suffer in silence. We like to think that our work speaks for itself. But the reality is that it doesn’t.
For your manager, your work may be visible, but your skip-level manager may not be aware of it. And for all intents and purposes, all that good work that you’ve done may be perceived as not having been done at all.
Our job sometimes is like a janitor’s job. If the janitor does a good job, no one notices. If the janitor does a bad job, everyone notices. However it doesn’t have to be this way.
Team visibility and the role of a lead
Influence is something hard to get right, and something hard to measure. But you can start noticing if your team gets trampled by others way too many times.
I believe that as a tech/team lead you’re also responsible for increasing this influence as this is not just about getting your team to do things their way, but also to have the company aligned on why engineering needs to do things a certain way.
How to increase visibility
Just like some advice that we may give for IC career progress, to keep a work journal, to keep track of your accomplishments, we can apply the same concept to the team. With that we can start doing some marketing and go from there.
- Keep a team journal: Keep track of the team’s accomplishments. Share this with the team and with the company.
- Share ways of working: Share the team’s ways of working. E.g. How a PR gets reviewed, how a feature gets developed, how a bug gets fixed.
- Share communication paths: Share how the team communicates. E.g. How the different components of a team interact.
Small checklist for team visibility
Does your company know in the past x months:
- Your processes?
- How you’ve tried to increase developer productivity?
- How you’ve tried to increase reliability?
- How your systems have grown over time?
- What systems are marked as frozen and why?
- What technologies you’ve tried recently?