High-Impact Project Strategies for Staff Engineers

As engineers we are really good at being technical... 👇🏼 Dependency injection, TDD, Clean Code, Reverse Proxies… we are all in. But there’s something simpler but harder we struggle with... And it’s makes you standout when interviewing, and looking to grow as an engineering leader (senior and beyond roles). Taking on challenging, high-impact projects. AND. Quantifying those project wins to business outcomes and wins. 🧠 We are technical superstars, so what often happens internally in conversations, or when interviewing is we go deeeep into the technicalities. “I rebuilt our build system from webpack 1.x to webpack 4.0 and removed the x/y/z security vulnerability, and speed up load times significantly.” Sounds impressive… But for product, business, and hiring leaders, it’s hard to really understand how valuable and impactful that was. What if instead for the same project, you were able to say: “I identified that our build system had several security vulnerabilities. I also discovered it cost our engineers 125 hrs / month waiting for builds to complete. I spearheaded an effort to upgrade this system, and led the team to fix our security issues, and decrease build times by 78%. Combined these measures saved our business approx $150,000 / yr.” Ok now you have their interest… they can’t wait to dive in more and ask follow up questions and learn more about the project. 🔥 But how can you get stories like that? Brag docs. – Keep a daily log of project updates + learnings. – Summarize these into meaningful impact every 2 weeks. – Summarize those wins again every 2-3 months into top wins/learnings. – Quantify them. Talk with engineering, business and product leaders to get the bigger picture and some impact numbers. – Use these wins/learnings in resumes, performance reviews, interviews, etc. Taking on challenging projects is key to your success. Don’t stop there. Quantify and document those wins. ✔️ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If you liked this post, you’ll probably love my weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e95JH9qH

Senior to Staff Security Engineer: From Execution to Orchestrator Moving from Senior to Staff Security Engineer is a fundamental transformation in how you approach your craft and influence the organization. I can't stress enough that it's an entirely different job. It's a bit like shifting from playing the violin to leading a jazz orchestra, expanding beyond technical expertise to strategic problem-solving. Today, we'll look at three examples through the lens of security engineering. 1. From Problem Solver to Strategic Problem Identifier: We must move from solving immediate security challenges to identifying which problems fundamentally uplevel or accelerate our organizational security posture. This requires seeing beyond charters or the domain you specialize in to recognize patterns that could improve multiple facets of our charter. Still, my expectation is staff+ engineers still see work through execution but they are thoughtful on when it makes sense to transition to focus on other areas. How To Apply: Examine the last six months of security incidents and bug bounty, looking for patterns/trends and their potential impact on business initiatives. Then, consider opportunities that would disrupt those patterns and trends holistically. 2. From Technical Expert to Business <> Technical Translator: Evolving from articulating technical concepts to peers toward translating complex problems or opportunities into business value language. This allows you to influence and work effectively with senior leaders across multiple teams, helping get the right projects funded. How To Apply: Practice! Take a security project you are working on and work to establish its leverage in a business context, aligned with company goals or strategies. GPT is your friend in brainstorming. 3. From Personal Impact to Scaling Through Others: Transforming from individual technical excellence to creating environments where teams consistently produce exceptional security strategies and execution. I say creating environments because an environment can scale by enabling everyone to produce great strategy and execute efficiently. How to Apply: Identify at least one gap in the strategic lifecycle where you work and examine what constraints, guidance, or frameworks would allow people to move faster and more confidently. You can work on these skills today, which will help you be more effective in a senior engineering role as well. Let me know in the comments if you have other observations or questions about what it's like to work in a staff+ role.

Back in my days as a junior engineer, there was a Senior Staff Engineer on my team who worked 40-45 hours a week and yet only pushed a few dozen commits per half.  At first, I didn’t understand it.  I was grinding away, writing code daily, and fixing bugs, while this engineer barely seemed to contribute.  But over time, I realized something game-changing about how high-impact engineers actually work.  So, what did they do?  🔹 They found the biggest inefficiencies and fixed them.   - Instead of churning out new features, they dug into legacy systems, identified slow code paths, and removed bottlenecks that had existed for years.  🔹 They focused on debugging at scale.   - They didn’t just fix bugs. They found the bugs that mattered, the ones costing the company millions in inefficiencies, latency, and downtime.  🔹 They were masters of system-level thinking.   - They understood that a 0.2-second reduction in a critical API response time could lead to millions in revenue gains and a better user experience.  🔹 They made existing systems more efficient.   - One fix they made? A small caching optimization that reduced database queries by 30%, cutting infrastructure costs dramatically.  The Real Lesson?  +  Impact > Lines of Code   - Writing 10,000 lines of new code isn’t as valuable as removing 1,000 lines of bad code that slow everything down.  +  Find the real problems   - The most impactful engineers aren’t just feature builders—they investigate, debug, and solve system-wide inefficiencies.  +  Optimizations drive massive value   - Small, strategic fixes at scale can save millions in infrastructure costs or increase revenue without adding new features.  ► What junior engineers can learn from this?  🔸 Stop thinking that impact = writing more code.   🔸 Learn how to debug and optimize instead of just building new things.   🔸 Look beyond your task list, find inefficiencies, improve what already exists, and focus on long-term system health.  Because the best engineers aren’t the ones who ship the most code.  They’re the ones who make the entire system better. – P.S: If you're preparing for a SWE role, do check out my guide on behavioral interviews. If you want to break into big tech, startups, or MAANG companies, you must ace the behavioral round. This guide will help you do it → https://lnkd.in/drnsTNhU (210 engineers are already using this!)

High-Impact Enterprise Architecture (EA) Practices (8) for Immediate Business-IT Alignment (Feasible, Executive-Focused)
 For leadership teams in low-maturity EA environments, focus on these lightweight, co-owned practices that deliver alignment within 3–6 months. Prioritized for speed, executive visibility, and measurable impact:   1. Executive-Aligned Capability Roadmaps ·     What: Host a 1–2 day offsite with Business and IT leads. Define 5–7 strategic capabilities (e.g., “Digital Customer Onboarding,” “Automated Order-to-Cash”). Publish a one-page roadmap with owners, timelines, and business outcomes. ·     Why It Works: Forces consensus on priorities. Example: A healthcare provider aligned 80% of IT spend to 6 capabilities, accelerating time-to-market for patient portals by 40%.   2. Rapid Value-Stream Kaizen Workshops ·     What: Run 2-day cross-functional war rooms on critical workflows (e.g., “Lead-to-Revenue”). Map pain points, redesign processes, and commit to 2–3 fixes in <30 days. ·     Why It Works: Exposes hidden IT-business handoff failures. A logistics firm cut invoice errors by 50% after redesigning their “Quote-to-Invoice” flow.   3. IT Portfolio Rationalization ·     What: Audit applications. Retire redundant/legacy systems (target 20% cost reduction), reallocate savings to strategic capabilities. ·     Why It Works: Immediate ROI. A retailer saved $1.2M/year by consolidating 4 CRMs into one.   4. EA Quick-Win Reference Builds ·     What: Build 2–3 reusable templates (e.g., API integration, auth module) in 2 weeks. Embed these into project kickoffs to cut 6–8 weeks of rework. ·     Why It Works: Proves EA’s value fast. A bank reduced dev time for new mobile apps by 35% using pre-approved UX shells.   5. Business-IT Steering Council with Live Dashboards ·     What: Bi-weekly meetings chaired by CFO/COO. Use real-time dashboards (e.g., capability progress, integration backlog) to kill low-value projects. ·     Why It Works: Data-driven governance. A manufacturer reallocated $500K from a stalled IoT project to a inventory optimization tool with proven ROI.   Leadership Playbook Start Small: Pilot 2–3 practices in one division (e.g., sales or supply chain). Demand Co-Ownership: Require Business and IT leads to jointly own roadmaps, glossaries, and dashboards. Fund Quick Wins: Allocate a 50K–100K “sandbox” budget for reference builds and Kaizen fixes. Measure What Matters: Track business outcomes (e.g., revenue impact, cycle time reduction), not just IT metrics.   Final Note: These practices have driven 10–25% efficiency gains in 6 months for mid-sized enterprises. Avoid “boiling the ocean”—focus on critical pain points first, then expand. Details are available in our Premium Content Newsletter. Do subscribe. Image Source: Paper by Giovanni Giachetti, Beatriz Marín, and Estefanía Serral Transform Partner – Your Digital Transformation Consultancy

The project that led to my promotion to Staff Engineer at Meta was an internal debug tool that 500+ engineers adopted. This project didn't exist on any roadmap, and my leadership team was completely unaware of my work for the first 80% of the project's existence. This was risky: the fast track to career stagnation is working on projects that no one cares about. So if you feel stuck with lower-priority work, you only have two options: 1️⃣ Drop your work. Figure out how to contribute to more impactful projects that leaders do care about. 2️⃣ Make your work a higher priority. Make a compelling case using data, narrative, or conversation that the work you're doing is actually undervalued. The second tactic is harder and, therefore, has less competition. If you succeed at *creating* a new priority, you get an outsized amount of the credit. My full thoughts: https://lnkd.in/gKJmr6xW