Personalized Coaching for Senior, Staff, and Principal Engineers by a former Staff Engineer
A newsletter for Senior+ engineers doing strong work but not always seeing it translate into recognition, broader scope, or career momentum. Also useful for engineering leaders who want clearer language for developing these skills in their teams. Subscribe for thoughtful essays on influence, visibility, self-advocacy, and Staff-level growth.
[This edition also includes a meaningful update from my world: I’m launching the Uncharted Career Series with two free Uncharted Office Hours sessions, beginning August 6.]
I had an epiphany some years ago when I realized that I had not outsourced self-advocacy in any other area of my life as much as I had done it at work.
If the dentist’s office did not call, I followed up. I did not wait indefinitely because the dentist “knew better” about teeth.
If a friend regularly missed social commitments, I held them accountable with empathy and offered help.
And I regularly set healthy boundaries on pending household chores with my partner. When I did those chores, I let him know, instead of relying on the completed chores to speak for themselves. 🙂
But at work, I did the opposite.
I kept absorbing more work to prove that I was capable and ready for the next level, and I waited for my manager to know better about my promotion.
When a coworker did not keep a commitment, I shied away from saying anything because I did not want to appear difficult.
Worst of all, I relied on my good work to speak for itself.
After I had worked at Microsoft for a year and a half as a new graduate, my manager mentioned at the end of a 1:1 that he had put my name forward for a promotion.
The news was positive, but I internalized the wrong message from it: Career advancement naturally follows good work.
I suspect many engineers internalize a similar idea because of how growth can work early in our careers. The work is often more clearly defined, our managers may be closer to our day-to-day execution, and competence and reliability can carry us a long way.
But as our careers progress, that strategy becomes less reliable.
Career growth happens in a larger system
Managers do not see or remember everything. They are responsible for several people, projects, priorities, and organizational pressures.
And as you grow more senior, your career is increasingly shaped by people beyond your immediate manager and team.
New projects, broader scope, invitations to strategic conversations, and promotion momentum often depend on people who do not work with you closely. They may know the name of the project you shipped without understanding the judgment behind it, the complexity you navigated, or the larger value it created.
This is how valuable work can remain locally understood.
Your immediate team may trust you deeply and rely on your expertise, while the larger organization still has only a partial picture of what you contribute.
That partial picture shapes opportunities long before formal review conversations. Throughout the year, leaders are deciding who to involve, who to trust with ambiguity, and who seems ready for broader responsibility.
Waiting to be noticed is career autopilot.
It keeps you busy, but it does not move your career forward.
What self-advocacy makes possible
Self-advocacy is often reduced to sharing accomplishments. In practice, it helps close four key information gaps that otherwise limit career growth.
1. It helps people understand the value of your work
You know why the problem deserved attention, which constraints shaped the solution, what tradeoffs you made, and what might have happened if no one had acted.
Other people may see only the project name and final output.
A sentence such as “I built a tracking API” may be accurate, but it leaves the listener to infer its significance.
A fuller explanation may reveal that product teams were reluctant to adopt a shared notification service because they could not connect its events to the company’s analytics system. The API removed that barrier and enabled broader adoption.
Career decisions depend on more than whether work was completed. People are also trying to understand what the work reveals about your judgment, ownership, leadership, and readiness for broader scope.
2. It makes your direction explicit
Your manager may know that you are performing well without knowing where you want to go.
You may be known as the person who rescues difficult projects, whereas you want to build systems that reduce the need for rescue. You may be repeatedly proving your execution skills while wanting opportunities to shape technical direction.
Self-advocacy helps your leadership understand which problems you want to grow into, where you need broader experience, and what support would help.
The organization may not have the opportunity you want, and your manager may disagree with your self-assessment. Still, your direction becomes part of the conversation instead of remaining private.
3. It creates calibration before decisions are made
One of the most painful review outcomes is learning that you spent months proving the wrong thing.
You may have taken on more execution because you thought volume would demonstrate readiness, while leadership was looking for evidence that you could set direction.
You may believe your work demonstrates broad influence, while others experience its impact as limited to your immediate team.
Self-advocacy gives you a chance to discover these gaps earlier.
You can ask how your work is being interpreted, what evidence is still missing, and which opportunity would allow you to practice the next capability visibly.
That gives you time to adjust your choices before the formal decision has already been made.
4. It equips other people to represent you
You will not be present in every room where your work and career are discussed.
Your manager may need to explain your contribution to their peers. A director may need to justify giving you a larger initiative. A stakeholder may be asked what changed because of your work.
Relationships affect whether people are willing to support you, and self-advocacy helps them understand your contribution well enough to represent it accurately.
They need to know what was at stake, what role you played, what changed, and what the experience demonstrates about your readiness.
Relationships create pathways through which your work can travel.
Self-advocacy gives people the context and language to carry it.
Self-advocacy bridges the gap between doing strong work and helping the organization understand its value.
How self-advocacy builds influence
The need to advocate for our work can also change how we understand and perform it.
If we know that we will eventually need to explain why the work was worth prioritizing, we have to look beyond whether it shipped successfully.
We begin asking:
What changed technically?
What changed for the organization and the people doing the work?
What changed for the business, customers, or company priorities?
These questions influence the work itself. We may seek context from different stakeholders, examine what’s behind the problem statement, measure a broader outcome, or recognize that the current project is part of a larger opportunity.
When we understand the value clearly and communicate it well, other people can build on our thinking. They may reuse our framing, involve us earlier, adopt what we created, or seek our judgment on related problems.
Over time, our work begins to shape how other people think and act.
That is influence.
Senior and Staff+ engineers are expected to move important outcomes without relying on formal authority. Helping others understand what was at stake, align around it, and act on it is part of our job.
[This is the first part of a two-part series on self-advocacy. In the next edition, I will explore the fears, beliefs, and workplace experiences that make it difficult in practice.]
Put This Into Action
Choose one meaningful body of work from the last six months and reflect on four questions:
Do the people who influence my career understand why this work mattered, or do they mostly know what I delivered?
Does my manager know what I want to grow toward and which opportunities would help me get there?
Have I asked how my current work and readiness are being perceived before the next formal review?
Could my manager or another trusted colleague accurately explain my contribution and growth potential in a room where I am absent?
Start by noticing where the information stops. That’s the place where self-advocacy needs to begin.
For engineering leaders: If a high-performing engineer on your team consistently delivers but seems reluctant to discuss their impact, aspirations, or growth, consider what information may be missing on either side. Which of the gaps above might be at play?
If this edition resonated, feel free to reply. I would be interested to hear which part of self-advocacy feels hardest in your own work right now: explaining value, articulating your direction, seeking calibration, or helping others represent you.
Introducing the Uncharted Career Series
I’m starting the Uncharted Career Series, a monthly space for Senior, Staff, and Principal Software Engineers navigating career challenges that technical skill alone cannot solve.
Over time, the series will offer different ways to think through real career situations, develop important leadership capabilities, and learn alongside peers.
The first format is Uncharted Office Hours, a free, live, interactive conversation where you can bring a real career question, decision, pattern, or piece of feedback you would like help thinking through.
You may be wondering why your impact is not translating into greater scope, what vague feedback such as “be more strategic” actually requires, how to make your value visible without feeling performative, or what direction to take next.
During the session, I’ll answer questions, coach a few attendees live, and help uncover what is actually making the situation difficult so you can leave with greater clarity and a practical next move.
If this edition resonated, I help engineers navigate these exact challenges through 1:1 coaching and a live course on behavioral interviews.
If you’re interested in exploring whether structured coaching support would be a good fit, reply to this email to ask about a 60-minute Clarity & Strategy Session. I’ll follow up with next steps.
If you’d like more essays like this, you can read past editions here.
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Personalized Coaching for Senior, Staff, and Principal Engineers by a former Staff Engineer
A newsletter for Senior+ engineers doing strong work but not always seeing it translate into recognition, broader scope, or career momentum. Also useful for engineering leaders who want clearer language for developing these skills in their teams. Subscribe for thoughtful essays on influence, visibility, self-advocacy, and Staff-level growth.