🔗Introduction: The Hidden Path after 10 Years
At around the 10-year mark, many engineers find themselves at a crossroads.
You’ve mastered technology stacks, delivered features, optimized systems — and now the question looms:
What’s next?
Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path offers a clear blueprint:
Technical leadership isn’t about titles; it’s about impact without authority, trust over control, and navigation over dictation.
But how do you actually move forward, step by step?
This post offers easy, actionable habits inspired by Tanya's principles — designed especially for engineers like you.
🔗Shift from "Building Features" to "Building Systems"
✅ Small Step: Write one design doc every quarter — even if nobody asks.
- Pick a problem (an incident you saw, a scaling pain, a confusing API).
- Outline a better approach, even if it’s informal.
- Share it with your team in a non-pushy way: "Here's an idea I had — feedback welcome!"
Why:
Staff engineers are recognized by the breadth of their thinking, not just the tickets they close.
🔗Start Noticing and Fixing "Glue Work"
✅ Small Step: Volunteer once a month for a “connector” task.
- Organizing a cross-team meeting.
- Unblocking two teams that are stuck waiting on each other.
- Documenting a hidden tribal knowledge system.
Why:
Tanya calls this the "glue" — work that holds teams together but often goes unnoticed.
Consistently doing small glue work builds your informal influence.
🔗Improve Systems Without Permission
✅ Small Step: Choose one small tech debt item to fix per quarter.
- No ticket needed.
- No fanfare.
- Just quietly fix it and document it clearly.
Why:
Leadership isn’t waiting for permission.
Small visible improvements make you the person people trust for bigger, riskier improvements later.
🔗Practice Technical Storytelling
✅ Small Step: Share a short, annotated Slack message once every sprint.
- Explain why a decision was made, not just what.
- Give historical context if possible.
- End with an invitation like: "Does this align with what others remember?"
Why:
Senior technical leadership = making decisions make sense to others.
Tanya emphasizes that technical storytelling is one of the most underappreciated staff skills.
🔗Build Trust Across Teams
✅ Small Step: Ask a simple question in another team’s demo or standup once a month.
- "Hey, this is cool — what are you most worried about scaling as you launch?"
- "Is there anything we can learn from how you approached this?"
Why:
Staff engineers don’t just think about their team’s success.
They become connectors of ecosystems, spotting dependencies and breaking silos naturally.
🔗Keep Your Hands Dirty — Strategically
✅ Small Step: Contribute one small PR outside your team's repo every 6 months.
- It could be a bugfix, doc improvement, or a tiny feature flag.
- Focus on high-leverage repos: shared libraries, critical infrastructure.
Why:
You stay credible as a hands-on engineer.
Tanya reminds us that great staff engineers are “strategic with their coding energy,” not coding 100% of the time, but never losing that edge.
🔗Start Mentoring Without a Title
✅ Small Step: Have one 30-minute “career coffee chat” per quarter.
- Reach out to a newer engineer.
- Ask them what’s exciting and frustrating in their work.
- Offer gentle guidance — not solutions.
Why:
Mentorship is a key Staff Engineer activity, and it starts before you're asked to "officially" mentor.
It builds your reputation as someone who elevates others, not just yourself.
🔗Growth Is Invisible Before It’s Obvious
You don't need a formal promotion to start living the staff engineer path.
Start small. Be consistent. Focus on impact, trust, and storytelling.
Tanya Reilly's message is clear:
👉 Staff engineers aren't just better engineers — they are better teammates, better systems thinkers, and better community builders.
Each small action you take compounds into the kind of technical leader your company and the industry needs.