Building Strategic Influence as a Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager

What makes a strategic conversation

Strategic conversations happen all the time, at all levels of every organisation. When we hear strategy, we think of the C-Suite talking about business trajectory and long term plan. Yet it also includes engineering and product leaders meeting to talk about a re-org, or even a team tech lead, senior engineer and product manager planning out the roadmap.

With each conversation, who is invited matters. To increase your impact and grow your career, you need to be involved in conversations that happen at a greater scope than the scope you have in your current role. This is where priorities are decided, where projects are given out and where the inputs into decision-making surface. Being involved will give you influence over this, help you direct and maximise your impact, and also allow you to bring better context to your day job, and to those working around you.

How to get invited

There are a few ways being invited to strategic conversations can happen. For the luckiest amongst us, position, domain knowledge or the expertise developed over a career will make being invited obvious – if you’re the company’s primary Kubernetes expert, you’re going to be invited to meetings on Kubernetes.

So let’s assume that you’re not an obvious invite. Your journey to getting invited to strategic conversations requires a few key approaches.

Identify what matters

It’ll be difficult to get invited to strategic conversations if you don’t know what matters in the organisation. If you don’t know where the important conversations are happening, find out.

It might be that your manager is kind or capable enough to already give you loads of strategic context. That’s contingent on both a) having a kind and good manager and not one that wants to hoard all opportunities for themself and b) having a well-informed manager.

So ask your manager how they get strategic context – or if your manager isn’t good at this, your manager’s manager. Or perhaps the product director. Ask someone who’s good at this: “Where do you get the strategic context that helps you make decisions? What meetings are most useful – are there any that I could join? What slack channels do you always keep track of? Whose posts always catch your eye?”

And observe what your manager does. At Isometric, my manager is our CTO. I’ve noticed that she’s incredibly engaged with our commercial operations – she’s really observant on the internal slack channels that our commercial teams dedicate to discussing our largest and most enterprise accounts, even if there isn’t an immediate need for the technology team to be involved. By adopting the same behaviour, I was quickly able to figure out who the most important partners are; how they work; what our partners’ priorities are; what our sales teams’ priorities are. I can now rattle off the top 25 companies we’re targeting for deals; I can tell you every company we signed each week for the last month. I’m able to bring all this back to my team to provide better context.

Be a beginner again

Being a beginner is about having curiosity and a keenness to learn. When we started off in software, as beginners, we embarked on a rapid growth journey in terms of technical expertise, fueled by this curiosity, willingness to ask questions and make mistakes. It was probably in this period of our career where some of the rapidest changes in our level of business impact took place.

Even today, as very senior professionals, we probably all still have retained that deep technical curiosity. How does the system work? What caused this bug and how do I get to the bottom of it?

And I think most, if not all of us are also curious about the user problems we’re solving – how does someone engage with the product we build, what went well for them, what worked better.

I’m describing a different curiosity here – curiosity for the parts of the business which aren’t part of our day-to-day job, but significantly contribute to how the business adds value. For an engineer, where typically our work is enabling internal or external users, this could mean understanding the realities of their work environments and lives in a deeper, more compelling way.

And to learn about this business you need to act like a beginner. When I joined Glovo, (a leading European on-demand delivery company), I jumped at the chance to go out and do actual deliveries – I was consistently one of the most active employees doing so. I would go to the Glovo Center – the place where couriers go to discuss their problems and challenges with ops managers. I was based in Barcelona but went on my own fact-finding trip to Castellon de la Plana to understand how product usage differed there. I spent half a day with the real-time operations team to see how they handled problems like thunderstorms disrupting deliveries or app outages.

Why did I do this? Through these activities, I learned a huge amount about how different parts of a several thousand person business worked and was able to bring all this context back to my team. I heard real-time feedback from users. I developed expertise about the business that very few people in engineering could match. And I got exposed to people from all across the organisation, building strong relationships. For many people outside of engineering, I was the only person they knew personally in engineering management.

Build strong relationships

All jobs and businesses work on relationships. To access more and better strategic conversations, relationships are essential. They’re even more important for engineering because in most organisations, engineering is down-funnel in finding out what’s going on.

Engineers are usually seen as implementers; we’re frequently the last to know. From a sales perspective, you might say that as an engineer, you need to move up-funnel. Opportunities, problems, and challenges usually come in through commercial and support teams, possibly moving to product, before going through rounds with leadership and finally making their way to engineering. By the time things get to engineering, it’s often too late to influence them, and only implementation details remain.

In a more technical organisation, the structure might look more hierarchical, but unless you’re the CTO, you can still benefit from moving up-funnel and finding out about problems earlier.

Relationships will help you change that by getting you to a place where you find out earlier. I can think of countless times in different roles where I was asked to take part in a tech evaluation of a merger, fly to another city to lead a workshop, or start leading a new team in China just because I was the person people knew.

Building relationships doesn’t mean setting up a load of cringey 1-1s to ‘quiz people about their job’. I try to find organic opportunities to learn more about someone’s job when they ask me for help. This might come when I’m intentionally being a beginner and doing something new. It might happen when my team handles a ticket filed by a commercial stakeholder, and I’ll help get it done faster or better than expected, then reach out to them and just be honest: “I want to learn more about our customers”. From that, I’ll try to find another way I can help make their life easier, and the relationship building goes from there.

When you have interactions with people, find ways to help them. One approach I use, when relevant, is giving feedback – or giving their managers feedback, without being asked to. Feedback doesn’t have to be solely positive; more people appreciate constructive feedback than you might realise, and it’s a great way to build an authentic relationship.

At Isometric, we’re really proud of our feedback culture. I was recently seconded onto a project working with our science team, many of whom are PhD world leaders in their field. Afterwards, one of my follow-up tasks was writing feedback about one of the scientists to their manager. This culminated in building a much stronger relationship with their manager, who has now asked me to lead a business-wide pre-mortem on a hugely important science project and work with them on another high-priority initiative.

Craft your internal brand

What is an internal brand? The definition I use is simply the words that jump into people’s minds when they think of your expertise, or conversely, when someone needs a topic expert, the topics where people think of you.

We all have things we know the most about at work – areas where our expertise is appreciated and respected. What are the topics where people would think of you as the expert? Now consider who these things give the greatest value to. Is it a particular team? Is it all the front-end engineers? Is it all engineering’? Is it the whole organisation?

When I joined Isometric about 18 months ago, we had lots of hiring to do (we still do), but my first priorities were learning about our tech, our product, our domain, and building out the team. So my six-month review came along, and I was told: “You’re doing well at what’s in your job description, but for the next six months, you need to focus on going beyond just what’s expected, and maximise your business impact”. My internal brand was something like ‘hiring, management, technical decision-making’ – what’s expected and nothing more.

I knew that a few weeks earlier, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce had announced roughly a billion-dollar market commitment towards reforestation, and that Isometric was planning to enter this market. I also knew that measuring reforestation requires a lot of remote sensing and data processing, which wasn’t an area where we had existing expertise. Hiring would take time, so while planning for that, I became the organisation’s internal expert on the tech side of reforestation. I read papers on some of the sophisticated measurement techniques used to measure Reforestation, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and terrestrial laser scanning. I refreshed my knowledge of GIS. I met experts doing above-ground biomass mapping.

By the end of summer, I had worked with our team of PhD scientists to write a reforestation protocol, and today a significant number of reforestation projects are using the technology built on top of it. Reforestation expertise is now definitely part of my internal brand.

Choose the green button (sometimes)

So you’ve figured out what matters, been a beginner, made some relationships, built a brand, and an opportunity presents itself. You don’t know how long it’ll take or whether it will go anywhere. What should you do?

Imagine a hypothetical situation in which you were given a choice between either pressing a red button for a guaranteed 1 million dollars, or pressing a green button for a 50% chance at 50 million, which would you choose? It’s about a 50:50 split in how people respond. Would you press the red button for the sure thing, or the green button for the bigger but uncertain reward?

This is how opportunities can be at work – carrying on doing what we know how to do and do it well, or taking a risk by doing something we may be bad at, or could take a lot of time and go nowhere.

The good news is that work life offers many button-pressing opportunities.

But to get as many button pushes as you can, you will have to say yes… sometimes. The hard part isn’t knowing when to say yes to opportunities. It’s knowing when to say no, or when to say “potentially, tell me more”.

I have my own rubric for evaluating opportunities, which includes several considerations:

First, I try to determine whether what I’m being asked to do forms part of an initiative or is business-as-usual work. By “initiative”, I mean something that is planned, involves multiple people (often from different teams or functions), and has been intentionally prioritised over other initiatives. This could be joining a pre-planning group for a new cross-team feature, working with another principal engineer to evaluate a new technology, or being part of a working group to rewrite the promotion process.

Business-as-usual work might be bug fixes, opportunities to be a rotating chair of a workgroup, or completing an already-scoped team-level technical project that someone else no longer has capacity for.

This is all a guideline – I wouldn’t automatically say yes to all initiatives and no to all BAU work, but it helps me build a picture. I might consider taking on someone else’s BAU work if it’s requested by someone much more senior or someone I’m trying to build a relationship with from scratch.

Next, I evaluate if the opportunity will help me grow. Growth takes many forms: demonstrating new skills (like presenting a webinar), learning about a new part of the business, or working with technologies I haven’t used before, even if my involvement is small.

I try to avoid saying yes to too many things I’m “already good at” – partly because I have limited time, partly because as Head of Engineering my role is to find opportunities for others, and partly because there’s always the temptation to stay in the comfort zone doing what we’re already good at.

I also consider what relationships I’m trying to build. If someone unexpected reaches out, I’m super curious about why. Sometimes this is tactical – I don’t want to become the default “person from engineering who solves problems” for a team trying to bypass their product manager. But generally, I’m excited to build relationships with people in other parts of the company.

I still consider opportunities from people I already have strong relationships with too. It’s a minor factor, but still relevant.

As a leader, I spend a lot of time thinking about precedent-setting. If we allow an engineer to cut corners, what precedent does that set? If I approve an out-of-cycle promotion for one engineering manager, what precedent does that set?

The same applies to opportunities. What precedent is set by saying yes or no? Generally, saying yes makes people more likely to come to me with similar things in the future. Saying no means they’re less likely to.

Finally, I’m usually inclined to say yes to small things I can complete quickly, even if they seem trivial. Even small favours can build strong relationships.

When opportunities arise, it’s not binary. Instead of simply saying yes or no, you can say “potentially”, “keep me in the loop”, or “is there pre-reading I can look at?” or “is there already a Slack channel I can join while I figure this out?” The appropriate response depends on context.

If you’re in leadership, you might say “Sure, although someone else on my team might be better placed to take this forward – give me some time to figure that out”.

As long as the person asking has clear expectations about your answer, that’s okay. There might be a way to invest a small amount of time to determine if this opportunity is right for you.

Remember the green button analogy: if you press it 10 times, you’ll probably get nothing half the time. Opportunities are probabilistic – some will go nowhere and have no impact. That’s okay. Even if something seems like a great opportunity, it can still fizzle out.

I try to be vigilant about this and call time if something isn’t moving forward. But it does happen. Early on at Isometric, I tried introducing Metabase (a BI tool) because I strongly believed data would help us. I invested significant time, but with only a handful of enterprise users in our product at that point, the insights didn’t lead anywhere.

Months later, a new team member with a passion for data reintroduced Metabase, and it’s now gaining significant traction. When I attempted it, the timing just wasn’t right to make that impact.

Bringing it all together: A real-world example

Let me wrap up with a story that illustrates all these principles in action.

I mentioned earlier about acting as a beginner at Glovo by doing deliveries and visiting the courier center. Through these activities, I gained extensive knowledge about courier operations. I would often share my findings on Slack or in presentations, quickly building a reputation as someone with a deep understanding of the courier app (which my teams worked on) and actual couriers’ problems across different locations. I also developed good relationships with our courier operations team – all contributing to my internal brand.

I was asked to lead a couple of low-key, unglamorous projects that others tried to avoid – one involved introducing country-specific features following courier strikes in Italy, and another was revamping our incident management and on-call response system. By saying yes to these opportunities, my relationships with the courier ops team deepened further, and I developed more nuanced knowledge of courier challenges in different countries.

I also served as incident commander on call many times, bringing visibility across the company as I handled production issues during peak times (Friday and Saturday evenings), remaining calm under pressure in calls with senior executives. If you asked an executive to name three people at my level in a multi-thousand person organization, I’d always be one of them.

Soon afterward, a business-critical project emerged. Glovo had been threatened with a massive government fine – potentially over a billion euros – due to allegations that we were disguising employees as self-employed couriers. The same happened to Deliveroo, which chose to simply shut down in Spain to avoid the issue.

However, for Glovo, Spain was our home market – we couldn’t just stop operating there. So we decided to completely redesign our courier app. We had three months to meet the government’s non-negotiable legal deadline.

I was asked to lead the technical side of this multi-team initiative – probably the highest-profile project at the time in a business of almost 3,000 people. We revamped nearly everything and got the fine reduced to €79 million – still significant but affordable – and the project was considered a great success.

It was doing the things listed that meant it was me, and not someone else, that was given the opportunity to lead and succeed on this massively important initiative.

In conclusion

To increase your impact and get invited to strategic conversations, remember these key principles:

• Identify what truly matters in your business
• Become a beginner on topics in areas that interest you
• Build strong relationships and deliver value to others
• Use your opportunities and relationships to craft your internal brand
• When opportunities arise, choose the green button (sometimes)

Remember that this takes time and happens step by step. It’s a virtuous circle that builds on itself. But if you apply these principles consistently, I’m confident you’ll be invited to more important conversations and significantly increase your organizational impact.