Daniel's Blog
Career Conversations
5 min read | Last Updated: November 17, 2020
You own your career
What does this mean? It means while the manager should help and coach you, you need to set your own goals and roadmap.
Choose what path you want to take: Do you prefer a career in management? Or would you like to continue in the professional track? Read and understand your company progression framework.
Own the roadmap: Let’s say you want to get promoted to a more senior position, do you have a timeframe in mind? Are you happy taking on more responsibilities or training today to reach those goals?
Expand your sphere of influence: Your manager should provide you with growth opportunities, but you should be thinking about those. Can you start doing interviews? Can you help out with the culture? Do you have an idea that could drive impact to the company?
The manager responsibilities
The manager is not the main character in this story, but they have a critical role.
Provide honest feedback: When managing someone that wants to get promoted, but the manager doesn’t think they are ready, they need to be transparent about it. As usual, that conversation should be positive and constructive feedback on areas of improvement.
Champion them: They need to champion your successes, so when the time comes to decide who gets appraisals or promotions, leadership knows what they did to deserve it.
Coaching: Not necessarily constructive feedback; your manager can also give advice and pointers for improvement. For example, they can suggest online courses or books.
Create growth opportunities: For example, Alex wants to be a manager, so perhaps the next time there’s a new joiner Alex can either mentor or manage him. The manager might come up with other opportunities such as organising a meetup or other events.
Career conversations
A successful career conversation involves three phases:
- Sync up
- Define roadmap
- Revisit often
Sync up
You and your manager should read and understand the ladders or framework before you meet up to discuss your current situation. If there are no ladders in place, you can still reflect about your progress in general and in the company.
The sync up is the most crucial step. If both of you can’t agree on where the report sits on the ladder, things will get worse from here. The direct report’s expectations won’t match the future, and that will cause disappointment.
The manager should drive this conversation, and honesty and transparency are essential.
Define roadmap
Here are some example questions and ideas you may want to discuss during these sessions. Managers, think of more ideas or items that may be appropriate or interesting.
- Are you working on a promotion?
- If you have different tracks, have you decided which one you currently want to focus on?
- Do you want to manage someone?
- Do you want to take more responsibilities? Are you ready to take on a project on your own? - Can you manage more people?
- What can you do to expand your sphere of influence? It doesn’t have to be technical stuff.
- You are doing a good job, but could improve on your current skill set? You could check out some new architecture or management books. Increasing your breadth of knowledge is always beneficial.
One thing is not as common in companies are lateral movements; here are some questions and ideas.
- Would you like current focus from the track?
- Would you like to consider a possible change of track (e.g. from management to technical)?
- If you are not convinced about a future in engineering, have you considered working as a product manager?
The last part is talking about timeframes, and I recommend having short-term and long-term goals. The more punchy the timeframe, the more the expectations might grow, but if you are up for it, your manager should support you.
Write down the goals and share that so you can go back to it whenever you are discussing it with your manager.
Sam wants to get promoted to a senior role, so she agrees with Sarah (her manager) to work on leading a small project and owning the whole feature implementation.
Alex wants to start managing, so he agrees with Jaime to start some training and some reading on some of those conflict resolution and feedback skills. Furthermore, Alex will continue focusing on mentoring others and will be more active onboarding that new junior engineer. Jaime will start looking for management opportunities so Alex can potentially manage a junior engineer when ready.
Keith would like to shift from engineering to a product manager role, so the manager suggests to book 1:1s with the PM. Keith will start getting more involved with pre-planning. This way, he can begin to hone his skills for a potential transition. Laura will book some time with the head of Product to discuss options for a possible career move.
Reflect often
You should reflect on your progress often and discuss feedback and improvement with your manager. That being said, I wouldn’t talk about your progression too often, as things don’t change as quickly as you may want.
Written by Daniel Lopez Rovira who likes talking about engineering stuff.