Become the Go-To Engineer in Your Organization
Build a great reputation for yourself by taking ownership and helping others thrive!
Intro
Engineers that are not afraid to take ownership and responsibility are highly desirable. And if they also make others around them better → that’s what provides a LOT of value to the engineering organization and the overall company as well. Becoming the go-to person means exactly that.
Let’s define next what a go-to person should and shouldn’t do.
Being a go-to person doesn’t mean you should hoard the knowledge for yourself
So what should you do as a go-to person? You shouldn’t focus just on making sure that you understand the specific domain, project or technology, but the focus should be on making it easier for everyone to get started and work with it.
Here is what you shouldn’t do:
❌ Don’t keep the knowledge and the context only to yourself
❌ Not creating any documentation
❌ Not being supportive, not being helpful to onboard and support others working on that specific thing
Here is what you should do:
✅ Spread the knowledge and awareness about it
✅ Create documentation and learning documents
✅ Provide support, be helpful and be there when others need help
Becoming the go-to person is very important to grow towards Senior and Lead roles
Especially for Tech Lead / Team Lead roles, it’s really important that you are considered a person that others go to when they need help or they have some specific question.
It shows that you have credibility and others consider you as an expert. It also shows that others trust your opinion and your judgment.
You don’t need to become the go-to for everything. Being the go-to for 1 thing and doing that well is a lot better than being the go-to for more and you are doing a mediocre job on all of them.
Focusing on going deep and really taking care of 1 single thing is what provides the most value. Think about it like this: 1 specific person in the organization takes really good care of a specific part → the result will be that all of them will be greatly organized.
Read more about how to grow from mid-level to senior to lead role here:
How to grow from mid-level to senior Software Engineer (paid article)
How to grow from senior to a lead role (paid article)