How to Become a Multiplier

The following article is taken from Getting to Staff, a weekly newsletter from Thinksy's CTO Eden Ghirmai.

How to Become a Multiplier

Sharing your superpower with other engineers

A good indicator that someone is performing at the staff+ level is that they are the go to person for something.

This could be things like:

• Great at creating dashboards to prepare for risky launches

• Excellent code reviews that ensure testing quality

• Ability to handle any ambiguous incident handed to you

• Expertise in reducing query timeouts

To be clear this is not the same as being an expert in a specific feature or area of code. Think something more general that could apply to most engineers at your company.

Imagine the conversation among engineers where you're cited as the go-to person for advice on a solution.

Identifying that superpower is your initial step. Next, determine how to empower your team in mastering that skill.

Let’s use the previous examples to show what that might look like:

Great at creating dashboards to prepare for risky launches

• Create a tool/script that allows anyone to auto-create a launch dashboard

Excellent code reviews that ensure testing quality

• Start a “code review club” where you publicly review PRs on your team

• Create a linter to force testing standards

Ability to handle any ambiguous incident handed to you

• Publicize your debugging toolset (e.g. logs you check first, indicators to certain issues)

Action Plan

Figure out what your superpower is and double down. How do you become a multiplier so your team becomes experts too?

Have a great week!

Eden