Am I supposed to do something with this map?

Part of what makes a good manager is the ability to communicate their direction: to their team and to their leadership and to their partners or peers. Part of what makes a good engineer is translating that into their team’s work and decisions and refining the implementation of it.

When I was a new Site Reliability Engineer, I was excited to finally attend my team’s first summit. We had everyone from the Munich team come visit everyone from the Seattle team, and we had a week to focus on what our team was doing and how we were going to get there. I was really enjoying working with this group, and I was learning new technical skills all of the time. As we were getting into the discussions, my skip manager asked for a show of hands on who had read the roadmap.

Uh…

I looked around. I was in some way comforted that I wasn’t alone when I saw zero hands went up.

He sighed. We talked about the importance of it, and like the great engineering leader he was, he read the feedback behind the feedback. No one had read it, so from there on out, the roadmap review was built into our team systems a lot more intentionally. Years later, on the same team, I think your hand would only stay down if it was your first day on the job.

At the time though, it was a lesson for me as a junior engineer. Hey, maybe if my boss’s boss publishes an important document I should read it thoroughly enough to understand it and communicate it back to them. But I’d never been on a team that really had a roadmap before, and I hadn’t known that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. When it landed in my inbox, I reflexively mentally filtered it out as not useful to me, archiving it and going about my day. In reality I should have questioned why he would write something like this and send it to everyone. I knew what my team was responsible for taking care of, but not really what we were trying to do going forward. I was so focused on learning how to keep the lights on, that I didn’t really know anyone was thinking about how we could do more of it and better.

We spent the next session of the summit walking through it, talking about it, and what it would mean for our day-to-day. Even those of us who hadn’t read it before the session were now being forced to inspect and engage with it.

Would it have been better if we’d done that beforehand? Yeah, definitely. But I was learning in real time what a roadmap and strategy for a team looked like and why I should care as someone who was not a manager or even a team lead yet.

(This is also a great example of why when you feel like a meeting could have been an email, it’s important to inspect what you would have done with the email.)

I came out of the summit super engaged with my role. I understood how I could contribute to a bigger picture that made sense to me, and for the parts that didn’t, I knew who to talk to about it. For the parts I disagreed with the most, I was put in charge of it (thanks, Jon) and sure enough, my junior engineer brain quickly started outgrowing the role as I started engaging with the strategy at one small level higher than I was used to. I was more motivated in my job and it was the first big step towards me owning more of my technical opinions. That’s pretty good for a summit.

So does your team have a roadmap? Even if it’s not called that, do you have something that’s describes what your team is doing when and why? I’ve seen a lot of roadmaps that are really just backlogs: they’re a list of things the team is going to do and usually a timeline goal. There’s no narrative around the why. No discussion around the priority. No connecting the dots between other parts of the business. It’s just the pieces and the calendar.

If you don’t know about the team’s roadmap, it’s a good 1:1 topic for you and your manager. Ask them to walk you through it. I find a dry erase board helps.

Then make sure you understand it. If you do have a roadmap, grab some sticky notes. Can you list out all of your team’s current projects? Do you understand how they fit into your roadmap’s themes?

From there, you have a whole world of conversations you can build off of that you’ll find useful.

• What is your team or department trying to change? Do you know why?
• What work or ideas didn’t make the cut? What aren’t you doing? There are always more good ideas than there is space available.
• What skills is the team missing to make this happen? Are we hiring for those skills or building them or both?
• Which areas are the most at-risk?
• Are there areas that you want to lead? Or is there a leader you want to work with?

Then go help execute it and make it happen. Ask questions and have opinions when things aren’t stacking together in a way that makes sense. Pitch ideas and solutions when you think you can help bridge those gaps. Your whole team will be better off for it.

Paid Subscribers get access to Ask Steph, a monthly advice column in the newsletter. Have a thorny career or work question? You can email it to steph@shippocareers.com or anonymously submit your question here. If I answer your question, you’ll get a copy of the response, even if you’re not a paid subscriber yet.