Beyond Coding: How Senior ICs Grow Influence and Drive Impact

The presentation titled Beyond Coding: How Senior ICs Grow Influence and Drive Impact by Kasia Trapszo discusses the progression of senior individual contributors (ICs) beyond their technical skills to influence and drive organizational impact. Below is a summary structured using semantic HTML:

Key Themes:

• Clarity and Trust: Building clarity within teams fosters trust and drives influence, as these are necessary for effective collaborations and sustainable progress.
• Alignment and Influence: Achieving alignment transforms trust into forward motion, enabling teams to work effectively towards common goals. Influence grows when ICs help shape how others think and make decisions.
• Scaling Yourself: Scaling one’s impact is about creating systems of clarity and making tacit knowledge explicit for others to follow, thus contributing to organizational growth beyond one's direct involvement.

Lessons Shared:

• Influence Without Authority: Senior ICs often lead initiatives without formal authority and must learn to navigate this through effective communication and empathy.
• Navigating Challenges: Issues like imposter syndrome persist, and ICs must continually build inner clarity and maintain curiosity and humility to overcome such challenges.
• Documentation and Decisions: The importance of documenting decision-making processes in an accessible manner to enhance collective team memory and avoid repeated discussions.

Conclusion:

Senior engineers may scale systems with their code, but their lasting impact comes from scaling organizations through clarity, trust, and influence. This transition from technical output to strategic influence highlights the IC's evolving role in shaping organizational culture and decision-making.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Many engineers reach a point where technical excellence alone isn’t enough to drive meaningful impact or advance their careers. Senior individual contributors must learn to influence without authority, build trust across teams, and navigate challenges like imposter syndrome to truly lead.

Drawing from my journey—starting as an engineer in small startups, gaining experience in the banking sector, building an engineering team from the ground up, and ultimately leading commerce architecture at Netflix—I’ll share real-world lessons on how I developed these critical skills.

In this talk, I will speak about how

• I built influence and trust as a senior IC
• Led cross-functional initiatives without formal authority
• Navigated transitions between IC and management roles
• Dealt with imposter syndrome to amplify my impact