How I do meetings as a senior engineer

If you are in the top end of seniority in your team or company, either in technical or domain areas, chances are you will quickly understand the issue or a new feature your team is presented with and you’ll also have a decent clue on how to approach it thanks to your technical knowledge of the system and familiarity of the product. This is great and extremely valuable to the organisation, but let’s discuss what it means for your team as it might not always be best to immediately declare the solution that seems so obvious to you.

I’ve been through this in the past, the product manager sets up a meeting to and presents the new idea or problem to be solved, upon hearing it I immediately imagine a possible solution and blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, mostly making sense, this get’s followed up with others in the meeting listening and agreeing to most of what was said, there would always be a few questions or even a correction coming from someone else on the team and those I would also quickly follow up with a speedy solution of whatever came to mind first. Great, now the team know exactly how the problem will be solved and I’ve successfully fulfilled my role. Right?

By being the first to speak, you rid the more junior members of the team a chance to practice their critical thinking and reinforced the idea that they are the followers, not the future leaders. Even though the less experiences members might be reluctant to speak out due to not understanding the problem or self doubt. Even though junior engineers might spit out a solution that would not ever work, they will not learn to change and improve by always being the ones who listen. And even if they do keep silent on meetings, I consider it part of my role to ask them for their opinion and, if needed, guide them with follow up questions.

Getting the chance to hear how others are thinking, what assumptions they make and what conclusions they arrive at is probably the best learning opportunity from these meetings for you. A large part of progressing as senior is about understanding others and communicating thoughts effectively, so exposing yourself to ideas of others and trying to understand what they are thinking exactly is one of the best ways to grow at the senior level, you are expected to be a great communicator at this stage in your career. This is one of the most fundamental mindset shifts when moving to a more leadership oriented role and it’s often one of the most difficult ones, I know it was for me.