I recently met with a mentor to discuss career development. We chatted for a while, but one of the themes of our conversation stood out to me: Leaders have vision.
Leaders can see down the road past the current feature or story they're working on. Leaders can see the forest for the trees. While some leaders have the opportunity and/or ability to dive deep into the details of the task at hand, they're also able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. They understand that the lines of code that they're writing or helping to write connect with something bigger and are building the future of the software.
Being able to connect the current task to the bigger picture doesn't come naturally to some, but it is a skill that can be developed. I often ask myself, "how does this fit in with the other tasks I know about?" Or, "how are these things related?" Or even, "how does this help our company carry out its vision or meet its goals?" Or a number of similar questions. These types of questions help me connect with the bigger goals and vision for the company. I used to ask these types of questions more frequently. Now I've developed the habit of thinking this way and I don't need to explicitly ask them as often as I used to.
As I say this, I'm reminded of a downfall of taking this too far. Some individuals might be tempted to connect their current task with every possible goal the company has. That's a mistake we often call "speculative generality." You probably know that you need to integrate with feature X, but maybe you'll also integrate with features Y, Z, P, and G later on. So, why not just write the code to integrate it now? Doing so often leads to overly-complex features, dead code, and a number of other code smells not to mention the wasted time and effort put in to implementing these items.
So, a leader not only has vision, but they know what to worry about and what not to. They know what "good enough" looks like and aren't afraid to stop when they've met it.
Leaders can see down the road past the current feature or story they're working on. Leaders can see the forest for the trees. While some leaders have the opportunity and/or ability to dive deep into the details of the task at hand, they're also able to take a step back and see the bigger picture. They understand that the lines of code that they're writing or helping to write connect with something bigger and are building the future of the software.
Being able to connect the current task to the bigger picture doesn't come naturally to some, but it is a skill that can be developed. I often ask myself, "how does this fit in with the other tasks I know about?" Or, "how are these things related?" Or even, "how does this help our company carry out its vision or meet its goals?" Or a number of similar questions. These types of questions help me connect with the bigger goals and vision for the company. I used to ask these types of questions more frequently. Now I've developed the habit of thinking this way and I don't need to explicitly ask them as often as I used to.
As I say this, I'm reminded of a downfall of taking this too far. Some individuals might be tempted to connect their current task with every possible goal the company has. That's a mistake we often call "speculative generality." You probably know that you need to integrate with feature X, but maybe you'll also integrate with features Y, Z, P, and G later on. So, why not just write the code to integrate it now? Doing so often leads to overly-complex features, dead code, and a number of other code smells not to mention the wasted time and effort put in to implementing these items.
So, a leader not only has vision, but they know what to worry about and what not to. They know what "good enough" looks like and aren't afraid to stop when they've met it.
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