Do you have regular 1:1s with your manager? If not, I would highly suggest you start doing that first. You can also setup 1:1s with mentors, but ask them first. I would pick folks that you think are good role models. Even if it is someone who doesn't work with you on a regular basis.

Once that is setup, I would suggest at a regular cadence (1/month or every 6 weeks) ask them if there is anything they were expecting you to do that you didn't? Or if you could have done something differently? This language changes the dynamic and leaves the door open for things that they thought were obvious, but you didn't realize.

ProTip: Setup a calendar invite just for yourself to remind you to ask them for feedback.

Eng VP at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ex-Meta, ex-Yahoo

Girish Patangay

Alex has given a lot of specific ideas, but I'll give you a more generic answer.

It really depends on your core competency and passion. If you are very interested in a specific function and are good at it, you'll be successful.

If all things were equal, then I would look at the ratio of Eng VPs to PMs. My guess/experience is that there are more Eng VPs than PM VPs? So, the probability of getting to an Eng VP is higher based on pure numbers alone.

Any C-level person in a company will have a much higher level vision for the company and the CTO for the technology organization. If I were in your shoes, I would focus on trying to get an idea of how they think about their vision for the company/org. Based on the company size, in most cases they'll not be able to dive into details of your daily projects. The other thing you can do is to figure out how you can provide them with value so that you can keep meeting them, maybe once a quarter or once a half? I've been able to talk to C-level leaders about systemic issues that I see and give them my recommendation on how to address it. Be sure not to spend the whole time just complaining about things, that's not as useful. Identifying 1-2 things that you would address if you were in their shoes is far more important. Ensure that you are thinking about the "global maxima" not just solving the problem for you or your team.

Hope that's helpful!

Here are a few things that I would recommend you do:

- Communicate to your team/leadership (TL or EM) - It is important that they know that you are blocked and are waiting on things to get unblocked.
- If you can, drive the XFN conversation by yourself or with the help of a PM/TPM. This might get tricky, but I would first bring this up with your manager and see if they think it's something they support.
- With the smaller, ad-hoc work, try to string things together. At the end of the day, you'll need to show the impact of your work. You doing 10 smaller things that are hard to measure on their own vs. 10 smaller things that you can loosely measure, the latter is always better. They could be things like - "I'm going to optimize X code path", paying off tech debt to help the team move faster in the future, getting rid of dead code, etc - but, come up with a theme that'll help you demonstrate impact.

As Rahul said above, coming up with an agenda and not covering status updates is a good way to make these teams more effective quickly. Just make sure to let them know that ahead of time in case they are confused by the sudden switch in topics.

In general, I would try to figure out what do you want out of these meetings? It sounds like you would like to use these meetings to prioritize/align work for these folks? Maybe some of it is career growth? Once you have the goals of the meetings sorted out, the agenda becomes rather easy to come up with.

I would also ask them what they find useful. Different people need to be supported differently. Some folks like to bounce off ideas, others want more guidance, others just want to focus on career growth. You'll need to modulate what you do with each teammate yourself.

It's great that you are reflecting on 1:1s and trying to make them more effective for both of you. Just that exercise will pay off.

First I would figure out why you would like to switch teams and what you are missing from your current role/team to lead you down this path. A couple common reasons are: work isn't as interesting as you were expecting, career growth stalling, unsupportive manager, etc.

Once you have an idea of your reason(s), you can start looking for teams that mitigate those issues and fit your needs best.

I'll modify your second question a bit by saying "when do you tell your manager?" At the end of the day, you'll have to tell them at one point or another. You need to figure out for yourself if it's worth bringing it up early or not. 

Couple reasons to bring it up early:
* Your manager might help resolve some of your issues and you might not even have to switch teams
* Your manager might already have plans for you, but just hasn't been able to bring it up. This would clear that up and make room to have that discussion.

You can't really go wrong by not bring it up as long as you are ok with not knowing if the above reasons would've been a better opportunity or not. Staying with your current team has advantages as well, you don't have to build a report with the team, your manager already knows you and probably has a pretty good sense of what you are lacking to grow in your career.

Hope this helps!