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How do I affect the roadmap of my team and get some of my project ideas incorporated into it?
Mid-Level Software Engineer [SWE4] at Mercari2 years ago
I'm a new engineer at Mercari, and I want to make a big impact. So in terms of OKRs and the overall team roadmap, how do you think about how you can integrate that into your work as an engineer? More specifically, I want to influence the team's product direction instead of only doing the work that I'm given. Do you just need to have a good product sense in order to work in this style?
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(1 comment)- 22 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
- Start building strong relationships ASAP, particularly with your product manager and tech leads. Influencing the roadmap is all about getting buy-in, so this is crucial, especially as you have neither extreme seniority or a very long tenure at the company.
- Dogfood the product as much as you can (i.e. use it yourself) to build a strong product intuition.
- Using competitor products is another way to build product intuition.
- Figure out how you can support your case to influence the roadmap with data. Everyone wants to be able to put their shiny thing onto the roadmap - What separates the successful ones from the not successful ones (on top of the social capital) is a strong suite of evidence. Mercari is a pretty big company with millions of active users, so I imagine you have some solid logging and analytics infrastructure there already.
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