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How do I affect the roadmap of my team and get some of my project ideas incorporated into it?

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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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    Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
    2 years ago
    • 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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Mercari, Inc. is a Japanese e-commerce company founded in 2013, with offices in the United States. The Mercari app has been downloaded over 100 million times worldwide and the company is the first in Japan to reach unicorn status.
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