As organizations evolve and tackle new challenges, engineering leaders must create new roles – both formal and informal – to address gaps and explore opportunities.
These new roles may be intentionally ambiguous, as we trust our engineers to go and figure it out. We may even be called upon to step into one of these roles ourselves.
Back in 2017, I was thrust into the new role of Asia-Pacific (APAC) Liaison, as my company decided to expand its engineering presence in the Greater China region, based out of Hong Kong. This required me to coordinate with the different engineering offices across APAC and with senior managers and teams in our New York and London offices.