I’ve said before that staff engineers should be thinking at least a year ahead. Managers should too. In fact, anyone who’s senior should have a robust belief in the future.
Believing in the future may sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget in fast-moving software engineering teams. Sure, we make our roadmaps and we define our Objectives and Key Results. But when it comes to planning ahead, we’re more likely to talk about what we want to do next than what we’ll look back in hindsight and wish we’d done. While a lot of our project work requires us to put on our product manager hats and put ourselves into the minds of our customers, there’s another stakeholder we should consider: we need to put ourselves into the minds of our future selves.