Growing Your Engineering Career at Guidewire

By: Will Manning (Director, Engineering)

While the focus may be on your own career development, everyone benefits when you progressively take on more responsibility at work: your manager, your team, your department, and your company. Your manager wants to see you grow, but they can’t take ownership of your career for you. Only you can do that. Your manager is there to help, but it’s your responsibility to figure out the best way to get the most from your manager. In every conversation you have with them, your manager is giving you feedback and advice. Take that feedback, learn how you can better help them, and then use it to your advantage.

Growing as an engineer can mean many things. You can progress as an individual contributor or move into management, architecture, or even move into another discipline entirely, such as product management. Even though we have a skills matrix for most of the roles in Guidewire, these matrices aren’t exhaustive and never could be. Growing in your role is not a box-ticking exercise, it’s a mindset. Your constant and consistent goal should always be to improve your skills. I would be remiss if I did not say that there is also some luck involved when it comes to career progression. But focusing on being the best that you can be will not only help increase your luck, it will also ensure you are ready to move your career forward when the opportunity presents itself.

Skills

Initiative

An engineer with initiative solves problems without being asked. They notice areas of potential improvement and drive advancements in those areas. This is an extremely important skill to not only apply to your projects, but also to your career journey. Be intentional about seeking out your own growth opportunities. Be specific when asking your manager or other senior leadership for help or feedback. Validate areas where you need to deepen your skills or need to grow to create a better match with your ambitions.

Guidewire doesn’t have quotas or limits that dictate the number of senior people that can be on a team. And while the ability to grow naturally reduces as you become more senior, there are always opportunities to take on additional tasks if you ask for them. In fact, you don’t have to be a team lead or in a formal leadership position in order to demonstrate leadership skills. Always be on the lookout for ways you can deliver more than is expected of you or improve the area you are working in. Lead by example, mentor new team members, or volunteer to manage an aspect of a project your team is working on. If you consistently go above and beyond, you will set yourself apart and will naturally be given more responsibility and opportunities.

Instincts

Your instincts can be described as your sixth sense. They tell you when something isn’t quite right or when trouble is coming. When you have an agile mindset and you start to curate a holistic view of how your work fits into the project overall, you will begin to develop these instincts. A great engineer doesn’t simply work on their own piece of the puzzle in isolation. They understand the big picture and how their individual contribution fits into it. They focus on the value they deliver and not just the work they are doing.

You can strengthen your instincts over time as you build up your experience. You can also read books and articles in order to understand how to spot patterns and learn from others who have traveled a similar career path. Take advantage of the various learning platforms that are available. We strongly support this learning mindset at Guidewire and have partnered with O’Reilly to provide you with access to books, webinars, courses, and sandboxes to help accelerate the learning curve.

Self-improvement

Relentless self-improvement is essential for growth. It’s important to know your strengths and lean into them. But it can be even more impactful to be aware of the areas where you need to add to your skillset. This self-awareness will allow you to fill in the gaps, learn new skills, and propel you forward in your career. Come up with a list of areas where you want to continue to grow and ask your manager two things. One, what is the most beneficial skill to focus on in the short term? And two, what is the most impactful skill to focus on over the long term? Don’t forget to also discuss ways you can utilize your current strengths to immediately contribute additional value. Be a continuous learner, relentlessly experiment, and be fearless. Unlock your full potential by continually improving your craft.

Consistency

Consistency shows that you are dependable and trustworthy. Whether you are an individual contributor or manage a team, focus on always delivering on your commitments and exceeding expectations. Be the person that people are excited to partner with on projects because they know you always produce quality work.

Communication

How you communicate can be just as important as the quality of your work. When a task has been delegated to you, keep stakeholders informed on your progress. Proactively provide your manager with the information they need to make decisions. Don’t discount the value of building strong relationships with members of other teams in addition to those you work with on a regular basis. Having strong communication skills will make it easier for you to work cross-functionally and these skills are critical to your career growth opportunities.

Feedback

The ability to provide and receive feedback is hugely important to building a great team. The best kind of feedback is timely, focused, and provided in an encouraging way. It is important to learn how to both give and receive feedback. Positive feedback is important because it validates and affirms someone’s strengths and contributions. And receiving constructive feedback is one of the best ways for you to grow both personally and professionally. When giving feedback, approach it with a mindset focused on providing support and suggesting opportunities for continued skill development.

When you receive feedback, ask questions about it. If your manager is relaying feedback from another source, ask them for their opinion on what they are sharing with you. Feedback properly internalized can be an excellent resource that is invaluable to your career progression. It’s not always easy to process constructive feedback and sometimes you won’t agree with the feedback as delivered. But if you approach the process of giving and receiving feedback from a learning mindset, you will be able to recognize the overall importance and value that it offers. Feedback is always a gift.

Mentoring

We all have backgrounds and experiences that have shaped our skill sets. Learning from one another is extremely important for the long-term growth and performance of you and your team. Invest time in others that don’t have the same knowledge or experience that you do. And be open to what they might be able to teach you.

Instead of trying to find one person to be your mentor, look for multiple people that you can learn from and draw on for advice. Reach out to people that you respect and be specific in your ask. Make sure to always set an agenda ahead of time if you set up one-on-one meetings with a mentor.

Technical Skills

It goes without saying that technical skills are hugely important. But how you use them is even more impactful. Use your technical skills to benefit the entire team. Look to take on the most challenging work. Strive to become the person your team can turn to if they need specific guidance or feedback. You aren’t just focused on the speed of delivery, but also the quality. Take ownership of features, write technical designs, seek out feedback, and drive the feature to completion with technical excellence. Become the expert.

Selling Yourself

The day-to-day opportunities you are presented with are mostly based on people knowing your skills. Use the projects that you work on as sales opportunities. Presentations, workshops, and design documents are some of the tools that you can use to showcase your expertise. Tell your manager everything that you are doing. Be vocal about helping others so they can also benefit from your unique skill set.

Emotional Intelligence

The phrase “emotional intelligence” is often used interchangeably with the word “maturity.” Those who have participated in the Crucial Conversations training or ever read the Difficult Conversations book will recognize that both the training and the book are essentially frameworks for applying emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is not only an understanding of how to empathize with others and defuse conflict, it’s also the ability to manage your own emotions, especially when faced with stressful situations. For example, it can be very frustrating and difficult to travel from a logical world into a world where the rules of logic seem to shift or even become optional. But this is what happens when you transition into more senior roles. You move from the science of engineering to the sciences of psychology and sociology, with some systems thinking and chaos theory thrown in.

Taking ownership of your career

A Manager’s Perspective

Look at your career from the perspective of your manager. Your manager wants you to grow. And yes, they want to promote you and give you more money. It benefits everyone for you to develop new skill sets and take on more challenging projects. Your manager is judged on many things, but a huge one is their ability to grow employees and therefore their teams. But your manager also needs to know that if they delegate a task to you, it will get done with the same level of quality, care, and attention that they’d give it themselves.

Managing Your Manager

As an individual contributor, you have direct control over everything for which you are held accountable. A manager, however, is held accountable for a large amount of work that they do not directly control.

A good rule of thumb is to make your manager’s life easier. Push the information you think your manager needs to them proactively. Sell yourself in every one-on-one. Your manager won’t attend every meeting you are in, won’t look at every pull request you open or comment on, won’t read every page you write. You need to bring these things to their attention yourself and ask for feedback. Be specific instead of using generalities.

Managing your manager is a great way of demonstrating that you are capable of managing others.

One-on-Ones

This is the most important meeting of your week. Use the time wisely. These meetings are not a reporting ceremony to your manager, they are for you. Be proactive about discussing additional areas where you can demonstrate your skills. If you need help, ask for their advice. If your manager is asking about your work it is because they want to know how you are doing. Find resources on how to do great one-on-ones and implement those best practices into your meetings.

Delegating Work to Others

Delegating work is a very difficult skill to master. Initially, delegation can actually be more work for the delegator. However, mastering this skill will make you more productive in the long run and will allow you to improve your mentorship skills, your work management skills, and remove single points of failure.

Delegation is not as simple as asking someone else to do some work for you. When you delegate work, you are still personally responsible for that work. There will also be a learning curve involved for the person that you are delegating to. The key is to set clear directions, detailed timelines, and specific quality expectations. You will also need to create a process for verifying the work that you are delegating. As you become more senior, you will be held responsible for more and more work that you don’t personally do.

Receiving Delegated Work

If you are offered an opportunity, take initiative and own it. As previously mentioned, delegation can often be more work for the delegator. But you are specifically being asked to do this work because they identified the project as a task that can help you grow. This is a chance for you to shine. Look for feedback constantly and check in with your delegator on a regular cadence to present your progress.

Goals

Setting goals is the single most important thing you can do to improve yourself. Setting and managing goals is the TDD (test-driven development) of career management. The most important thing to remember is that you own this process. It’s up to you to set goals for yourself, measure against them, and self-assess on a continual basis.

The act of setting goals is a simple one and there are many tools to help you along the way. One option is to perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis and present it to your manager for feedback. When you set a long-term goal for yourself identify skills, expertise, or projects you want to master instead of using a specific position or title as your goal. Perform a gap analysis to measure where you are currently against where you want to be. Break down the gaps into smaller tasks — be specific. Sometimes tasks need to be repetitive in order for you to master them, e.g. I will do task X at least N times a month. As you gain more influence and experience, the tasks you set should evolve to be more complicated in nature.

For example, let’s say your goal is to transform your team so it fully aligns with Lean principles. Achieving this goal involves multiple conversations with your teammates, both in small groups and one-on-one settings so you can present a compelling and convincing case to get their buy-in. This is not an impossible goal to achieve. But it’s also not a static initiative that won’t require you to revisit it. In fact, after the initial implementation, it may be more important to sit down every year, quarter, month, and/or week to review the goal as a prompt for yourself to look for opportunities to influence your team and remind them of the importance of delivering value as early as possible.

Getting Feedback

Take ownership of gathering feedback on your work. Your manager will give you feedback on behavior or accomplishments they observe, but they can’t know everything that you are doing. If you diffused conflict on the team, let your manager know how you did it. If you are preparing to deliver a presentation, give your manager a draft of your content so they can give you feedback. If you made a mistake, talk about what you learned from the experience and how you’ll incorporate those learnings in the future. Let your manager know your priorities and goals so they can support your ambitions. Ask them if the projects, tasks, or skills you are currently focused on will get you to where you want to be.

Always Remember

You will always make time for what is important to you; be sure self-improvement makes the cut. Actively manage your career in order to progress forward; you are your own best advocate. Prioritize your goals and look for ways to capitalize on efficiencies; remember, feedback is a gift. Find mentors to support you along the way; always look for ways you can mentor others as well.

Create your own opportunities, build relationships, and above all enjoy the journey.

If you are interested in working on our Engineering teams building cutting-edge cloud technologies that make Guidewire the cloud leader in P&C insurance, please apply at https://careers.guidewire.com.