The Role of a Principal Engineer - Michael Gray- Leeds Sharp

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The Role of a Principal Engineer
Michael Gray

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Michael Gray
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Principal Engineer
at ClearBank
@mikegray@mastodon.social
@MikeGrayCodes
github.com/mikegraycodes

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“At ClearBank, our purpose is
to provide great technology
that unlocks our partners’
potential, ensuring everyone
has the freedom to choose
the financial services they
need”
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Financial Fabric
Fintechs
End customers
Fintechs Small Businesses
End customers
End customers
Fintechs

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The Role of a Principal Engineer
Michael Gray

9. What I hope you take away
Demystify the role
Help you inform you if it’s a
career path for you
What I think you need to be
successful
Share some tools/techniques
to help you

10. What do you think?

11. Staff Engineer
Principal Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
Lead Engineer
Tech Lead
Technical Architect
Solutions Architect
Distinguished Engineer
Senior Staff Engineer

12. Size of
Org
Time

13. “Enable teams to make informed decisions to ensure
the system as a whole evolves in the desired
direction”

14. The System as a whole
- It is socio-technical
“Within a socio-technical systems perspective, any organisation, or part of it, is made up of a set of interacting sub-systems, as shown in the
diagram below. Thus, any organisation employs people with capabilities, who work towards goals, follow processes, use technology, operate within
a physical infrastructure, and share certain cultural assumptions and norms.”
https://business.leeds.ac.uk/research-stc/doc/socio-technical-systems-theory

15. Overwhelming right?
- We design our orgs to help us cope with the cognitive load, typically around what we call domains. This is how orgs scale effectively. We localise decisions

16. Okay great problem solved but… localised decisions

17. Okay great problem solved but… localised decisions

18. Size of
Org
Time

19. Desired Direction
- The system, organisation must have a shared goal it’s trying to achieve a purpose. The decisions we make should be made with the desired direction in mind

20. Where are we going and why?
How are we going to get there?
Desired Direction

21. To enable - “give (someone) the authority or means to
do something; make it possible for.”
Enable Informed Decisions

22. Enable
"

23. “Enable teams to make informed decisions to ensure
the system as a whole evolves in the desired
direction”

24. So where did Principal Engineer come from?
“Architects define
the architecture;
software teams
deliver it”
DevOps Movement
“Everyone should do
architecture, so we
don’t need
architects”
No one is looking after
the global system and
things are falling apart,
but everyone should
still do architecture so
how can we ensure
everyone does
architecture, so the
global system works

25. Where does it sit?
CTO
Heads of
Engineering
Principal
Engineers
HRBP

26. To enable – “give (someone) the authority or means to
do something; make it possible for."

27. Why we want to enable informed localised decisions
- It’s how we scale organisations
- We need to the make decisions that move the global system forward too
- We make better decisions as teams know their domain better than Principal Engineers
ever could, they will make better local decisions than anyone else in the organisation

28. What do you need to make informed localised decisions
- Where are we going and why?
- How are we going to get there?
- What are we going to do to get there?
- How do I fit into how we get there?
- What decisions are within my remit to make?
- What constraints am I operating within?

29. Where are we going and why?
“At ClearBank, our purpose is to provide great technology that
unlocks our partners’ potential, ensuring everyone has the
freedom to choose the financial services they need”

30. How are we going to get there?
Business strategy
Target these market segments as they are the most underserved and provide us with the biggest opportunity while reducing operational costs
Product Strategy
Offer more product capabilities to enable more innovate businesses to offer xyz services to target the market sectors.
Ensure we are operationally efficient, as transactional volumes grow, operational costs grow. To serve our customer and disrupt the market we need to be financially viable
Tech Strategy
How can technology support the product strategy.
Fix xyz process constraints
Operational automation
- How can technology help us here?
Build vs buy
- If we buy, what should we buy and how will it integrate with the rest of the system
What’s constraining us from getting there?

31. What are we going to do to get there?
- Translate how technology needs to do to help us get there
- Standardise interactions between our components based on x industry standards
to make our system more pluggable which will allow easier integration of 3rd party
products we are going to buy to provide new capabilities for our customers

32. Communication
- Little and often is better than big and once
- Re-enforce the message continuously, people need
to know this is the direction, and that it continues to
be the direction
- This is hard work, have a clear comms plan in place
and hold yourself accountable to it
- Communication is two way, listening to feedback is
just as important as communication the direction

33. Constraints
A constraint is something that limits what
you can do. We can differentiate between
two types of constraints: governing
constraints and enabling constraints.

34. Governing Constraints
- Every pull request must be approved by 2 people
Enabling Constraints
- Principles
- Approved technologies
- Decision Scopes

36. Case study – Architecture Advice Process – Enabling
Constraint
- ADRs (Architecture Decision Records)
- Decisions Scopes
- Architecture Advisory Forum
https://martinfowler.com/articles/scaling-architecture-conversationally.html -
Andrew Harmel-Law

37. Putting yourself in a position to succeed

38. Pre-requisite to success is information flow (context)
- You need as many inputs as you can find so you can apply as much context to your
decision making as possible

39. Become a trusted advisor to senior leadership
- You want to have influence on the art of the possible early to help senior
leadership make good decisions
- It also gives you view of what’s coming and allows you to bring strategic
thinking back to technology and the decisions they make

40. Act as a consultant to technology teams
- Make yourself available to teams to discuss and work through
problems
- Facilitate discussions, ask probing questions to make them
think about problems in a different way
- Help provide them with context of the bigger picture if they
don’t already have it
- Gain their trust and respect
- Avoid making local decisions for them
- You do not want them to become reliant on you to
make decisions for them, they need to make those themselves
or we don’t scale

41. This becomes your network – The most critical part of a
Principal Engineer’s toolset
- Your network is your information flow,
the context for making decisions or
understanding what important and/or
strategic initiatives we may need to go
after

42. Make ruthless priority calls
- Make sense of the chaos from your inputs
- There will always be too much to do
- Be ruthless with deciding what are the most important
wide impacting and enabling changes you can work on.
- These changes could be processes, ways of working,
technology initiatives
- Focus on these and be patient
- Change takes time
- Your feedback cycles tend to be long

43. Not all problems are for you to solve
- You’re in a fortunate position, you have one of the widest views of the org
- In some cases, it’s to make sure we know what problems/opportunities we
need to address and help make it a priority for a team to work on and own

44. Principal Engineer is an Influencing Contributor Role
- This means you don’t have direct power
- It means you need to convince
- It means you must lead
- It means you sometimes need to get others to use their power on your
behalf (Rarely)
- It leads to better decisions and higher impact

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What I want to talk about
and why

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Business Goal
Mission
Business Goal Business Goal
Your tool, technique, initiative
Focus on how it helps
these

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Control
Influence
Concern
Influence
Things that we have indirectly have
the power to influence or change
Concern/No Control
Things that we have little or no
power to influence, but impact us or
are concerning
Control
Things that we directly
have the power to control
or change

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Control
Influence
Concern
Influence
Team’s ways of working
Your health
Concern/No Control
War, Politics, Economy, Pandemics,
Weather
Control
Your words
Your attitude
Your action

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I can use it to
aid my thinking
and form solid
opinions
I can get Technology to use Wardley
mapping to collaborate on tech
strategy
Get senior leadership to collaborate
and communicate using Wardley
maps when discussing business
strategy
Wardley mapping

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Wardley mapping
I can use it to
aid my thinking
and form solid
opinions
I can get Technology to use Wardley
mapping to collaborate on tech
strategy
Get exco to collaborate and
communicate using Wardley maps
Amount of
energy required
I can get technology and product to
collaborate on product and tech
strategy

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If it aligns to business goals, the timing is right
and it’s within your sphere of influence
Yes
For some of it
Not right now
Then let’s get cracking
Let’s tighten the scope and set
our expectations
Let’s work on making the
conditions more favourable

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You don’t go on a journey without a map and an
idea of your destination
Add options

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Relationship map

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Make it personal Share your ideas
Listen Adjust
Do not get everyone in a room to share you
thinking yet. Make it personal and individual,
people like to receive information in different.
Understand your audience
Start with where you want to end up, and
then share how you think we can get there
Take on the feedback and adjust. You have
more insights now and are wiser for it. The
more diversity of thought to test
assumptions the better.
Adjusting also makes people feel valued
and they know you’ve really listened
Really really listen. Let them speak, this is
your first opportunity to get feedback and test
your assumptions.
Socialise your ideas and
thinking
This is your first opportunity
for feedback

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Never interrupt Listen without judgement
Ask Questions Paraphrase and
summarise
Interrupting gives the impression you think
you’re more important.
They are also distracting and interrupt their
train of thought
Don’t feel like you must fill silences
Listen without judgement, you are hearing
an opinion from a new perspective that’s not
available to you directly. It is valid
regardless of your view of the world.
Nothing says like you’re listened and
understood better than a concise summary
of the conversation for clarification. It also
catches any missunderstandings.
Be curious, ask questions, really understand
what they mean when they’re speaking.
There are insights to be gained here
Listening
We are bad at listening

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They are already aligned Safe trusted environment
Collaborate on the journey
map
The pre working you’ve done sharing your
thinking means the working group are
already aligned. This will get your
collaborating together more quickly
Ensure you make this a safe and trusted
collaborative environment
Continue to work on the map, enablers,
blocks and how do we know when we’re
there and execute on it together
Working group
Your first followers
Leverage each other’s
influence
Now there’s a few of you, we can leverage
each other’s influence, divide and conquer,
get more people aligned with the ways of
thinking.

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Understand your audience Put your story into their context
Let’s face it, you’re
probably going to need a
PowerPoint
A common theme. Understanding your
audience, what they care about, what they
are trying to achieve
How will what you’re trying to achieve
impact them? Model this out with your
working group and make this speak their
language
Communicating Upwards
This might not be you,
personally.
Think about who would have
the most impact, leave your
ego aside

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Synopsis Opportunity
Method Conclusion
This is where you are today
- Current positioning
- Current trends
- Core Problem
This is where you could be tomorrow
- More of…
- Less of..
- Avoid or postpone..
This is why you must ask now
- Benefits
- Investment (Time, people resources)
- ROI – What repays your investment
- Other options – Take do nothing off the
table
This is how you go there
- Key elements
- Detailed solution
- What you need
Making your case for change
Presentation structure

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Workshops Make it clear it’s not final
Get anonymous feedback
Small intimate groups to share ideas and
thinking focusing on how it will impact them.
Hopefully, what you are doing is going to
improve something for them.
The workshops are for feedback, listen to
feedback and take it into account.
Communicating outwards
Not everyone feels comfortable sharing
feedback publicly or even directly.
Anonymous surveys are a great way to get
true thoughts, feelings and sentiments on
changes
Adjust and communicate
Take the feedback and action it. Make sure
it’s clear you actioned it.
Communicate final widely

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Do what you said Share progress upwards
Share outwards
Small intimate groups to share ideas and
thinking focusing on how it will impact them
You’ve got buy in for what you wanted to do
now you need to deliver. If you don’t
communicate people get nervous.
All of that was the easy bit
Do what you said
Continuous communication on progress,
how it will affect people
Share setbacks as well as
successes
Make sure you share setbacks as well as
successes.

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You are constantly reflecting Adjust
You are prepared to fail
This will keep you sane and also focused.
Remember to look back at where you were
and how far you’ve come.
Reflecting and listening taking feedback, be
prepared to adjust quickly. Nothing is ever a
straight line, ride the bumps
Along the way make sure…
There are lessons to be learned here. Take
the lessons, apply them and go again.
Failure is part of the journey.

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What can we do if the stars
don’t yet align?
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It’s rewarding You’ll learn too
It’s a great way to
influence indirectly
Seeing someone grow is great. Feeling like
you’ve made a difference to someone’s
career
I gain insights from mentoring. They teach
me too, both about ongoings in the org, and
about tech, people
Mentoring
Mentoring is great way to share ideas,
which the mentee will then share with
others. It’s a great way to influence
indirectly to make a bigger impact
Seriously, it’s really
rewarding
Like seriously

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Education

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Have you seen this?
What would you do?
Hostile -> Advocate
What makes you think
that?
What would you do?
Questions
The most powerful tool in your
arsenal
Have you thought
about…?

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Give credit where credit’s due
Small and often
It’s amazing what a quick comment can
people to people. If you think something is
good, or someone’s done well, tell them,
always.
Publicly celebrate other people’s
successes, big or small. It’s even better
when they’re not expecting it.
Shout outs
Get your boss to send
them a note of
appreciation
Never shout about how
great YOU are, especially
publicly
This is the quickest way to destroy trust. If
you’ve built your influence and network,
they’ll do this for you.

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Examples
Business goal How can tech support
Context
We documented our entire
architecture using the c4
model from a single
question, in the right
context at the right time
Timing
Deliver banking licence Need systems architecture diagrams
We have no standard way of documenting
our architecture
We have a deadline
Have you seen the c4
model?

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Examples
Business goal
Context
Intro session to event
storming and modelled
flows. 1 session and teams
continued to us it
Timing
We need to build some new payment rails
We don’t have a good way to communicate
around processes and requirements
Beginning of international journey
Would you indulge me in…

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Control
Influence
No Control

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Control
Influence
No Control

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10x Engineers
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“You don’t need a job title to
be a leader, you just need
followers”
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83. The Role of a Principal Engineer
“Enable teams to make informed decisions to ensure the system as a whole evolves in the desired direction”
It is an influencing contributor role, your network is your biggest tool.
Looking at the system as a whole, how could it be better? Tech, process, ways of working people.
Where are we going and why? Translate the business direction to the technical direction. Communicate this continuously so
teams can make decisions informed by this
Put in place constraints enabling/governing to sure the system evolves in the desired direction
Make sense out of chaos, make big bets out of the chaos.
Your feedback cycle are long, have patience and play the long game. You’re here to make long lasting impact to a lot of folks,
this doesn’t happen overnight.
I’ve shared some tools on influencing change in an organisation which are a critical part of a Principal Engineer’s role

84. The Role of a Principal Engineer
- Being a Principal Engineer isn’t for everyone
- If it’s just writing code that energises you it’s fine to peak at being a senior
engineer
- We should do what energises us as that’s what will make us happy and also
make us the most effective

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Thank you for your time.
Any further questions please contact:
michael.gray@clear.bank
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