10 Bottom-Up Initiatives Engineers Can Propose to Showcase Leadership

Create your own career growth opportunities. Say you’re an engineer who wants to showcase leadership and communication skills, and be known as someone who initiates change and improves things. Healthy organizations recognize great ideas from anyone, so you should propose and lead a “bottom-up” initiative.

Below are 10 ideas that scale well. Start at the team level then expand to the wider organization. These are things you can lead and invite others to contribute.

How you propose matters

Write a proposal document. Describe the painful world that exists today, the goals you want to achieve, how it will work, what will be monitored to make sure it’s working, and who will drive. Seek out feedback from your manager and peers. Then link to this important artifact in your future promotion doc — or surface it in your next career conversation with your manager 😀.

10 bottom-up initiatives

• Operational reviews. Review operational details of production systems — recent incidents, weekly metrics aberrations, upcoming launches, investigations, open action items.

• Tech talks. Help showcase others’ work and spread knowledge of recent learnings and new technologies.

• Themed sprints. Plan special sprints dedicated to issues that aren’t getting prioritized on their own. Cost savings, operational excellence, documenting system architectures and runbooks, solving top issues from customer service.

• Away team onboarding. Make your team’s onboarding process so self-service that any engineer in the company can submit an idea for approval, code, and launch on their own.

• Ticket management. Create dashboards and a leaderboard of top resolvers. Regularly review and prioritize the queue. Set criteria that triggers dedicated days where the team gets the queue back to a manageable size.

• Dogfooding sessions. Host a fun meeting series where teams and stakeholders bang on production. Happy-paths and edge-cases, multiple device types and languages. Find bugs before customers do. Discover low-hanging fruit to surprise and delight.

• Launch readiness. Reduce risk, improve communication, and get more eyes on deployment plans. Create a checklist and notification/approvals workflow for risky launches.

• [Your ideas here.] I know you have ‘em.

Bigger swings for more senior engineers and managers

• Technical strategy doc. What architectural and organizational challenges need to be solved to meet long-term objectives? What capabilities and investments are needed over the next 3 years? Assemble leaders and senior engineers to contribute and publish every 8–12 months.

• Awards programs. Encourage innovation and excellence by recognizing outstanding contributors in strategic areas. Give monthly awards for innovation, operational excellence, customer happiness, etc.

• Mentorship program. Match mentees to mentors on specific criteria. Remove any stigma around seeking help. Describe what effective mentorship looks like.

Those were 10 bottom-up initiatives.

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