At Justworks, we spend a lot of time thinking about growth. A few years ago, my colleague and mentor (whether she knows it or not), Param Ghangas, VP Data & Analytics(opens in a new tab), put together a presentation on how & why we spend time thinking about growth. It was thoughtful, insightful and largely transformed how I think and talk about growth. In this blog I’ll lay out a lot of my adaption of that growth skillset for software engineering.
In my experience, career growth is a hot topic. If your approach to growth is only looking toward your organization for guidance, then you’re limiting yourself to the maturity, philosophy, and expectations of that organization. By zooming out and considering your growth over the course of your career, you arm yourself with the power to invest and prioritize strategically with the opportunities provided to you to accelerate your growth.
Another way we as engineers often limit our growth is by chasing titles and titles only. You may not be surprised to hear that a senior engineer at one company may not be a senior engineer at another. What does remain the same throughout those experiences though are stories; and you take those with you for the rest of your career.
What do I mean by stories?
Opportunities + Impact = Stories = Career Currency
Focus on having the biggest impact on the biggest opportunities in front of you right now. These stories become your career currency. These are what you’ll reference in every interview for years to come and demonstrate your ability and achievements far more clearly than a list of titles and technologies used.
Planning Your Journey: A Framework for Intentional Growth
Over long periods of time, that growth is rarely the simple, linear ladder people imagine. The reality is a winding path of striving for excellence, failing, learning, showing grit, and getting help and guidance to move forward.
Source: Jason Tan, Founder & Executive Chairman, Sift — LinkedIn
However, with the right tools and framework it can be simple, intentional, and relatively predictable within short-cycles. The mix I’ve found the most successful come from 3 activities:
Discover what you don’t know
— what are the competencies you don’t know that you need to learn?
Describe your destination
— what does your day-to-day and career look like 3–5 years from now?
Map your obstacles
— what capabilities and competencies do you have to develop to get there?
1. Discover What You Don’t Know
One of the hardest parts of growth is figuring out what you don’t know that you need to invest in. This is what drives us to lean hard on organizations to provide us clear roadmaps. It’s natural that we steer toward the comfort of “if I do these 4 things then I’ve reached the next level!”
Now consider how many times that approach has let you down, left you frustrated, and feeling stuck.
Instead, let’s treat it like any well-managed project or initiative and start with discovery.
One tool in my toolbox for competency discovery is the “four stages of competence” visual:
Source: Zainan Zaki — Medium
Park your ego at the door and embrace your incompetence with me. Without first identifying your gaps, you’re bound to invest your energy in the wrong areas. The goal of this reflection is to focus on the movement of competencies from Unconscious Incompetence → Conscious Incompetence.
This is where an organization’s growth framework may be helpful as an input; But you’ll clearly need more inputs for a robust output.
You’ll want to seek feedback from mentors and managers. I’d also recommend reading blogs and consulting the growing landscape of LLMs. The point is to push yourself out of your comfort zone and think about the behaviors and experiences of the people who hold positions that you haven’t yet charted.
Find ways to have conversations with them. Ask targeted questions and don’t balk at responses, however unexpected. This is all discovery for your path.
2. Describe your destination
Armed with a laundry list of things we’ve now learned we need to learn, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed. The next tool you’ll need is a guiding light to prioritize these opportunities against. It’s just as important to consider which opportunities to intentionally NOT invest in. Your time and energy is finite, and you should use it wisely.
A tool in this arena that I’ve found useful is the concept of ikigai to help identify your purpose.
Source: Illustration by BetterUp
Reflect on how you want to show up in the world. If you’re this far in your career, you likely have your profession chosen. The two biggest areas of opportunity I’ve found for most of the engineers I’ve talked to is finding some overlap between your passion and your vocation.
If you’re going through this exercise at an organization, scope “What the World Needs” down to “What the Organization Needs”. Figure out what unique skillsets you have, and what you really love doing, and apply it to that scope of need.
If you can do that, trust me, your mission will become clear.
As you start to put these to paper, consider the HARD format:
Heartfelt: Does this goal matter deeply to you?
Animated: Can you visualize yourself achieving it?
Required: Is it necessary for the future you want to build?
Difficult: Does it stretch you beyond your comfort zone?
A couple of examples of a HARD goals I wrote a couple of years ago in June 2023 were:
Become a trusted engineering leader who has shipped multiple large, complex projects, enabling Justworks to transition into our multi product future
Gain a deep understanding of organization design for effective teams, having shipped multiple teams, and in a position to start my own organization, if the opportunity ever arose
These goals gave me something to prioritize my investments against and helped me refine that list from things I could invest in into one I would invest in.
3. Map your obstacles
At this point, you’ve got a list of opportunities and a purpose to prioritize them against. This is where you can have that relatively predictable 6 month time period of investment with confidence you’re investing in a set of skills to move you in an intentional direction.
The best format I’ve found for these short term goals are SMART goals. There’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of this concept before, but in case you haven’t SMART goals are:
Specific: What exactly will you do?
Measurable: How will you know you’ve done it?
Achievable: Is this realistic for the timeframe?
Relevant: Does this help you achieve your long-term HARD goal?
Time-bound: When will it be done?
I guide engineers to set 3 SMART goals per half. Below, these examples align with Justworks core competencies for Engineering, but I would recommend this mix to anyone at any engineering organization.
Your first goal should be Execution & Delivery focused. It is critical that we never lose sight around our primary goal of quickly & reliably delivering value to our customers. A fairly generic example of this might be:
Execution & Delivery
In the next 6 months, I will lead discovery, planning, and execution of a project including delegating to & organizing multiple engineers, and setting delivery milestones and expectations with stakeholders
It’s important that the goal is the practice of skill and not directly tied to a current priority at the business. Any project or priority should be able to be a vehicle for you practicing your ownership and management of work.
A second goal around Technical Skills is also critical for our growth as engineers. Learning new skills & methods of bringing solutions to life, as well as supporting them, is the bread & butter of growing as an engineer. An example of this may be:
Technical Skills
In the next 6 months, I will begin to practice systems level thinking by encapsulating permissions in a service with an OpenAPI spec and meeting a high bar for observability health standards
Finally, as engineers, we should always have a goal around either Teamwork & Communication or Inclusive Leadership to help foster relationships & trust both inside and outside of our teams. These skills are critical for our ability to scale & optimize our engineering processes & practices. Once again, they may show up in goals such as:
Teamwork & Communication
In the next 6 months, I will improve the quality of our technical documentation within the team through improving the quality of documents & tutorials and driving awareness through sharing in wider forums
Inclusive Leadership
In the next 6 months, I will directly support my teammates’ growth as engineers through mentorship & coaching them towards their goals, as evidenced by the success of them in their goals & requesting 360 feedback
Once you identified your 3 core investment areas for the next 6 months, again, treat them like any well manager project or initiative and identify:
Key Results — How will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?
Key Initiatives — What are some potential vehicles for you to practice these investments?
Key Support — What do you need from managers, mentors, or anyone else to be successful?
Once you’ve got this far, the rest is up to you! Within these relatively short 6 month cycles, you’ve got some predictability in your ability to grow and you have a track record to reflect on year over to see yourself growing!
Why Justworks Is the Place to Grow
This framework isn’t just theory; it’s core to how we think about growth at Justworks. We are committed to growth as a lifelong process and provide the structure to make it happen:
Dedicated Frameworks: We provide a flexible Justworks Career Journey framework so you can calibrate your skills against clear expectations for your role and level.
Structured Planning: We use goal-setting templates to help you define your career outlook and build actionable 6-month plans.
Continuous Feedback: Growth is a conversation. We bake it into our culture through performance reflections, monthly goal check-ins, weekly 1-on-1s, and continuous feedback.
Most importantly, you get to apply this growth to high-impact challenges. Right now, our engineering teams are doing meaningful, ambitious work to build an ecosystem that enables the product our customers deserve. We’re building predictability and transparency into every stage of their lifecycle.
You’d be joining a team that is:
Driving a massive architecture evolution to enable our transformation initiative consolidating our products — PEO, Payroll, and International — into a single, scalable global platform.
Deeply defining our ecosystem in a robust way, thinking critically about the separation of mechanism and policy to bring clarity to complex, distributed workflows in orchestration tools like Temporal.
Embedding intelligent automation and AI into our compliance, customer support, and employee workflows and setting the groundwork for how Justworks will enable itself via experimentation into the future.
Enabling a borderless employment platform helping small businesses seamlessly hire, pay, and manage teams anywhere in the world.
Lastly, consider who you get the opportunity to build for. The customer profile of who we serve are often overlooked and overworked scrappy starters and ambitious service providers.
Delivering at a Justworks means that when someone builds up the courage to start their dream startup, they don’t fail because of the overwhelming compliance and paperwork required for multi state tax compliance and offering benefits.
Delivering at Justworks means that when an admin hears the government make yet another tax change or promise to reimburse, they have one less thing to worry about knowing Justworks has their back.
Delivering at Justworks means that in those chaotic times of hyper growth, organizations can focus on hiring talent no matter where they are because we’ve abstracted away the complexity of hiring anywhere across the globe so they can grow with confidence.
