Staff Prep Glossary
This glossary defines key terms and concepts related to Staff Engineering, leadership, and organizational influence.
A
Alignment
The state where different teams, stakeholders, or individuals share a common understanding of goals, priorities, and strategies. Achieving alignment is a core responsibility of Staff Engineers.
The formal power granted by an organization to make decisions, allocate resources, or direct the work of others. Staff Engineers often operate with high influence but limited formal authority over the teams they guide.
Availability
The percentage of time a service is operational and reachable, often expressed in “nines” (e.g., 99.9%).
B
Buy vs. Build
A strategic decision-making process to determine whether to develop a technology solution internally (“build”) or purchase an existing commercial solution (“buy”). This involves analyzing costs, time-to-market, strategic value, and maintenance burden.
C
Conflict Resolution
The process of facilitating a peaceful ending to a conflict or disagreement. In an engineering context, this often involves mediating between technical trade-offs or team priorities.
Consensus
A decision-making process where the group agrees to support a decision in the best interest of the whole, even if it wasn’t everyone’s first choice. Distinct from unanimity.
E
Error Budget
The amount of error or downtime a service can accumulate over a certain period without violating the SLO. It is calculated as 1 - SLO. When the budget is exhausted, new feature releases may be halted to focus on reliability.
I
Impact Pyramid
A conceptual framework for understanding the value of engineering work, moving from Activity (writing code) to Output (shipping features) to Outcome (improving metrics) to Business Value (revenue, cost, risk). Staff engineers focus on the top levels.
Incident Commander (IC)
The person responsible for coordinating the response to an incident. The IC holds the highest authority during the incident and delegates tasks to others.
Influence
The ability to affect the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. For Staff Engineers, this is the primary mechanism for getting things done without formal authority.
M
Managing Across
Building relationships and coordinating with peers in other teams or functions to achieve shared goals.
Managing Up
Consciously working for the mutual benefit of yourself and your manager. It involves understanding your manager’s goals and constraints to be more effective.
Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)
The average time it takes to detect an incident from the moment it begins. Reducing MTTD is key to improving overall reliability.
Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)
The average time it takes to restore service after an incident occurs. This is a critical metric for operational efficiency.
Mentorship
A relationship where a more experienced or knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or knowledgeable person. Focuses on advice, skill development, and perspective.
N
Nemawashi
A Japanese concept meaning “going around the roots.” In a business context, it refers to the informal process of quietly laying the foundation for a proposed change or project by gathering support and feedback from stakeholders individually before a formal meeting.
North Star Metric
A single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to its customers. It serves as a guiding light for long-term growth and strategic alignment across teams.
P
Political Capital
The trust, goodwill, and influence an individual accumulates within an organization through successful delivery, helpfulness, and relationship building. It is “spent” when advocating for difficult decisions or changes.
Post-Mortem
A blameless review of an incident to understand root causes and prevent recurrence. The goal is to learn from the failure, not to assign blame.
Production Readiness Review (PRR)
A structured process or checklist to ensure a service meets operational standards (monitoring, alerting, capacity planning) before going live or scaling up.
R
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It answers the question: “How much data can we afford to lose?”
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The maximum acceptable time to restore a service after a disaster. It answers the question: “How quickly must we be back up and running?”
Roadmap
A strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it. It serves as a communication tool for aligning stakeholders on the evolution of a product or system over time.
S
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A contract with external users or customers that includes penalties (financial or otherwise) for not meeting agreed-upon service levels. It is typically looser than the internal SLO.
Service Level Indicator (SLI)
A quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service, such as latency, error rate, or availability. It is the specific metric being tracked.
Service Level Objective (SLO)
A target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI. It defines the reliability goal (e.g., “99.9% of requests succeed in < 200ms”).
The networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively. Staff engineers “spend” social capital to drive changes. Similar to Political Capital.
Sponsorship
A relationship where a senior leader uses their political capital and influence to advocate for a protégé, creating opportunities for them to be visible and advance. Unlike mentorship, sponsorship is about acting on behalf of the protégé.
Stakeholder
Any individual or group that has an interest in the outcome of a project or decision. Identifying and managing stakeholders is crucial for successful technical leadership.
Stakeholder Mapping
A technique used to identify key stakeholders and categorize them based on their power (influence) and interest in a project. This helps determine the appropriate engagement strategy (e.g., Manage Closely, Keep Informed).
STAR Method
An acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result. It is a structured framework for answering behavioral interview questions by providing a clear narrative arc that highlights the candidate’s specific contributions and the outcome.
Strategy
A high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In engineering, this often involves technical roadmaps and architectural visions.
T
Technical Debt
The implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. Staff Engineers must balance speed with long-term maintainability.
Technical Vision
An aspirational description of what the future state of a system or technology organization should look like. It provides direction and purpose, guiding architectural decisions and prioritization.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
A financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or system. It includes acquisition costs, operating costs, maintenance, training, and decommissioning.
W
Wardley Map
A visual representation of the landscape of a business or service, plotting components based on their value chain (visibility to user) and evolution (genesis to commodity). Used for strategic situational awareness.