# Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track [3/5]

Below, a sprint review of each session discussed.

## Getting in the room, and stay there (https://staffeng.com/guides/getting-in-the-room)

- When you're not in the room where important decisions are being made.
- When you don't understand the company's decisions and have important context that seems to be missing or ignored.

> Bringing something useful to the room is very context-specific to you and the room you're in
> Have a sponsor in the room.
> Your sponsor needs to know you want to be there.

> Stay aligned with your manager.

> Keep in mind that it's your obligation to be understood, not the obligation of everyone else to understand you.

## Find your sponsor (https://staffeng.com/guides/find-your-sponsor)

> The most important member of the team guiding your promotion is you yourself. The second most important person is your organizational sponsor.
> Have multiple sponsors in our guidance
> Activate your sponsors
> What if it doesn’t work? The book suggests a time span of 6 months as a good time window to evaluate if your sponsor and you work well together. We could say that this varies and could take more than a year to workout.

## Staff projects (https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-projects)

> I'm instinctively a little bit wary of this sort of idea of a staff project, in part because one of the archetypes of Staff engineers that I've seen people who don't necessarily run into grand projects themselves or do big things. But just are sort of incredibly effective gurus and routers who make the whole engineering organization run better.

> Getting access to Staff projects

1. First is learning to stay aligned with your team's leadership
2. Second, you need to be known as having the technical aptitude for the problem at hand
3. Third, is less in your control, which is your company having a pressing need to solve a Staff-level problem, which can require some patience

> In all cases you should be aligned with your companies goals, and aim for the most impact in your area.

## Being visible (https://staffeng.com/guides/being-visible)

> One of the most effective ways to get luckier is to be more visible within your organization.
> Why visibility matters
> Internal visibility