Engineering Personas - Innovator, Executor, and Caretaker. What are you?
If you look around your team and observe how each one of them operates, you may be able to broadly bucket them into three personas. This applies to engineers and managers alike.
Understanding your own persona is critical to your long-term happiness and career growth. Knowing the persona of those around you helps in collaborating successfully.
Each persona has its flaws and merits. However, having a successful & rewarding career takes a completely different approach for each persona. In this article, we will see how you can identify your persona as the first step.
Which persona are you?
The classification is primarily based on the following criteria.
- Origination of ideas & problem statements
- Excitement curve during a project lifecycle
- Project management
- Tenure
Innovators
Brim with ideas & can always list down a large list of things that can be solved within their current role & scope. Do not accept the status quo and are most excited in 0–25% of a project lifecycle.
Weaker on the project management as the projects will be typically in a very ambiguous state during initiation.
Typically, innovators have a longer tenure in their various roles. This is required in order to understand the systems before ideas kick in.
Executors
Love being part of a deadline-driven project and getting behind someone else’s ideas (not a bad thing). Usually, very talented software engineers are able to execute at a break-neck pace. Great at written communication and strong project management skills. Most excited for the 25%-99% of the project lifecycle.
Typically, executors will have a shorter tenure in various roles. Once a project is done, they move on to the next. Any delay in finding the next project in their current role will urge them to look elsewhere almost immediately.
Caretakers
A unique breed that mostly works on projects from 99% to 99.99% through multiple years. They love solving maintenance & performance problems. You may find some of the technically deep engineers belonging to this category. Usually less interested in project management and deadline-driven execution. Caretakers spend years in a single role as they are never satisfied with the quality of a system and continue to refine it as a work of art.
Conclusion
These three personas are rarely mutually exclusive. Some of the best engineers I have worked with excel across these persona boundaries. However, one would always find their dominance in one of them. Being self-aware would take you a long way.