Lessons from Rick Boone, a Strategic Advisor at Uber:

• Being aligned with your manager means being aligned on “principles, values, world views, emphasis on emotional intelligence, approach to execution and philosophies”.
• Being a leader (any kind of leadership) means to get into “the realm of emotional intelligence, communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, evangelism and so on”.
• To advocate for change, you need to know the change to advocate for. If you aren’t coding anymore it’s hard to find technical problems. Two ways are: 1- sit next to teams to hear when they complain about a problem/service, 2- maintain a list of people who are good in surfacing problems.
• Interesting topics to look at: “behavioral economics, behavioral science, human psychology, organizational strategy”.

These are key takeaways, highlights or “learnings” that I captured while reading the book Staff Engineer by Will Larson. You can read the full article here. The above takeaways are by far not a complete summary, but rather my personal highlights or understanding (which can be wrong) and thus do not capture all the wisdom in the original article, so you should read the full article to form your own view & understanding.