Field notes / 2025 · Engineering org
My reach exceeded my authority on purpose
Eight people reported to me; ninety ran on processes I set. I had to learn to lead the ninety without the lever I’d been trained to pull.
Live question
How do you take responsibility for far more than you control without pretending you control it?
My direct team is eight engineers. The number that describes my job is closer to ninety — the people across the product whose work runs on processes I set up, on release gates and triage rules and a postmortem culture I wrote down. None of those ninety report to me. I can’t reorganize them, can’t set their priorities, can’t put anything in a review that lands on their pay. For a while that gap felt like a problem to close. It was the wrong instinct.
It first hit me during the reliability work, when I was suddenly accountable for fifteen-plus engineers across five subteams and two continents, most of whom I’d never manage. The training I’d absorbed (set the goal, assign the owner, follow up) assumes you can assign. Here I could only convince. If the on-duty rotation I proposed was annoying, people would route around it the day I stopped watching, and I couldn’t watch ninety people.
So the work changed shape. Instead of issuing a standard, I had to make the standard the path of least resistance — the SLOs that told an engineer their thing was broken before a parent did, the triage process that meant a P1 wasn’t their lonely 2 a.m. problem. Adoption stopped being a decision someone made about me and became a decision they made about their own week.
The org didn’t adopt my standards because I outranked anyone. It adopted them because they made the next morning easier.
That sounds tidy. In the moment it mostly felt like exposure. I owned outcomes produced by people who could ignore me, and when a number went the wrong way I couldn’t point at an org chart — I could only ask whether the thing I’d built was still worth their time.
What I still don’t have a clean answer for is the failure case. When persuasion isn’t enough — when something genuinely has to happen and the only people who can do it have every reason not to — I’ve learned to borrow authority from someone who has it, an exec sign-off, a P0 label. But every time I reach for that lever I’m spending the thing that made the influence work in the first place. I haven’t found where that line sits. I just know I notice now when I’m about to cross it.