You can be depended upon to pick up a story from the backlog, do it well (quickly / dependably / transparently / correctly / valuably) and drive it to delivery. You ramp up quickly on new teams, and are soon productive as a solo or pair.
One example of success in this area: You are trusted to drive stories to completion, and answer on-call escalations. Your anchor can depend on you to pair/solo on any story in the backlog, and provide leadership on tracks that need extra guidance.
Another example of success in this area: You join a team whose main responsibility is integrating assets from other teams, and deploying them to a long, running production environment. You have minimal experience with operating the platform at scale. You are able to learn the tribal knowledge on the team quickly, and are able to execute on stories in the backlog with little guidance. Soon after, other pairs rely on you to onboard new team members, approach you with questions relating to the domain, and to reliably drive to completion uncertain/risky/technically complex stories.
| Level | Skills |
| P1 |
- Asks relevant questions on stories
- Provides basic input into pair's progress on a story while pairing
- Provides coherent and informative updates at standup
- Actively participates in pointing well-defined stories
- Is comfortable with rotating pairs frequently
- Is comfortable with carrying context on well-defined stories
- Clarifies product requirements on stories, when necessary
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| P2 |
- Able to lead a pair on well-defined tracks of work; can solo on well-defined tracks, if needed
- Participates in writing acceptance criteria for well-scoped stories, when necessary
- Fits engineering chore work into existing feature work
- Understands what changes need to be made, and how to execute on them in order to complete a story
- Discusses the balance of short term execution with long term health
- Recognizes and discusses potential anti-patterns
- Clearly and kindly shares context on in-flight work to onboard their pair
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| P3 |
- Able to lead a pair on all tracks of work; can solo on any story in the backlog, if needed
- De-risks and makes progress on tracks with uncertain implementation
- Works with PM + Design to scope epics to buildable blocks
- Leads or anchors well-defined tracks of work.
- Notices anti-patterns, can articulate reasoning and suggest ways to course-correct
- Consistently follows up on tasks/communication from stories
- Can ramp up quickly to become productive on most R&D teams
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| P4 |
- Identifies long-running/systemic technical problems (eg: testing anti-patterns, poor code health) affecting the team and drives intervention
- Is focused on solving customer problems, and works with PM+Design to translate customer problems to well-defined stories for the team
- Provides technical leadership at inceptions (eg: holds context around multiple cross-cutting tracks of work, and understands how to use that context to keep the inception focussed)
- Able to recognize what would help improve technical execution on teams, and successfully fills in that role. (Eg: notices PM needs coaching, and steps up to enable PM, etc.)
- Teaches team members how to execute well on stories (eg: teaches definition of done for stories)
- Teaches technical concepts and show team members how it is applicable to their product
- Can navigate their way through legacy systems and improve throughput of the team (eg: notices complex code paths are slowing down feature delivery, facilitates conversations with the team on how to simplify them, gets buy-in from PM+leadership to prioritize this work, drives it to completion with the team)
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