Canary Engineers

As an Engineering organization scales, senior leaders will increasingly lose touch with the ‘ground truth’ of what front-line engineers and front-line managers experience. Unless, of course, leaders take proactive steps to solicit that ground truth.

Canary engineers are those that will candidly tell you about emerging, critical issues in your organization. For example: mid- or senior-level management that isn’t cutting it, early signs of product issues, or corrosive cultural issues.

Canary engineers can come from anywhere in the org: your highest performers, your cultural standard-bearers, your earliest employees, or through randomly-selected skip-level meetings. They don’t even have to be engineers; ground truth can come from canary marketers and canary product managers.

What’s essential, though, is that leaders cultivate trusted and candid relationships to make sure you are getting the ground truth.

As part of our work at FirstMark, we have the opportunity to learn from accomplished leaders with genuine insight about the world. Each post in this series is a recap of one poignant idea.

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