Being an “Intrapreneur” as a software engineer

Question: “I’m a software engineer at a larger company. How can I build the right skills to thrive in my current role, while also setting myself up for success in today’s tech market?

We’re not in a great job market, these days: Big Tech is becoming more cutthroat, with cuts and stricter performance reviews, while job openings are at their lowest for several years. With recruitment tight, setting yourself up for career success in your current job makes sense. In such a context, there’s a useful skill to help with this in your current job, or in a new job at different company, and it’s also invaluable if you decide to launch your own business, like founding a startup or launching a bootstrapped company

That skill is "intrapreneurship". It’s a word combining “internal” and "entrepreneur” and I first heard of the concept from Chaitali Narla, a seasoned engineering executive who was at Google for 15 years, and recently became CTO of Glid, a startup aiming to shape the future of road-to-rail transport. She also runs her own business, ChaiTime, coaching engineers and engineering leaders on how to stand out in their careers.

Today, Chaitali covers seven habits of “intrapreneurs”:

1. Run towards problems, not away from them

2. Take end-to-end ownership to land the solution

3. Invest in cross-functional relationships

4. Get sponsorships

5. Don’t fear “no”

6. Make impact visible

7. Do everything, everywhere, all at once

By the way, Chaitali runs an online, week-long course for senior+ individual contributors called Outstanding: get the ratings, recognition & sponsorship you deserve. If you like to learn as part of a group, why not take a look.

Reading on this topic:

• Engineering career paths at Big Tech and scaleups

• Thriving as a founding engineer: lessons from the trenches

• Lessons from bootstrapped companies founded by software engineers

• What is a Staff+ engineer?

With that, it’s over to Chaitali:

I joined Google as an intern while earning my Master’s in Computer Engineering. After graduation, I accepted a full-time offer and spent 15 years at Google, moving from intern to director via 5 promotions in the first 10 years. During this time, I worked on Google products, including:

• The social graph backend that powered social features across major Google services

• Chrome browser

• Compute Engine on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

• Google Workspace, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, and other collaboration tools.

I was an IC for my first 6 years at Google, then in a hybrid tech lead/manager role for 2 more, and was a senior manager/director for the rest. This article covers tips and learnings as they apply to ICs and managers alike.

The theme of my journey can be summarized in one word: “intrapreneur”. It’s a portmanteau of “internal” and “entrepreneur” and a style of leadership I’ve used over and over for my own career success, and that of tech professionals whom I’ve coached. Today, I’m sharing the seven habits of intrapreneurs, along with examples and tips for incorporating them into your own career.

Let’s start!

1. Run towards problems, not away from them

The best Staff+ engineers I’ve worked with are always ready to run towards problems, and I’ve also used this strategy of seeking them out in order to grow my career.

Follow friction. This is one way to find impactful problems. In many growing tech companies, some tasks get pushed aside for the sake of priorities, and many will cause inefficiencies over time. So, look for activities your team keeps doing over and over, which may be helpful to automate. Identify areas where your team feels frustrated due to missing features.

For example, in my first year at Google, I worked on the Contacts team. This team later supported social features across Google products like Ads and Gmail. We had a lot of “data seeders” in our development environment, used to populate synthetic data like:

• User names

• Emails

• Addresses

• Birth dates

• … and other data required for contacts

Data seeders also created “fake” social graphs by simulating a few interactions between test users, like sending an email, or liking a post. I noticed friction, like that testing features