This is the first part of a series of blog posts that cover qualities that I believe make someone a Senior in their profession.

There is a lot of debate about what Senior means or whether it means anything at all. In order for the Senior title to have any meaning, it needs certain distinct qualities that separate it from the respective non-Senior role. I don’t consider being good at what you do or having a certain number of years of experience sufficient to qualify someone to hold the Senior title.

My definition of a Senior is that of a leading role. Not like a boss or supervisor. Rather, like a person that other people choose to follow.

A visionary. A pioneer. A guide.

A Senior is a person that leads themselves and others (non-Seniors, other Seniors, people from other domains, managers, …) in their domain of expertise.

One particularly important quality of such a leader is having, sharing and following a vision.

Share and follow your vision

The first and foremost quality of a Senior is that they devise a vision of their work, follow it passionately and share it with others.

A vision is a positive, aspirational image or idea of a state of something that motivates to work towards. A vision is all about improvement and a more favorable future compared the status quo. It’s accompanied by a strong desire to reach that state.

A vision is not necessarily something that you can put into words. Until you start thinking about it and try to put it into words it’s more like a hunch or an inner compass that guides your decisions.

Your vision normally covers parts of your domain of expertise and area of responsibility, and beyond. The following examples give you an idea of what that might look like for certain roles in a software company.

CEO

A CEO, or CVO (Chief Vision Officer) as Simon Sinek calls it, devises the company’s vision and shares it with employees and customers. Companies often put a condensed version of their vision into a catchy slogan.

For CEOs there is no Senior level. The leading role, and therefore having a vision for the company, is an integral part of their job.

Product Owner

The Scrum Guide describes a Product Owner as “accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team”, along with a couple of tasks performed by the PO.

A Senior Product Owner is also a PVO – a Product Vision Owner. They develop and share an inspiring and motivating vision of the product with all stakeholders, including their team.

Scrum Master

According to the Scrum Guide, “The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide”. And it goes on stating how the scrum master serves team, PO and organization.

Senior Scrum Masters maintain their own vision of the agile process implemented by the team. An inspiring vision that goes beyond the Scrum Guide. A vision that everyone on the team is motivated to follow to improve their process and thereby their work results. They also share it with other Scrum Masters in their organization and with the organization’s management.

Software Engineer

Software Engineers know how to translate business logic into program code. Among other things, they design, implement, test and maintain code.

A Senior Software Engineer also maintains a vision of certain aspects of the software architecture and design, the development process, the code base, etc., and shares it with the entire team, management, and other developers in the organization.

Test Engineer

Test Engineers assume the role of the user and verify that all uses cases have been implemented properly. They have a quality mindset and deep knowledge of the product, its use cases and requirements.

A Senior Test Engineer maintains a vision of the software’s quality, the test process, test automation, use case and requirements documentation, etc. They share it with their team, within the test community and with the organization’s management.

Note how Seniors in different roles have a vision for their respective domains. The vision of a company that’s devised and shared by the CEO typically doesn’t cover details of software design or testing. Likewise, the vision of a Senior Software Engineer probably doesn’t cover all the goals of the entire organization.

Have a vision

The first steps towards sharing and following your vision is to have a vision. It’s not important to call it a vision, nor to put it in words. Often it is not more than a gut feeling that tells you whether something is heading in the right direction or not. Don’t confuse this with following rules, best practices and conventions that you’ve learned by heart and that make you feel uncomfortable when violated, though. In fact, for a vision it’s not unheard of, to challenge established rules.

Unfortunately, you can’t lock yourself into a room for a week, hoping to develop a vision from scratch. A vision needs to come from inside you. It takes expertise and experience for it to form¹. That said, you can still support that process. That’s a topic for another blog post.

Once you’ve discovered a seed of a vision inside you, you can actively develop it by deepening your knowledge about the subject and gaining more experience in that area.

Over time, your vision will evolve naturally as your knowledge, your experience, and your skills grow, and as your area of responsibility changes. Some aspects might become less important and you might find new aspects that are important to you.

Share your vision

In a leading role it’s essential to share your vision.

By sharing your vision you enable others to follow it, and to adopt your vision and make it their own. This way they can still follow it after you’ve left the team or the organization. As a leader, as a Senior that’s what you want, your vision to come true, with or without you.

Another important reason to share your vision is to get feedback. You can use that feedback to refine and develop your vision.

You can share your vision by speaking or writing about it. Share it in your team, your organization, in open space sessions, at meet ups, at conferences and in blog posts².

By far the most efficient way to share your vision is to passionately follow it yourself.

Follow your vision

Following your vision means working towards making it come true. If your vision guides your actions and your decisions, you become a driver of innovation and improvement of everything that is required to make your vision become reality.

A strong vision will keep you on the right track and there is little to nothing that can stop you from working towards it.

If you follow your vision, it won’t go unnoticed. Your vision and you following it will inspire and motivate others to follow it too, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of it becoming reality.

Conclusion

A vision is the result of other qualities that I’ll cover in future posts of this series. It’s motivation, inspiration and compass for you and others to a better future. This is what leadership is about and this is what makes a Senior.