I always say: “the 10x engineer is the one who built it in the first place.”
- Understand the problem that is solved
- Why does this thing exist?
- What is the value?
- Who are the users?
- Understand the solution
- Has a useful mental model of the solution, that limits cognitive load
- Understand the vision
- Allows decision making that keeps open paths towards the future
- Familiar with the tech stack
- Familiar with the current architecture
- Knows which tradeoffs were made, thus can evolve the architecture
- Cf: Toyota Kaya quote" let them copy, they won’t be able to build on that and will be stuck
- Knows where to find information
- Who knows what
- Where is some documentation
- Familiar with the team’s ways of working
- Knows undocumented information
- Knows about previous learnings / experiments and their outcomes