Highlight from How to influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

make your pet idea available for an existing political campaign. Suppose you’ve wanted for a while to pull out some existing functionality into its own service. There are two ways to make that happen.

The hard way is to expend your own political capital: drum up support, let your manager know how important it is to you, and slowly wear doubters down until you can get the project formally approved. The easy way is to allow some executive to spend their (much greater) political capital on your project. You wait until there’s a company-wide mandate for some goal that aligns with your project (say, a push for reliability, which often happens in the wake of a high-profile incident). Then you suggest to your manager that your project might be a good fit for this. If you’ve gauged it correctly, your org will get behind your project. Not only that, but it’ll increase your political capital instead of you having to spend it.