I coached someone who was genuinely one of the best data engineers I had ever seen. Technically, they were operating two or three levels above their title. By month one at a new company, they had built models the rest of the team had been struggling with for months. By month three, they were the person everyone handed the complicated work to.
A year and a half later, they quit. Frustrated, and feeling like the company did not value them.
In fact, The company did value them. They valued their execution. What they never got was somebody to listen to their ideas and judgment. Because this person never voiced any of it.
They worked on everyone else’s ideas, delivered brilliantly, and waited for recognition that was never going to come through technical performance alone.
I have seen this story play out dozens of times. And you probably recognise it too.
The Problem Is Not Performance
Brilliant engineers get great performance review, but no promotions. They are never picked for the exciting projects.
You do what you are told, you do it well, and somehow the people who get the opportunities are not the ones who write the best code.
And this is an onboarding problem.
The first 30 to 90 days in a new role set a reputation that is almost impossible to shake. The team forms an opinion of you before you have a chance to demonstrate your full capability.
That opinion determines which projects you get offered, whether your proposals get heard, and whether your manager sees you as someone to develop or someone to assign tasks to.
Most engineers get this period exactly backwards.
They arrive with strong opinions, a full toolkit, and a mental list of everything they would do differently. And then they start doing it. Immediately. Without asking why anything is the way it is.
One person I worked with joined as a new Head of Data and kicked off a full warehouse migration in their first weeks. The context they were missing could have told them why that decision was catastrophic for this specific organisation. They were gone within a few months.
Three Habits That Change How You Land
This is not a framework. These are behaviours I have observed from every person I have coached or worked with who had a strong first year. They do not require a senior title to execute. They work whether you are joining a new company, a new team, or picking up a new stakeholder group at your current org.
Habit 1: Empty the Glass Before You Fill It
There is an old story about a student who goes to a master and asks to be taught. The student has already read everything. They already have opinions. The master pours tea into their cup until it overflows, then says: you cannot fill a glass that is already full.
When you walk into a new data environment, you are going to see:
broken dbt lineage
tests that take 12 minutes
an #analytics-questions Slack channel full of questions whose answers exist in a Wiki nobody reads
an infrastructure that looks like nobody ever cared about it
Your instinct is to fix it. But that instinct is wrong.
Before touching anything, stop and ask why.
Why do those tests take 12 minutes? One engineer I worked with assumed it was negligence. After asking, they found out those tests were keeping watch on a set of records in the most critical table in the warehouse because of a recurring data integrity issue nobody had yet figured out how to solve properly.
Their first plan was to filter the lookback window to 24 hours. The right answer, after understanding the context, was a full remodelling of the upstream logic.
One of those solutions fixes the problem and one of them creates a production incident that makes you the person everyone watches carefully from then on.
Here is what you are mapping in your first 30 days:
How code gets shipped. Pull request process, number of reviewers required, merge versus rebase conventions, who actually needs to approve before you merge. This is not about following rules. It is about understanding the norms before you violate them accidentally.
How decisions get made. In the team I lead, nothing gets committed without a design review first. You document your proposed approach and get confirmation from someone experienced before writing a line. Some teams have nothing like this. Some have something entirely different. Ask before you assume your way is the standard.
How stakeholder updates work. Some teams run a dedicated project Slack channel and push daily updates. Some expect nothing until the thing ships. Do not guess. Ask.
What the actual team pain is. The problems you experienced in your last job are not automatically the problems here. Some teams struggle with data literacy across the business. Some have a perfectly functional data team sitting next to a shadow analytics function that is quietly doing parallel work and creating slow-burning turf conflict. You want to know that before you accidentally step into it.
The engineers who build trust fastest in the first month are not the ones who ship the most. They are the ones who break nothing and ask the most questions. That reputation is worth more than any quick win.
Habit 2: Form Opinions Before You Are Expected To
Asking questions without forming opinions is just data collection. The second habit is what you do with what you learn.
This is where a lot of technically excellent people stall. They go quiet. They process. They wait until they feel they have enough context to say something worth saying. By then, the window has closed and they are already seen as someone who executes rather than someone who thinks.
You do not need a lead title to have an opinion. You need observations and a reason.
Here is the method. Open a spreadsheet, a Notion board, anything. Start a running log:
What I observed. Something specific. Not “the pipelines are slow” but “every pipeline runs once a day except this one, which runs every three hours.”
Why I think this is the case. Based on the questions you asked. Not a guess. An informed hypothesis.
What I would do to improve the situation. One idea. Sometimes one bullet. Sometimes a few steps.
That third column is where your reputation gets made. It turns observations into proposals. And proposals, shared at the right moment, are what shift how your teammates see you from month one.
There is an important distinction here. This is not the same as the previous habit telling you not to presume. Presuming means acting without context. Forming opinions means building a point of view with context. One breaks things. The other earns you a seat in the conversation.
The engineers who are seen as strong leaders after 90 days are almost never the ones who delivered the most. They are the ones who showed they understood the environment and had ideas about how to make it better.
The full playbook continues below for paid subscribers
In Includes:
the third habit
the exact questions to run through when mapping hidden power dynamics
a real example of how a team member got an immediate “no” in a group meeting and then got the same proposal approved three weeks later by approaching it differently
the complete onboarding companion workbook with exercises you can use in your first 30 days
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