Principle A conviction, distilled from the work.

The work only travels as far as it's legible

At staff scope, your impact is bounded not by what you can build but by what others can carry without you in the room.

One clear form (brass), copied outward as others adopt it, fading at the edge of legibility. The work travels only as far as it reads.

Early on, leverage looks like output: how much you can build. Past a certain scope it inverts. Your impact stops being bounded by what you can build, and starts being bounded by what other people can understand, adopt, and extend without you in the room.

A system only you can reason about stops at your own hands. A decision no one can reconstruct gets relitigated the moment you leave. The artifact that isn’t legible, whether an interface, a design doc, a tradeoff, or the code itself, cannot travel. Legibility is the multiplier.

This is why Tanya Reilly named the connective work “glue,” and why Will Larson frames staff engineering as changing what a whole organisation can do. Naming, writing, and documentation are not the overhead around the work. On a long enough horizon, they are the work.

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