I spotted it during my first year as an engineering manager. The engineers who became indispensable were able to see what’s not there.
It wasn’t technical knowledge, or writing great code or being the most eloquent presenters. They had something else – a skill that multiplied everything they touched.
While everyone else focused on their assigned work, these engineers noticed the gaps. The undocumented deployment process that confused every new hire. The missing integration between two critical systems. The feedback loop that no one owned but everyone needed.
More importantly, they didn't wait for permission to fix these gaps. They just did it.
The Pattern I Couldn't Unsee
Once I recognized this pattern, I saw it everywhere.
When our API response times started creeping up, one engineer noticed we had no visibility into which component made the endpoints slow. No one asked him to build a performance dashboard. He just did it in an afternoon. That dashboard prevented three potential regressions (or eve incidents) just in the following month.
When another team kept missing deadlines, a different engineer realized the real problem: dependencies weren't tracked anywhere. She created a simple dependency mapping tool. Nothing fancy – just a spreadsheet with some automation. Suddenly, everyone could see the bottlenecks.
Neither task was in their job description. Both became critical to our success. And they didn’t have to pull heroics to do this.
They had an understanding of a fundamental truth of complex systems: the most important work often lives in the spaces between defined responsibilities.
Why Most Engineers Miss This
We're trained to execute within boundaries. Your ticket says build feature X, so you build feature X. Your role is backend engineer, so you write backend code. Your team owns service Y, so you maintain service Y. And this model works, you can get very far in your career using this approach.
But systems don't fail at the center of well-defined domains. They fail at the edges, at the handoffs, in the coordination between teams.
The senior engineer who gets promoted to staff isn't just technically stronger. They've learned to spot these boundary problems before they explode. They've developed an instinct for organizational debt – the accumulated friction from all the small gaps no one owns.
More crucially, they've learned when to fill a gap themselves versus when to build a system that prevents the gap from forming.
The Three Levels of Gap-Finding
I've watched engineers evolve through three distinct stages of this skill.
Level 1: Reactive gap-filling. You stumble across problems and fix them. The deployment breaks, so you update the docs. A new hire struggles, so you pair with them. You're helpful but tactical.
Level 2: Proactive gap-hunting. You actively scan for issues. Before starting a project, you map dependencies. During planning, you ask "what could go wrong?" You prevent fires instead of fighting them.
Level 3: Systematic gap prevention. You build systems that surface and eliminate gaps automatically. You create processes that make gaps visible before they become problems. You teach others to spot gaps themselves.
The leap from Level 2 to Level 3 is where good engineers become great leaders.
Making It Practical
Start by asking better questions in every meeting:
"Who owns the handoff between these two teams?"
"What happens if this person is unavailable?"
"Where would a new engineer get confused?"
"What are we assuming but not verifying?"
Document what you find. Not in some elaborate gap-tracking system – just a simple list. Review it weekly. You'll start seeing patterns.
Pick the gaps that block multiple people or processes. These have the highest leverage. Fix them, but more importantly, create visibility so they can't re-form.
The magic happens when you teach your team this skill. Run a "gap review" in your retrospectives. Ask everyone to name one thing that fell through the cracks. Make gap-finding a celebrated behavior, not extra work.
The Compound Effect
Engineers who master gap-finding accelerate everything around them.
Projects ship faster because hidden dependencies get surfaced early. Teams collaborate better because interface problems get addressed. New hires ramp up quicker because knowledge gaps get documented.
But the real power is in what doesn't happen. The migrations that don't fail. The deadlines that don't slip. The engineers who don't burn out from preventable friction.
Your manager notices when things just work. When projects mysteriously avoid the typical pitfalls. When your team seems to dodge bullets that hit everyone else.
That's not luck. That's systematic gap-finding.
The Meta-Skill That Matters
Technical skills become obsolete. Frameworks change. Languages evolve. But complex systems will always have gaps.
The engineer who can see these gaps – who can build bridges before anyone realizes there's a chasm – will always be invaluable.
This skill transferred when I moved from engineer to manager. It'll transfer if I switch companies or industries. It's the skill behind every other skill, the multiplier that makes everything else more effective.
Start looking for gaps tomorrow. Not because someone asked you to, but because that's what leaders do. They see what's missing and make it whole.
If you're working on developing this meta-skill and want more frameworks for engineering leadership, I share practical insights every week. Subscribe to my newsletter or connect with me on LinkedIn where I write about the critical skills that actually drive engineering careers forward – the ones they don't teach in bootcamps or CS programs.