Big companies tend to have Staff/Principal/Distinguished type roles. Usually those roles give you a lot of independence. But that independence means you need to be able to find projects to do and advocate for them and get them staffed and planned and executed and out to production. Often those projects can span many teams and multiple organizations, depending on how the company is structured. So I suppose the most valuable skill is being able to earn the trust of the managers so that you're able to even get them to listen to you so your stuff ends up on their roadmap.

so i do sympathize with a lot of the negative sentiments about the role here in this thread, and i think that in general there is a lot of navel gazing about the staff+ tech ic roles, there is an actual place for them as tech leads of large projects.