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How to establish impact when assigned on non-priority projects?

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Devops Engineer at Series B Startup2 months ago

I've always had a fair share of projects, some of which are high priorities for the team and some of which are less so.

How do I show my impact on the team/org when I'm assigned projects that are low on priority?

Less-priority projects often receive less effort from Product, Design, and other functions. Things get delayed because of other higher-priority projects. Do you have any pointers on navigating such scenarios?

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    2 months ago

    Career growth comes from working on whatever is most important. So you have two options:

    1. Figure out how to get allocated some of the more impactful projects that are considered more important.
    2. Make a compelling case with data, narrative, or conversation that the work you're doing is actually undervalued.

    Another dimension to this is "important to who?" Certain projects may be more important to the design or PM teams than to engineering. Within all the engineering-led projects, some projects will be more important to certain leaders than others.

    Your job is figure out the landscape and then strategically decide what to work on. Use "Talk & Observe" as a way to do this as I talk about in the onboarding course.

    One general rule of thumb is to work on projects which have fewer dependencies, which means there are fewer opportunities for things to go wrong. If the project you're working on requires zero input from design or PM, you don't need to rely on their (differing) opinion on project priority.

    This is why internal tools for other developers is often a ripe area for impact and innovation. It was a big part of my own promotion to Staff Engineer at Meta: [Case Study] Building A Meta Internal Tool To Empower An Entire Org: Staff Promotion Story

  • 1
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    Senior Engineer @ Amazon, Founder @ Roman Yusufov Coaching
    2 months ago

    One solution that hasn't been mentioned is to ask for higher-impact work. This may sound simple but you can't get something if you didn't ask for it.

    What might this look like in practice?

    First, talk to your manager about wanting higher-impact projects. But, more importantly, be specific and tie them to your strengths. So, if you're an expert at fine-tuning high-throughput databases, you would ask to be included when your expertise is needed.

    If your manager isn't able to just give you this work, go to the next step.

    Secondly, get involved in projects earlier. Start participating and contributing to more projects earlier in the development phase when possible. You could ask to sit it on a product requirement meeting or a design review.

    The intent is to learn more about the product and contribute where you can. But, the more you do this, the more visibility you have. When it's time to distribute the work, you're more likely to get it if you're already familiar with the project and contributed earlier in the process.

  • 0
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    2 months ago

    Showing impact is the same regardless of the project: Work backwards from the goals and try to add logging - "How do you measure the impact of an initiative you are leading?"

    In terms of how to claim a good amount of credit for it, that's tricky. You have a couple options:

    1. Craft a narrative that these projects are more important than people think - Try to tie these projects to your organization's goals/North Star/KPIs/OKRs/etc. You need to come up with a connecting line they're not seeing. From there, I recommend making a nice doc or slide deck and presenting it to leadership.
    2. Just ship it and see what happens - Sometimes you don't know the true impact of a project until you launch it. This is a common strategy I've seen from top engineers, especially those who got to Staff levels and beyond. They were able to finish their core roadmap work early (e.g. with just 35 hours out of 40 in a week) and essentially tried out these seemingly "lower impact" projects as an experiment (they often had some intuition on why these projects were undervalued). A lot of the time, their intuition was correct, and they looked like a hero.
    • 0
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      Devops Engineer [OP]
      Series B Startup
      2 months ago

      I didn't completely get "try to add logging"? What does logging achieve here?

    • 2
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      Engineer @ Robinhood
      2 months ago

      If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

      According to managers, the answer is no.

      Logging whenever something starts interacting with your project or starts interacting with specific functionality within that project will allow you to get tangible numbers on what your project is doing (recording the "sound" of your project). If there's not a way to quantiatively describe the value of something, the value is generally perceived to be 0 (no one can hear the sound, therefore there is no sound).

    • 0
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      Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
      2 months ago

      If you have any scale whatsoever, logging is the main way to show the impact. Otherwise you are merely pointing to your thing and saying "This is good" with no clear evidence.

      Let's say you work on the CI/CD pipeline to improve its continuous testing suite. Your goal is to make the testing suite more reliable and catch more bugs. A simple way to show the impact is to show the amount of regressions caught per commit submitted both before and after your improvements. Example:

      • Before: CI/CD's continuous testing is flaky and catches 2 bugs per 100 commits
      • After: CI/CD's continuous testing is now rock solid and catches 7 bugs per 100 commits

      You can further corroborate your impact by quantifying the number of production issues before and after. If production issues go through some sort of ticket management system, you can log an event whenever a new one is generated. You can compare the number of production issue events before and after, hopefully being able to show that the number of production issues went down with your CI/CD improvements as more bugs are being caught proactively.

      If you give a concrete example of one of your projects, I can give more specific metric ideas.

      In general, humans are naturally drawn to numbers, especially those in STEM fields. Numbers make everything feel more real, and data really is the lifeblood of the entire tech industry.

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