How to leverage your efforts in software engineering to make a meaningful impact.
Focus on high-leverage activities.
- Leverage: impact produced / time invested.
- 80/20 rule: 80% impact comes from 20% work.
- Focus on not more hours but more value per limited time on the task.
Increase leverage by:
- Reduce the time it takes to complete the activity (default to half-hour meeting instead of one-hour one, automate manual dev process).
- Increase the value produced (have a clear agenda beforehand, prioritize tasks based on launch date).
- Shift to higher-leverage activities (use email instead of in-person discussion, talk to customers).
Output can be measured by:
- Number of projects launched
- Bug fixes
- Users acquired
- Engineers hired
- Quality
- Revenue generated
Understand the power of compound interest.
- Compounding leads to an exponential growth curve.
- The earlier compounding starts, the sooner it hits the exponential growth, the faster you can reap its benefits.
Small deltas in the interest rate can make massive differences in the long run:
- Improving by 1% per day makes us 37x better at the end of the year.
- Google's idea of 20% where engineers spend about 1 day a week on a side project to make the company better results in successful products such as Gmail, Google News, Adsense,…
Optimize for learning because learning compounds.
- Find a fast-growing work environment.
- Take advantage of the resources at your work.
- Study code from the best engineers.
- Write more code.
- Go through technical, educational material.
- Send code views to the harshest critics.
- Participate in design discussions — don’t wait for an invitation.
- Team with senior engineers.
Invest in other skills too.
- Invest in skills that are in high demand.
- Build strong relationships.
- Read books.
- Write to teach.
- Pursue side projects.
Prioritize regularly.
- Track TODO list in a single list.
Sort the list frequently by asking yourself on a recurring basis:
- Is there anything else I could be doing that’s higher-leverage?
- Focus on what directly produces value (products shipped, user acquired, business metrics moved, sales made).
- Focus on the important and non-urgent (planning career goals, building relationships, personal development, improving workflow).
- Preserve larger blocks of focused time + learn to say no to unimportant activities.
- Limit the amount of work in progress + resist the urge to work on too many projects at once.
- Make it a habit.
Iterate quickly to build more and learn faster.
Invest in time-saving tools.
- Bringing the release time down to several minutes helps the team deploy more frequently, 40–50 times a day — skyrocket growth.
- If it saves you 1 hour a day, it saves 10 people 10 times as much.
- Measure the progress frequently.
Validate early and often.
- A well tested, clean design, scalable product doesn’t deliver much value if users don’t engage or customers don’t buy it.
- Bounce ideas off teammates.
Define measurable milestones.
Originally published at https://hoanhan101.github.io on May 16, 2020.
