Picking & Choosing

How to pick topics as a manager or staff engineer

I wrote this down because I find that sooner or later I have this conversation with every manager, senior manager, or staff engineer that reports to me: How to pick what topics to work on. Of course you can follow your intuition, and that works well for some people. But if you are more like me you will want to build a mental model to work your way through the problem.

Before we start

Before we dive in, I think two things are important to realize. One: congratulations! The fact that you have this problem means you have the basics of your role under control. If you are running from one fire to the next you will not be asking your manager what more to pick up. And two: Things will get worse. Sorry about that, but as you move to bigger roles your sphere of influence increases and the amount of topics could get involved in grows exponentially. You will not ‘solve’ this. I’m guessing that a big part of why you got to your position in the first place is your ability to spot relevant things to work on. So let’s explore how we can tackle this.

Backlog

Make a backlog. Like any backlog, don’t be opinionated about what can go on your list. If it comes to mind three times, write it down. Now let’s have a look. I’m just guessing, but I think you will have written down more work than four of you could do in a year. And that brings us to the next step: prioritize.

Prioritize

You are trying to optimize your time as a professional and you should do so based on impact. Not just impact on your company’s results, but also impact on your own growth path. Impact only is not enough though. If everyone in your company dives on the same problem the result will be chaos. For example, if your company has a great product but sales are lagging, are you going to fix this if you are a staff engineer? In a startup, maybe. In a bigger corporation you can find better ways to spend your time.

Let’s review your backlog from the perspectives of authority and engagement to help you prioritize. Your ability to drive a topic to a result depends on both.

Authority

With authority I mean: what is your formal ability to influence the topic you want to work on. I think your authority flows from two sources. Your experience with and your expertise on the topic and the scope of your position. Let’s look at an example. If you are leading your company’s infrastructure team, optimizing a Kafka cluster may simply be part of your job, which gives you formal authority over the problem. On the other hand, if you are supporting the Customer Care tooling teams as a staff engineer, but earlier in your career you dove deeply into Kafka that will give you informal authority, based on your expertise.

I’m not suggesting that you should only look at topics you have authority over. The point is that if you have less authority you will need more of something else: engagement.

Engagement

With engagement I mean: how much do you care to have an impact on this topic? Again, this flows from two sources. If something touches your team that triggers a formal engagement. Informal engagement is more personal. Maybe you have a deep personal reason to care about diversity even though your team is as diverse as it gets. That is still a great reason to get involved. Engagement is what fuels your engine. Let’s use it to drive results.

Authority versus engagement

We now have a simple quadrant to test your backlog against.

• Do you have high authority on the problem space and are you engaged to bring it to a solution? Go for it!
• Do you have high engagement and low authority? You will be fighting uphill. If you care enough, that is fine. But you will not have the energy for many of these. So be selective.
• Do you have high authority and low engagement? It is better to delegate to someone who is enthusiastic to take over, or train someone who is eager to learn.
• No engagement or authority? Let’s give a heads up to whomever is responsible and move on.

Impact

Now that you have classified the backlog it is good to look at impact. If your authority or engagement on a topic are very high it is ok if the impact on the company is lower. But if all your topics are low impact you are simply not doing what your company is paying you to do. I would avoid having more than one low impact topic.

How many

How much you can take on is difficult to answer without detailed context. But as a rule of thumb: if you end up with more than four things in parallel it’s almost certainly too many.

If that seems few to you: most professionals underestimate the amount of time they spend answering messages, being pulled into meetings, doing light admin and keeping things running.

Letting go

We end with the hardest part. Letting go of the things that you know need to get done, but that you are not going to have time for. Align this with your manager. But mostly, align it with that voice in your head that might tell you you are not doing a good job.

And accept the hard fact that sooner or later someone may walk up to you and say: You should have taken care of … And you will need to answer: I know.

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These views are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.