Do more with less & don't burn out

While my remarks come from the perspective of a product and software engineering management career, the principles may apply to more areas of your organization.

Early in my management career I worked for a president who I thought was the most tightfisted budget owner on Earth. I didn't have a budget. I couldn't even buy stamps or a stapler without a written request to the accounting team for the exact dollar amount. We were growing so fast that we couldn't keep up with all the things that needed to be done and I wasn't allowed to hire anyone or buy any software to help.

Later in my career I worked for a CEO who was even more strict. However, his main directive was to cut costs in order to reach profitability. We couldn't allow any customers of our SaaS product to cancel, but we also had to spend most of our time on cutting infrastructure, facilities, and other expenses.

Both of these leaders were, perhaps, a little too zealous to control costs... but then again, maybe not. Because of the constraints these two leaders put on me and my teams, we were forced to dig deep and get creative to solve our largest problems. Through these two experiences, the common adage "necessity is the mother of invention" became much more meaningful to me.

As a result of my time working for these leaders I've adopted two main behaviors that I'd like to share:

• Prioritize is everything
• Don't spread yourself too thin

Disclaimer: Please don't assume that just because I have identified these and attempt to instill them that I'm the best at either of them.

Prioritize everything

It may sound hollow and obvious that in order to do more with fewer resources you will need to prioritize what you work on. But I don't say this casually. No matter what your business is and no matter where you work within the organization, there will always be too many good things to work on to do them all. Once I let go of the notion that I had to do everything, I found myself constantly asking the question, "then what should I let fall between the cracks?" This was, of course, the wrong question to ask and in time I learned that the right question is, "what's the most important thing I can accomplish today?"

What's the most important thing I can accomplish today?

The measuring stick for all responses to that question comes back to your organization's top-level goals. Are you trying to cut costs? Are you trying to increase revenue? Are you trying to land new logos? Are you trying to pay some tech debt? There are endless possible visions for any organization, but no matter what the vision is, your software engineering team will likely have a part to play in it. Consider, of all the tasks you have to do, which one will move the company closer toward its goal? You'll find that answering this question honestly requires some real research into sales forecasts, cost projections, adoption rates, and more. Once you fully understand all those areas of the business, you'll be better equipped to work on what matters and leave the rest behind. If your business is too large to be able to discover those answers for yourself, you may be able to get information from other teams who also want to make the organization succeed. You'd be surprised how many people are secretly waiting for a way to contribute in a meaningful way but are just blocked by the general lack of leadership and information.

Don't spread yourself too thin

It's one thing to make sure your individual teams are working on their top priorities. It's another thing altogether to ensure that the organization is working on the top priorities holistically. Too often in SaaS companies, the product and engineering teams grow too quickly and make organizational decisions that result in siloed product development. It's not uncommon to end up with multiple teams working on similar features or products. When push comes to shove and you need to do more with less, I'd suggest you look into every initiative across all the teams. It's quite possible you'll find that you have been building and maintaining multiple versions of a product or two products that have 80% overlap in functionality, or two different views in an application that accomplish the same goal in two different ways. Sometimes these duplications of effort are necessary. But ask yourself whether the compromise of consolidating these efforts will help reduce your team's effort more than it costs in customer satisfaction. Be honest with yourself and you'll find innovative ways to accomplish so much more.

Can I consolidate two initiatives into one with minimal compromise?

Several years ago I worked at a company that found itself in desperate need of paying some tech debt and controlling costs at the same time. I wasn't able to hire more resources to manage the debt and our team was extremely small. We couldn't afford to lose any customers and somehow had to balance bugs, features, and making a meaningful dent in the tech problems that plagued us. It took time, but we eventually pulled through that time and began to grow and be successful again. One of the key decisions that allowed us to get through it all was simply to consolidate two major features of our application into one. We had two different pages within our web application that effectively solved the same problem for our customers. Some preferred to view the data through the first page, and others preferred to look at it through the second page. The two pages had a very different look and UI and there wasn't more than 80% feature parity between the two, but it became clear that we spent a great deal of our time fixing bugs and adding tweaks to both of those pages. We made the hard and unpopular decision to sunset one of the pages and add as much missing functionality as we could to the other. Everyone resisted the change. I won't argue that the end result was a better experience for customers. But it allowed us to reduce our engineering efforts by a considerable amount, giving us the free time needed to resolve some much more pressing issues. I will forever be an advocate of finding the balance between the value of meeting customer needs and the cost of maintaining them.

If you find yourself in the situation where you need to do more with less, I hope you'll take a closer look at what you're spending your time on and at least consider the possibility that you could re-prioritize what matters or consolidate multiple efforts into one. We all know that our teams will find things to busy themselves with no matter how many people we hire. If you ask any of your teams whether they need more help they will almost always say yes. This unsustainable belief that teams need to perpetually grow isn't true and the more we accept that and find ways to make do with our given constraints, the more we'll find success in our efforts.