Unlocking High-Impact Activities in Your Software Engineering Career

The more you grow in your career, the more impact (positive of course) is expected from you. Navigating this landscape as a software engineer can be challenging. Deciding between immediate features and long-term initiatives can be confusing.

Here, I'll outline the strategies that have enabled me to make a positive impact in my career.

1. Define Your Role Clearly

When joining a new team or organization, ensure you have a precise understanding of your role's expectations. Avoid assumptions and clarify responsibilities through one-on-one discussions. Ask targeted questions like:

• What are my job responsibilities? Is it primarily coding or a mix of coding and stakeholder management?
• What's our product vision and the team's goals?
• How do we track progress? What metrics do we use?

2. Elevate Team Productivity

Whether leading a team or managing engineers, enhancing productivity is paramount. This involves embracing minimalist meetings, a robust onboarding process, and automating recurring tasks.

i. Minimalist Meeting Culture

• Keep daily stand-ups concise (~15 mins for 7-8 members) for focused updates.
• Promote asynchronous communication (Slack, Jira) over synchronous meetings.
• Ensure important information is readily available to reduce meeting need.
• Make meeting agendas mandatory to enhance preparation and efficiency.

ii. Robust Onboarding Program

• Maintain an updated onboarding program covering coding guidelines, dev environments, logs access, metrics, etc.
• Integrate interaction with customer success teams to add customer-focused dimension.

iii. Automate Recurring Tasks

Identify manual tasks during on-call periods and other day to day activities and prioritize automation for increased productivity.

3. Cultivate Customer Focus

Depending on your team's domain (feature or platform), customer focus varies. Tailor your approach accordingly:

i. Feature Teams

• Collaborate with product owners to understand customer experience and complement product vision.
• Analyze user registration metrics, feature usage, and performance metrics for impactful insights.
• Stay attuned to customer pain points through touch points or surveys.

ii. Platform Teams

• Prioritize developer productivity and optimize organizational infrastructure.
• Ensure easy access to logs and visualization for efficient issue resolution.
• Implement basic alerting and monitoring for common microservice issues.
• Provide coding guidelines and minimize boilerplate code for streamlined development. I have covered this topic in detail in a blog titled "Code Consistency With Examples & Services Framework" link here .
• Enable canary deployments for thorough release testing.

Remember, this list is a starting point, not exhaustive. Feel free to share your own high-leverage activities and your approach to identifying them.