Engineering Prioritization: Maximizing Leverage Through Strategic Focus

This is one of the most undervalued skills and one of the highest leverages you can give your team

In today's fast-paced tech landscape, the difference between good and great engineering teams often comes down to one crucial skill: the ability to ruthlessly prioritize for maximum leverage. It never seizes to amaze me how under developed this skill is among us all. I say this transparently, I have misses on this front and I find myself having to dig out this skill, dust it off, refocus and work with my teams to regain control of our priorities.

For leaders, leverage your forest time. Your team is counting on you to help identify the highest leverage work. This comes from stepping away from the details (for just a little bit 😅) and looking over to see where to focus the team.

Here's how to develop this superpower.

The Power of No

The most impactful engineering teams aren't the ones that do everything – they're the ones that strategically choose what not to do. Every "yes" to a project is implicitly saying "no" to countless others or further delaying getting the most important and valuable thing done. Make these trade-offs explicit:

Stop doing low-leverage work that keeps you busy but doesn't move meaningful projects forward and this goes for both product and engineering priorities. This includes:

• Over-optimizing systems that are "good enough"

• Building features that won't significantly impact user behavior

• Refactoring code that isn't actively causing problems

Remember: Being busy isn't the same as being productive. Your goal is impact, not activity.

Validate Before You Build

The most expensive engineering time is time spent building the wrong thing. This is one of the key insights from ‘Inspired’, which I highly recommend and encourage you to study as an engineering leader. Modern tools give us unprecedented ability to validate ideas before writing a single line of production code:

• Use AI tools like Claude or bolt.new to rapidly prototype interactions and content.

  • Create no-code prototypes to validate user flows

  • Build clickable prototypes for user testing. It’s amazing how much time save everyone gets by ‘walking’ through the experience.

• Run A/B tests with minimal engineering investment

• Use feature flags to test with real users. Don’t over invest, small changes and iterations will help you decide where to go and minimize your downtime should you need to revert these changes.

Let product managers and designers leverage these tools to validate assumptions early. The cost of a failed prototype is infinitely smaller than the cost of a failed feature.

The Iteration Advantage

Great engineering teams optimize for learning speed, and well defined iterations.

Here's how:

1. Start Small: Break large projects into vertical value increments

2. Measure with purpose: Define clear success metrics before starting, play it backwards - what do you hope to see and what will you do with this information.

3. Learn Fast: Build instrumentation into your first iteration

4. Adapt Quickly: Be ready to pivot based on the insights you are getting

5. Share Knowledge: Document learnings to prevent repeated mistakes

The goal isn't to get it right the first time – it's to learn as much as possible with each iteration.

I love this framing by Dharmesh Shah

Creating Your Impact Framework

To consistently identify high-leverage work:

1. Define Clear Impact Metrics

   1. What moves the needle for your business?

   2. What creates compounding value over time?

   3. What unblocks other teams or company initiatives?

2. Evaluate Opportunity Cost

   1. Could this time be spent on something more impactful?

   2. What are we saying "no" to by saying "yes" to this?

   3. Is this a good definition for an iteration?

3. Engineering Initiatives Strategy

   1. How are you evaluating and weighing in the technical initiatives your team is looking to drive

   2. Create milestones and a roadmap for taking on these initiatives and make sure to provide product value as part of these investments

   3. Use data to quantify the impact of technical debt (e.g. incident rates, developer productivity metrics, tools efficiency and value, cost reduction and resource efficiency)

4. Team Leverage Multipliers

   1. Swarming, pairing, and getting the team to focus on a smaller set of priorities over increasing the in-progress work and fragmenting the capacity of the team.

   2. Documentation as a leverage point

   3. Less automation (please hold throwing things at me right now) - Be critical of what the team is investing in automating. A one time migration does not need to be automated, your team time is better spent on higher leverage work. I’m not suggesting automation is bad, and more highlighting that it is another category of work that you need to be critical about investing the team time in.

      1. When to invest in automation is a great skill to have

   4. Context switching costs

      1. The hidden cost of multitasking is real

      2. There is a lot of value in batching similar work. Think about tackling a category of bugs in a particular area of the product vs one at a time

      3. Protect deep work time

      4. Manage escalations and interruptions

   5. Run efficient meetings and team calls

      1. Be intentional with the time you are asking your team to invest in. Have an agenda, prep the topics, engage in demos, leverage the value of the synchronous mode, clarify the goal for the conversation.

      2. Drive for action

         1. Summarize the conversation before you end the call

         2. Identify action items

         3. Identify who is owns next steps

Conclusion

The key to engineering leverage isn't working harder – it's working smarter. By saying no to low-impact work, validating ideas before building, being intentional and optimizing for learning, you can dramatically increase your team's effectiveness. Remember: every hour spent on low-leverage work is an hour taken away from potential high-impact projects.

The best engineering teams don't just build things right – they build the right things.

Till next time!