Focus on Impact.

This is probably the most common piece of advice I hear from managers. It's such a seemingly simple phrase that just sounds good, but I need to be honest with you. It drives me crazy.

Although most people use this phrase with great intentions, "impact" is rarely well-defined. I've seen many engineers and even managers default to focusing on short-term needs for their teams when thinking about impact. Long-term work that is important for a company might be impactful, but it's often hard to measure and comes with more ambiguity. As a result, it's just easier for people to focus on short-term needs when thinking about impact as an abstract idea.

Take the following (not really) hypothetical scenario. A senior engineer is thinking about how they can grow into a staff engineer and expand their sphere of influence. They could invest a lot of time improving their app's mobile architecture and developing new best practices since the industry is adopting new standards. There might not be any immediate gains, but a migration from Objective-C to Swift will have to happen at some point for the iOS app. Any work over the next quarter will likely compound and save a great deal of future work during the eventual migration. On the other hand, the engineer could focus more on generalizing a newly launched feature so that other teams can take advantage of their team's recent success. The latter is much easier to quantify, will probably be valued more by the company, and is easier for everyone to understand. As a result, the engineer ends up focusing on making it easier for others to use the feature their team built because it seems more tangibly "impactful".

When telling engineers to focus on impact, 90% of the time people will focus on projects that are well-defined and measurable. At first glance, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Projects can be prioritized based on how much they will move metrics, and trade-offs start to feel more objective with numbers involved. At an organizational level though, everyone focusing on short-term impact results in few people, if any, thinking about long-term projects since it's harder to clearly define their value. The result is a culture defined by short-term, quantifiable projects with "unforeseen" rewrites coming up on a somewhat regular basis.

If we want to create environments were people are empowered to invest in the long-term health of our organizations, we need to be mindful of the language we use. Using the word impact can be a bit too blurry when helping people prioritize their work and identify growth opportunities. Instead of using the word impact by itself, I've found the following types of questions to work well in conversations with my teams:

• What do you think would help our company out in the long-term?
• What would have the biggest impact on our yearly OKRs?
• What do you think our team's / architecture's biggest weakness is?
• What would our customers appreciate the most?

At the end of the day, it can be as simple as telling people to focus on what is best for the company. Whether or not people will follow through on that, though, entirely depends on whether they believe the company actually values long-term work. And that is another topic for another day.