The Alignment Strategy: Do work that matters

Make your efforts worthwhile, both at work and in your life

Hi everyone, Fran here 👋
Thanks for the words of support during my first week of writing! I’m energized by your kindness, I hope you enjoy this week’s post.

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Making progress isn’t about putting in hours and waiting.

Most of our contracts say that we work 40 hours. If you are pushing hard at your job you may work 50-60. No matter how many hours you put in, all of us want our work to make us grow, to make progress toward our next promotion, and to be recognized.

Someone with 100 times more impact than you is not working 100 times more hours. Don’t worry, this is not a post about productivity and removing distractions. This is about putting your efforts in the right actions. The most productive hour is the hour you don’t spend on throwaway work.

Both your company and your life are in movement. Align your actions with them.

🏆 Takeaways

• How to identify meaningful work.

• How to make the most impact from any of your work.

🏭 Align with your company’s direction

You can’t swim against the tide. No matter how many hours you put in as an individual contributor or as a team, you can’t fight the momentum of the entire company moving in a direction for years

Check the book Essentialism from Greg McKeown to explore these ideas

Find initiatives that align with the company’s direction. You don’t have to throw all your initiatives away. Instead, make them align with the direction. When socializing your initiatives, speak your audience’s language. Manage up your leaders to get their buy-in on the idea and their support.

Your organization’s direction will change constantly. Align regularly. Understand both short-term direction and long-term vision.

🌟 Identify opportunities aligned with your company's direction

Immediate opportunities for most engineers are in their sister teams. Understand their work, and join their design reviews. This will make you their go-to person and sounding board. You are building a network that makes switching teams easier. You are influencing outside your team and that’s a senior trait. And most importantly, you are learning.

Avoid tunnel-visioning in your team (a local maximum) and focus on understanding the big picture (the global maximum). To achieve this, expose yourself: Talk to managers and senior engineers from multiple teams, attend the all-hands meetings, and read the roadmaps from your close teams.

No leader cares that you improved your service availability from 99.99% to 99.999% when customers are unhappy and the company is losing millions of dollars every week. To get someone’s support, solve their problem, not yours.

Tech is a means to an end, start with the vision and work backwards on how to make progress towards it.

💚 Align with your life’s direction

When I was studying at uni, I uploaded my notes and solved exercises to a freemium website. They added ads to the PDF files and paid something like 1 cent per download. This was not worth the effort by itself for the money they paid, even as a student. But I was already taking my notes and solving exercises for myself. The incremental effort of uploading them was very small

This allowed me to be consistent and upload almost the entire degree’s coursework. 5 years later, I have more than 150k downloads. Remember: downloads of PDF documents, to study subjects at uni… this is not something mainstream at all.

At some point during uni, I thought about recording a YouTube course on some subject I had already passed on the previous term. Spoiler: I gave up. I learned that video creates a higher friction than writing. But most importantly, I was not studying it in the current term. There was no overlap, everything was extra effort and it was more work than I was willing to put in at the time.

🌟 Identify opportunities aligned with your life’s direction

Ask yourself some questions:

• What have you dedicated most of your life to? It will likely be around your studies and jobs

• What is something you already do for any other reason?

Let’s check my answers to these questions: I studied a CS degree and I have a full-time job as a software engineer. I read and study for my career growth. The incremental effort of writing about career growth for software engineers is very small, it leverages all my previous efforts.

Do the effort once and profit from it twice. That’s what I call a good deal.

🎯Conclusion: The strategy of incremental efforts

You know that rewriting an entire application from scratch is a bad idea, no matter how you look at it. It doesn’t align with any company’s direction. However, identifying how other projects align requires paying close attention.

You may think that starting a side hustle completely unrelated to your full-time job is sustainable, but it’s not. Either align the side hustle to your job or find a job in the field of the side hustle. Don’t take action in different directions, you’d spread yourself too thin.

You can do anything. You can’t do everything.
Pick actions that align with the direction of your life and your job
You are already in movement, don’t try to run in the opposite direction.

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Thanks for reading until the end. You are a real career strategist!

- Fran

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