Day 3: Four Factors Essential to Your Company’s Success
Be Better Engineering Leader, a 30 Days Series
This is the first week of a series of daily lessons on how to Be a Better Engineering Leader. I recommend spending up to an hour on each lesson to gain insights into Product, Technology, and People—areas critical for every Engineering Manager.
As an engineering leader, you need to guide your team beyond just writing code. Your goal is to build a product that contributes to the business in meaningful ways.
There are four key factors essential to any product’s success:
Growth: Attracting new customers and increasing market share.
Expansion: Offering new products and services to existing customers.
Profitability: Generating resources necessary for sustainable growth.
Customer Satisfaction: Ensuring customers return and recommend your product.
Understand which of these factors your team is contributing to at any given time. Whether you’re building features, optimizing performance, or improving stability, each task should align with one or more of these objectives.
In more mature organizations, this framework is part of a broader strategic context:
Mission: Why the company exists.
Vision: The future the company aims to create.
Objectives: Key focus areas for the next months or years, linked to the company’s scorecard of KPIs.
Action Points: Create Your Product Advocacy Cheat Sheet
Objective: Build a reference document that helps you communicate your team’s impact on the company’s success. This will enable you to advocate effectively for your team and ensure they’re building a product, not just writing code.
Create a Document:
Title it “Product Advocacy Cheat Sheet.”
This document will be a quick reference for how your team contributes to the business.
Add Key Information:
Company Vision & Mission: Summarize the company’s purpose and long-term goals.
Core Values: Note the company’s guiding principles.
Strategic Objectives: Include high-level goals, such as those discussed during All-Hands meetings. These usually align with growth, expansion, profitability, or customer satisfaction.
Scorecard & KPIs: Identify key metrics that measure the company’s health. Link to dashboards or internal reports if available.
Team Contribution: Note which of the four factors—growth, expansion, profitability, or customer satisfaction—your team contributes to the most. Provide examples of recent work or projects that align with these factors.
Review Regularly:
Review this document before each 1:1 or team meeting. Use it to provide context to your team, helping them see how their work impacts the bigger picture. This will shift the focus from merely completing tasks to building a meaningful product.
Be a Missionary, Not a Mercenary
Your role as a leader is to transform your team from being feature factories into product champions. Use the "Product Advocacy Cheat Sheet" to ensure everyone understands the broader impact of their work. Like the janitor who “helped put a man on the moon,” every engineer should know how their contribution supports the company’s mission.
Resources for Further Learning
Book: Empowered
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