Leader's Week - how to maximize your weekly impact
Leader's Week - how to maximize your weekly impact
One of the most essential things for engineering leaders is effective time management. With multiple priorities, many people, and a tech stack under their leadership, capturing the actual outcome of the work can be challenging.
Leader's Week will help with that. Thanks to this framework, you will maximize the value of every single week of your work.
You will learn to focus on the right things and plan your week.
You will learn to pick initiatives that generate the most value for you, your team, and the company.
You will become an effective leader who will earn trust to gain more autonomy and ownership in future projects.
You will fully understand your potential and the value you bring to the organization, which will help you build your self-confidence.
Leader's Week in practice
The idea behind Leader's Week is simple. Focus on a single week - plan these days properly at the beginning and sum up the work at the end.
One week is small enough to plan it precisely and big enough to generate value. Leader's Week framework will help you with that.
Leader's Week comes in the form of a multi-step course. You can read it at once or split it into learning batches. Each page will give you the context behind why you should work in a particular way.
At the end of the course, you will get downloadable content - templates you can use to plan each of your weeks. You will get both:
Digital version (Google Doc template, Markdown file, MS Word template)
Printable PDF
Table of Contents
Leader's Week - how to maximize your weekly impact
1 - When you are a leader, you always have too much work to do
1 - When you are a leader, you always have too much work to do
As an engineering leader, you usually have more work than you can handle. This is a normal situation. Yet it's very different from individual contributors, who typically get their work prioritized for them.
Leaders' prioritization process looks different. You still have objectives or projects coming from the top management, yet it's your job to juggle between
initiatives or particular tasks,
the team's growth and well-being activities,
building roadmaps and strategies,
keeping an eye on technical debt,
and more.
A leader's job can be rewarding as your impact can grow indefinitely. But it's also challenging. Sometimes your week can be super busy, yet you are unsure what your accomplishments were when it ends. It's easy to get lost among super-important priorities, team struggles, long-term goals, and short-term initiatives.
After almost a decade of leading engineers, I came up with the framework which helps me do my job effectively and focus on the right things while keeping the feeling of accomplishment.
Read more on this subject
2 - Leader’s Week vs. OKRs
Leader's Week doesn't compete with known frameworks like OKRs. It should be complementary to them.
OKRs (Objective - Key Results) is one of the goal-setting systems used in many successful organizations. Thanks to it company can build alignment around objectives and the entire strategy for reaching these goals. If you want to learn more about OKRs, I recommend two sources:
Measure What Matters - the book written by John Doerr, the creator of OKRs, shares success stories of how big organizations like Intel, Google, and others implemented this framework and succeeded.
7 Short YouTube Videos to Kick Off Your Adventure with OKRs - the article from Kamil Stanuch, with a list of videos that will explain OKRs within 60 minutes.
The time range for OKRs varies between a few months to a few quarters. And while I find this framework powerful, assessing the value of your day-to-day work is sometimes difficult.
OKRs won't always tell you you did a great job when closing the week.
Planning a week
This is where Leader's Week comes to light.
The framework will help you to plan your week more precisely and to focus on the right things here and now.
Sometimes it'll be an execution of activities related to your Objectives, and sometimes defining the right things to focus on (e.g., good Key-Results to measure).
Leader's Week also will narrow your focus to a few critical things to accomplish within a week - it's helpful when there are too many objectives you are responsible for.
Assessing a week
Leader's Week is also a quick feedback for you.
While OKRs are effective when tracking things over extended time, they won't always tell you how was your last week. Metrics behind key results won't always change day by day. Sometimes bars and charts go against your goals in short periods. And sometimes your activities aren't strictly related to your objectives.
Leader's Week will help you look back at the last few days. These can be metrics and your leadership activities, like - did you support your teammates? Or have you inspired them?
The framework will also help you recall wins from the last few days to practice gratitude and complacency.
Finally, you will also review distractions that dragged you from important things.
This kind of assessment is excellent practice for your self-awareness. The more often you write down your wins, distractions, or exemplary leadership practices, the faster you will catch these "on the fly" during a week.
3 - Your job is to focus on the right things
The 1st level managers - Tech Leaders, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, or Team Leaders are the most critical roles in the company.
An organization's success depends very directly on these first-level people managers. Their difficult job is to mix hands-on experience with strategic thinking. They combine knowledge about products, business, and technology. They translate long-term objectives into day-to-day tasks.
First and foremost, as an engineering leader, you need to ensure the team builds a product, not just the code. But it's not always clear what it means "a product" (not mentioning - the right product for customer needs).
What if, for example, you lead a platform team that doesn't build customer-facing features but infrastructure components? It shouldn't be a surprise, but your job is still to focus on the commercial success of your company.
If the information about why you do particular projects doesn't come directly from your objectives, roadmaps, or product stakeholders, here's what you should identify at minimum. 👇
There are four factors essential to the success of any product or business: Growth, Expansion, Profitability, and Customer Satisfaction.
Growth allows you to reach new customers and expand your market share.
Expansion enables you to offer new products and services to your existing customers.
Profitability ensures that you have the resources to continue growing and expanding.
Customer satisfaction ensures that your customers will keep coming back for more.
Of course, these four factors are not the only ones that matter in product development. You must also consider product quality, usability, and marketing, among others. However, growth, expansion, profitability, and customer satisfaction are the foundation of any successful product development strategy.
Leader's Weekly, planning the week
When planning key initiatives for a week, it's worth starting from this assessment. Ask yourself which factors you touch the most with your activities - Growth, Profitability, Expansion, or Customer Satisfaction.