Metadata
- Author: seangoedecke.com
- Full Title: Crushing JIRA tickets is a party trick, not a path to impact
- Category:#articles
- Document Tags: leaddev LeadDev outline Outline
- Summary: Focusing on JIRA tickets won’t lead to real impact or promotions; prioritize the work that aligns with your company’s important goals instead. Be willing to drop low-priority tasks and ask yourself regularly if you’re working on the most important thing. While suggesting new ideas can be rewarding, it carries risks, so it’s safer to support the company’s top priorities.
- URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/party-tricks/
Highlights
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Everything you could want from a company - promotions, bonuses, internal respect - comes from shipping projects, not from closing out tickets. (View Highlight)
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Importance at a tech company is whatever your directors/VPs/C-staff say it is. I mean that quite literally. Your job as an engineer is to execute on the strategy of the company, and since that strategy is set by executives, your job is to make sure you’re aligned with what they consider important. (View Highlight)
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Try to be ruthless about dropping work that is no longer important. If you ship a project and your management chain begins talking about the next thing, stop improving that project. In my experience, continuing to work on an already-shipped project is a very common mistake. Declare victory and walk away! (View Highlight)
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You should be asking yourself this at least twice a day. (View Highlight)
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The second mistake is not having a sense of what the most important thing is. Here’s how I figure that out in practice:
- Is there an ongoing high-visibility incident going on (e.g. directors/VPs are asking about it)? If so, can I help with that?
- Are there any open questions in Slack/JIRA/etc that I’m able to answer? Is there anyone waiting for a response from my team?
- For each project that I’m leading, in order of importance: could it ship right now? If not, is there anything I could do right now to speed that up (any code that needs to be deployed or PRs that need reviewing)?
- For each project that my team is working on, in order of importance: is there any work available to be picked up that would move it along?
- Are there any tickets on the JIRA board in “ready for work”? Note that going to the JIRA board is the last step, not the first step. Remember, companies care about projects, not tickets. (View Highlight)
- Note: Интересный план. И тикеты на последнем месте.
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If you get this right - if you only spend your time on the most important thing - you can be hugely impactful with much less than 40 hours of work per week. Companies are so full of engineers who work without conscious direction that doing one or two useful things per day will immediately make you unusually productive. (View Highlight)
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The hardest way to deliver value is to figure out an important thing that your organization isn’t doing and try to convince them to do it. This is basically betting that your company’s executives have done a bad job of identifying what they want, and that you can do a better one. (View Highlight)
📂 Articles | Последнее изменение: 28.01.2025 18:44