Project Prioritization Framework (What Should I Work On?)
A simple yet useful framework to rank projects
Welcome back to Path to Staff! We are now a 4000+ strong community. A special welcome to the 1100+ new readers since our last article on how work-life balance slows / accelerates careers.
Today, I’ll share more about my framework for prioritizing projects. Prioritizing your work is a skill that becomes increasingly important as you advance in a company.
Why? Knowing how to prioritize means:
You don't have to lean on your manager as much, which builds greater trust between you and them.
As you get more senior and lead large teams and organizations, you need to figure out what to work on. Other engineers depend on the output of your work.
You get to have fun while doing so. Being in control of your priorities means you're in control of your destiny. Besides, who likes being told what to do?
Marrying needs & fun
You need two things to prioritize your work:
A good understanding of your company
A good understanding of yourself.
To do so, ask yourself two questions:
Question 1: What drives the most impact for the company and how does that translate to my work?
For almost every company, the answer is revenue. This is the lifeblood of companies in order to stay afloat. As you think through this, ask:
How can you help your company survive?
How does that trickle down to what your org and team does?
How does that shape what you do?
Here’s an example I was considering just last week. Pretend you’re an engineer that builds internal tools (e.g. calendar, mail, etc.) for a MANGA company. VPs mention often that your team adds to “cost” rather than “revenue”. As such, you struggle to see how your work had real impact.
Let’s work through this example using the framework. First we’ll lay out all the goals, starting from the company to team.
Company goal: Make money.
Org goal: Build internal tools to support employees.
Team goal: Build the best internal tools, e.g. calendar.
What could your goal be? If your org is seen as a cost center, it is actually easy to connect your work to deduce your impact on the company. (Side note: I would advise against trying to change how the org is seen, unless you're a director or VP at the company and have strong leadership influence.)
Now, let's translate these goals into a chain of needs to discover what your personal goal should be:
Company goal: Reduce cost for company
Org/team goal: Enable employees to move faster through internal tools
Personal goal: Reduce time to get to expected result. This could include shortening time spent creating & modifying calendar events, or reducing time it takes to load an email inbox.
Now that we’ve identified your personal goal, let's move on to the second question.
Question 2: What am I good at?
This is like the old adage of "work on what you love." It takes time to understand what you're good at. But once you do, you'll be able to get through your work easily.
Here's a few tips I give other engineers to find their strengths:
Ask others around you what your strengths are. We're often bad at recognizing our own strengths.
Notice what you naturally gravitate towards. Pay attention to the work tasks you genuinely enjoy.
The goal is to find that sweet spot between personal impact & skills.
Leveraging the same example, if you're personally great at spotting and fixing inefficiencies, and your personal goals are to reduce employee time spent to get to goals, your impact is extremely clear: reduce employees’ time to reach their goals.
You could even break it down even further for each half, e.g. reduce time spent on Calendar in H1, and Mail in H2, etc.
If you've found this sweet spot, great! You know how to achieve impact.
If not, keep on searching. Sometimes the right combination of project/team doesn't fit well, and you might need a team/priority change. But be patient and give yourself at least a couple of weeks to figure it out.
The Impact, Risk, Effort Matrix
Now that you've understood impact better, I'll share my project prioritization framework.
Let's take the same example from before. I'm an engineer working on internal tools at a large company. Remember, my goal is to help my company save money and enable employees to achieve their goals faster.
Consider four different projects that I'm planning on, and rank them by impact, risk and effort.
Impact: How impactful will this project be for the company? Use the previous section to guide you.
Risk: How risky is this project? Will I be able to deliver it? Will timelines slip? How many dependencies are there?
Effort: How much work is required? Do I have to dedicate every working hour to accomplish this?
Place this into a table, and color code impact/risk/effort like a stoplight table. This allows you to easily understand visually what to work on.
Now consider the following:
Chase the "Ideal Project" - High-impact, medium-risk, medium effort: Why medium risk and effort? You want to show that you were able to overcome challenges, and put in a sizable amount of work to get it done. If it is too easy, by all means do it. But remember, every project you take on adds additional mental burden.
Measure and quantify your impact: If your company uses revenue as a topline metric, be sure to have data backing your work both before and after to understand your impact.
Reorder your priorities. Using your color-coded table, rank these projects based on which you want to tackle first.
Every half-year, I like to pick one or two high-impact projects and pair them with a couple of investigative efforts (e.g., experimenting with a new AI tool) that will inform my future work.
This balance lets me keep coding while also shaping the roadmap for myself and the team. It’s not a perfect framework, but it’s worked well for me for many years.
That’s it!
TL;DR:
My prioritization framework in a nutshell:
Find your strengths to know what you’ll enjoy working on.
Align these strengths with company and team goals.
Aim for “Ideal Projects”. These are high impact, medium risk, medium effort. Make sure to track measurable results.
Pair big projects with smaller investigative efforts to inform future work.
In future pieces, I plan to cover:
How I find and source ideas across the company
How I balance smaller projects on top of main projects
Let me know in the comments if today’s prioritization framework was useful, and what else might interest you.