A Portfolio of Work
At any level of engineering, you are responsible for some work. Early in your career, it’s a ticket, a task. The work is narrow but likely deep. As you grow in your engineering leadership career, your purview becomes broader. And at some point, you’re no longer responsible for one thing. You become responsible for a collection of work. We call this a portfolio of work. Your portfolio of work and how you manage it constitute the impact you can make. And the further along you get in your career, the more nuance exists in how you can manage it.
Progressing from being responsible for one thing to many starts at the large project level. If you lead a project, break down the work into parallel pieces, and have teammates contributing, congrats — you have a portfolio of work. This is your first real experience managing a portfolio for the outcomes you desire. Initially, your project might be tightly scoped, but as the scope grows, so will the unknowns. You’ll begin to manage risk in how you approach the project and allocate work. This is your first real taste of managing a portfolio of work.
If you are a tech lead or engineering manager, you are responsible for the team’s outcomes. You’re now managing a portfolio of work across a team. At its most basic, you can manage each project separately to success. But as you gain experience, you can begin to manage the whole as a portfolio. Here are some important questions to ask: Which of the team’s projects do I expect to deliver the majority of expected impact? If a project was at risk, which project would I deprioritize to increase the chances of success? What does the curve of success for each project look like: is it binary or is it linear? Having these mental models can allow you to manage your work for greater impact.
As you grow comfort in managing your portfolio, the next step is to build in an intentional amount of risk. If your team has the capacity, you can begin to organize your portfolio to take on a moonshot: book 60% to “sure thing” work, 30% to “somewhat risky but linear impact” work, and push the remaining 10% toward that home run shot.
Once you manage your quarterly and half year planning well enough, you can intentionally manage your portfolio with time as an added dimension. Set your team up to deliver for a couple quarters in a row, and take the big home run swing once you’ve banked some gains. Or, if you took a swing and it didn’t come through, plan for more “sure thing” work the following quarter. Your portfolio of work exists in a given quarter or half year as your work-in-progress. It exists in hindsight as your team’s reputation. Build up your team’s social capital and spend some of it.
Finally, there’s breadth. As you work across teams, you begin to manage portfolios of portfolios. To do this with intentionality, you need to work with your team counterpart. Encouraging people and teams to take on or off risk becomes a part of your calculus. Two failure modes to consider. In one, teams are continually risk-averse and you need to push one toward risk. In the other, all of your teams are too bold, and you risk little delivery across them. As you manage your teams, manage them to produce the portfolio of work you intend across their breadth.
How’s your portfolio of work performing? What can you do this week to build some more intentionality into it?