Ever since I first stepped into management, my favorite part of the job has been figuring out how to multiply the talent around me. Hiring phenomenally smart people is the easy part. Ensuring they don't get bored — and making sure the organization actually sees their work — is the hard engineering problem.

If you just let engineers "do their thing," they often get stuck in the sandbox. They write great code, but nobody outside the repo notices.

Proper growth isn't an accident, and it's not just "closing Jira tickets." It's a deliberate system design. If you don't have a plan for your impact, you are just a passenger in someone else's roadmap.

So, I started deploying what I call the Impact Plan. It's an active blueprint that lives with us all year to track highlights, hardships, and the actual trajectory of growth.

1. Productivity & Impact (The Execution) 🧱

Value added is what gets you the attention and the fuel to make a difference.

  • Feature Delivery: Are you shipping what the team planned?
  • Operational Excellence: Are you fixing the underlying systems? (Tech debt, stability gaps).
  • Team Effectiveness: Are you making the dev next to you faster? Multipliers are the real 10x engineers.

2. Visibility & Collaboration (The Network Effect) 🌐

Large companies generate a massive amount of noise. You need to carve out a clear signal.

  • Direct Team Collaboration: Are you driving alignment, or just writing code in a vacuum?
  • Outside Team Visibility: How do we break silos? (Guilds, POCs, cross-team sharing).
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Do customers or leadership know what you built? If no one knows it exists, did it really ship?

3. Personal Development (The Infrastructure Update) 🚀

Your capabilities are the one thing that stays with you no matter where you go. Never budge on investing in yourself.

  • In-Depth: Mastering your current stack — pick one area a year where you become the go-to person.
  • Horizontal: Exploring adjacent nodes. These will give you superpowers today (Product, Design, Architecture).
  • Network: Joining communities, attending conferences, mentoring.

The Reality Check

Being a leader means designing the environment for this to happen. It means having the conversations about visibility and skill gaps before they become a crisis. It means treating your team's growth like production infrastructure — you don't wait for it to go down to maintain it.