In the tech industry and beyond, working at breakneck speed to create groundbreaking new products and loyal customer bases is often valued. By rapidly eliminating technical roadblocks and being two steps ahead of the innovation curve, this is how an organization becomes the best and sets the new standard for competition. Right?
Well, for engineering teams at Grubhub, the greater payoff comes from working “SMARTer.”
No, that’s not just an exhilarating way to say they work with quick wit and clever ideas. It stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound,” which Senior Software Engineer Saumya Mohan said has been essential to working on engineering projects swiftly and precisely.
“Working with speed can cause one to cut corners in order to finish tasks on time, resulting in mistakes and potentially leading to burnouts,” she said. “Creating SMART quarterly and yearly ambitions for myself lets me plan how to divide my time in a way that helps me achieve my goals.”
Mohan isn’t alone in her approach. At Veeva Systems, Senior Engineer Andrew Smith believes that working within a set timeframe with a proper roadmap can also give engineers the much-needed structure to function quickly and efficiently without detriment.
“If speed and a sense of urgency are from a perpetual feeling of ‘being behind,’ you’re probably not creating an environment in which you can focus deeply,” Smith said. His solution? “Check out the Pomodoro Technique — it involves focusing on a single task, shutting out all distractions and working until your timer buzzes.”
To learn more about how engineers are conquering innovation at a sustainable speed, Built In Boston caught up with Mohan, Smith and Cohere Health’s Principal Engineer Kevin Yan for their most impactful strategies on working fast, eliminating burnout and leveling up current skill sets.
Grubhub is a leading global online food delivery marketplace.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
As a senior software engineer at Grubhub, I collaborate across teams to design new flows and code solutions, as well as mentor new staff. Our industry is fast-paced and I keep up by being able to swiftly execute action items and pivot with moving project plans as needed. I move fast to get quality code out to production ahead of schedule, which grants me the ability to explore more opportunities and take on additional responsibilities, and has been a major contributor in helping me progress in my career.
During your career, what have you learned that helps you work faster?
Planning my daily priorities helps me prioritize my time to avoid frequent context switching. I also strive to be a champion of knowledge sharing: I curate project summaries which include key people involved, blockers I faced and what helped to get past those hurdles, as well as any new findings. These documents become a useful resource for future reference and they allow me to reflect on my experience to avoid duplicate work, ultimately allowing me to be more efficient.
When collaborating across teams, sharing documents with agendas, meeting notes and action items has helped me to build consensus efficiently, create transparency amongst stakeholders and effectively execute project timelines. Another very valuable practice I’ve learned is to never shy away from asking for help. Reaching out to colleagues, mentors and managers when faced with a hurdle is key. The knowledge and perspective that I gain from their help allows me to be more productive and effectively help others in the future.
Planning my daily priorities helps me prioritize my time to avoid frequent context switching.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
Working with speed can cause one to cut corners in order to finish tasks on time, resulting in mistakes and potentially leading to burnouts. I mitigate these by evaluating the different components of a task to ensure all the action items — including testing and getting peer reviews — are listed, and I have an accurate understanding of the effort needed for it.
I strive to be transparent with my team and manager about any new findings that may increase the scope of a task, allowing us to take a step back and refine our approach. Creating SMART quarterly and yearly ambitions for myself lets me plan how to divide my time in a way that helps me achieve my goals while still making time to decompress via breaks during the day.
Veeva builds enterprise cloud technology that powers big names in life sciences.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
If the speed is sustainable — if it leads to more energy and motivation versus depletion and exhaustion — it will significantly increase the sense of fulfillment you get from work and will accelerate the speed at which you learn new skills and concepts. Consider the fabled “flow” state which significantly increases productivity, creativity and energy. If the speed is at a cost to your well-being, it will result in diminished performance over time and will not serve you well in the long run.
During your career, what have you learned that helps you work faster?
There are three areas that I’d recommend focusing on to ensure engineering teams maintain a consistent and fast delivery within their product timelines. First, to move fast you need to ensure you’re working on the right thing, so hopefully your product or engineering manager has helped set you up for success. An agreed-upon roadmap, upfront design when feasible and well-groomed stories go a long way, but it all depends on your circumstances — whether you are in an established domain with clear priorities and customer commits or are doing rapid iterations on an evolving prototype to derive and vet customer requirements.
As I said before, once you’re ready to execute with abandon, check out the Pomodoro Technique. Focus on a single task, shut out all distractions and work until your timer buzzes. Distractions are the great saboteur of focus, speed and sustainable performance, so create opportunities to block them out so you can engage in focused work. Lastly, always celebrate the small wins and acknowledge the progress you’ve made.
Distractions are the great saboteur of focus, speed and sustainable performance.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
If speed and a sense of urgency are from a perpetual feeling of “being behind,” you’re probably not creating an environment in which you can focus deeply. This is not a sustainable way to operate, as alluded to in my previous point. The key mitigation skill is focus. Mindfulness meditation is a great tool to hone the skill of moment-to-moment attention, which will improve your ability to focus once distractions are stripped away. It will also reduce emotional reactivity, lessen the fight-or-flight response and allow you to leverage reasoning and logic more effectively in your work.
Cohere Health builds software that allows patients and doctors to focus on health, rather than payment or administrative hassles.
How does moving fast as an engineer benefit you, your skill set and your overall career?
By moving fast, I am able to explore new technologies and new ideas. I get to see results quickly and feel good about it.
During your career, what have you learned that helps you work faster?
Focus on the problem at hand, don’t look for the perfect solution and remember there are no perfect solutions. All software products will eventually be rebuilt — and with the pace of current technology trends, that cycle is becoming smaller and smaller.
Have a good monitoring and deployment process in place, know when things break and be able to fix it quickly. Have good troubleshooting skills, think logically about how data flows through the system and know where it can fail. Become an end user, know what features will benefit your own workflow and consider where it will break.
Focus on the problem at hand, don’t look for the perfect solution — and remember there are no perfect solutions.”
What are the potential drawbacks of working with speed, and how do you mitigate them?
Most of the time, moving fast means losing sight of long-term plans and the risk of refactoring a feature is high. Sometimes the quality of the work is sacrificed, either by missing a test case or working for 99 percent of the cases. To mitigate these risks, I would spend as much time as possible on a task while still keeping it at the pace of the company, then periodically look back to see if there’s an area of improvement and add it to the tech debt.
Build in systems of monitoring and alerts when things fail so that you can fix it quickly. Focus on testing different scenarios and edge cases. Have a good rollback plan and process. Finally, keep track of changes as most things break due to recent adjustments.
