For Staff and Principal Engineers, the goal is to identify and deliver leveraged work, efforts that multiply both throughput and quality across the organisation.
Picture leverage as a simple chart: time on the x-axis, impact on the y. The real win is top right contributions that endure and change the trajectory. Not just a quick boost or flashy result, but work that compounds. It becomes part of the foundation others build on, shifts the baseline, and raises the bar for everything that follows.
| If it… | …then it probably belongs in that sweet-spot |
|---|---|
| keeps paying dividends long after the launch | Longevity is doing the heavy lifting |
| turns one hour of effort into many hours saved for others | Non-linear impact is showing up |
| lets teams build on it rather than around it | clear Enablement |
| leaves a template, script, or doc that’s easy to copy | strong Teachability |
The art of leveraged work is finding where the opportunities lie, the majority of the time these can be found through conversations with team members and the wider business.
- Pain-point mapping - sit with on-call, read incident reviews, notice recurring toil
- Road-map stress-tests - ask, “What single failure would torpedo next year’s plan?” and front-load the fix
- Glue-work synthesis - connect patterns observed across teams and turn them into shared libraries or services
Below are some concrete examples of leveraged work:
- Feature-flag platform - internal service + SDKs for fast, reversible releases
- Incident-retrospective programme - a lightweight 5-Whys process that looks at systemic fixes
- Service-bootstrap template - a generator that spins up a production-ready app in minutes
Leveraged work is how Staff & Principal engineers multiply impact as it’s durable, scales beyond the individual, and spreads by design.
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