The 4 Priorities of a Technology Leader

[This article was originally posted on LinkedIn on Jan 26, 2019.]

The life of a software technology leader is an interesting one. There are so many competing priorities, requests (and yes, demands!) coming from the business, your boss, your peers from other functions within the company, and from your own technical team. This can become a difficult juggling act: how do you balance, say, the priority of a bug fix for a very vocal customer against that of a feature request from an important partner and the unglamorous but essential server upgrade work that needs to be completed?

Here is a simple but powerful mental model that can help you make these tradeoffs in a systematic and organized way. I first heard of this framework from a blog post by Bill Russell, CEO of Health Lyrics - I’ve expanded on it for my own use.

The model is based on a railroad analogy. Let’s say you are running a railroad company, with all the challenges and tradeoffs that go with it. You can classify all of your activities into four broad categories, listed below in decreasing order of priority starting from the highest:

Priority 0:  Prevent train crashes before they happen

This one is self-evident: even aside from the moral implications, there is nothing more important to the success of the railroad than passenger safety.

For a technology leader, this means making a strong argument for prioritizing ongoing maintenance work for existing applications and infrastructure, and continuing to pay down technical debt. Quality, security and compliance fall squarely into this bucket: very important, but not always urgent. The challenge is that the ROI for this work is not readily apparent in terms of signed deals and increased revenue; the old joke that “IT only gets attention when something breaks” is often too true.

Priority 1:  Make the trains run on time

After safety and reliability, this is one of the most important considerations for the passengers of your hypothetical railroad.

This is the bread and butter of software development work: a well-functioning process that integrates product requirements, agile development, quality validation, bug fixing and customer support. This leads to iterative planned releases on a regular schedule, with well-defined features, on time and within budget - so that the other functions of the business can count on you and make plans accordingly.

Priority 2:  Expand the rail network

Once your railroad is working smoothly, the next goal is to expand the network by laying new track.

For technology this means continuous improvement, both internal and external. Within the team, you can focus on enhancing the system architecture, creating new applications and improving process and quality. Looking outward, you can look for expanding into adjacencies: related new areas where technology can play a bigger role in supporting the business.

Priority 3:  Build airplanes

The final step is realizing that, beyond running a railroad, you are actually in the transportation business.

Discontinuous change is not a new idea for most technology leaders. As software and hardware continue to evolve, powerful new ideas and technology can completely change the nature of our work. Major innovations in mobile, cloud and data technology in the past few years have brought about global change. Keeping up with these types of advances and exploring ways to leverage them to create business value, is a critical responsibility for every technology leader.

Putting it all together

Although you can run all four of these activities in parallel, the order of their priority is not in doubt so you should allocate resources accordingly. To take an extreme example, you cannot defer essential safety maintenance on your existing railroad track in order to focus on completing the design for a future airplane. Expressed in this way, your choices and prioritization are readily explainable to your CEO, your peers and your team. I find that applying this classification usually makes it much easier to evaluate competing needs and make choices among them.

How do you make choices and tradeoffs among competing priorities in your work? Add a comment and join the conversation. You can also find me on X: @NitinK