Stop Being Busy. Start Being Ruthless.

Why Great Teams Do Less, Not More

Everyone says “prioritize better.” Nobody says “it will feel like letting people down every single day.”

It's September 2025 and I haven't been this busy in months. The last Manager Operating System cohort of the year starts next week. I partnered with an education science expert to completely shred how I teach, which means tons of unexpected work. On top of it all, my wife will be out of the house and I have four kids to take care of.

I have a choice to make. All of this is on top of my regular work and commitments. I can work into the night and compromise on sleep. Or cut some of my grounding activities, such as exercise and learning Arabic. I can also cut back on time with my kids.

If you're an engineering manager, this should sound like your typical week. An endless stream of tasks and all of them are critical and due yesterday. I learned the biggest tool to thrive in the chaos during my onboarding to Meta.

The Problem with Being Busy

A few years ago, in a 1:1 with a strong senior engineer, I brought up the subject of working towards a Staff level promotion. They were happy where they were. They had good work-life balance, good performance, and were good at their job. Meeting next level expectations meant working longer hours and compromising on what they cared about. Which is all reasonable, just not necessarily true.

There's a common misconception that each new title means longer working hours. That the only path "up" in the career ladder involves working longer hours. More hours means more performance. Except that it doesn't pass the sniff test. If that were true, your typical Principal Engineer wouldn't have time to shower or eat.

More senior engineers are better at creating value. They pull bigger levers and scale their impact.

Another common mistake is to believe that x10 engineers exist...and that's it. These engineers 100% do exist, they're just rare. In my career I've worked with a literal handful. The issue is that x10 teams also exist, and that they are in fact much more common.

It's a hundred times easier to build a x10 team than it is to find and hire a single x10 engineer.

There are several ingredients to a x10 team, but the most fundamental one is ruthless prioritization.

The Pedestal of Focus

One thing that Meta does better than most companies is support new engineering managers. Picture this: I'm a few weeks into being an EM at Facebook, in a meeting with a few dozen other managers. Sheryl Sandberg is on the stage, sharing from her experience. My biggest take away from that day was the concept of "Anti Goals."

Back when Facebook was a smaller company, already printing money from ads, everyone at the company had the same idea. Create an ad network. It sounded like a great idea. It was an excellent idea.

But there were even more important ideas to work on first.

So Sheryl introduced the concept of the Anti Goal. In the end of every planning cycle, the idea of the ad network came up, and it was never the right time to work on it. It was "below the line." But instead of letting it go at that, Sheryl put this idea on a pedestal. She put the spot light on this great idea that everyone was not working on.

When changes, interruptions, and new requests came in during execution, there was now a bar they had to pass. Is this new ask more important than working on the ad network? The answer was always a clear "no." And this made it easy to say "no" to these distractions and focus on what matters.

Anti Goals help you focus on the most important work.
Anti Goals help you scale focus on the most important work.

It is an amazingly useful tool.

But it's much more than that.
For me, this was the moment it finally clicked.
Real impact is not about addition, it's about subtraction.
Outsized impact is first and foremost about what you are not doing.

The Three Pillars of Prioritization

I've seen countless x10 teams. There is no greater professional experience that being a part of a x10 team. The key ingredient is what the team builds, more than how they build it.

It's about Ruthless Prioritization.

Here are your three pillars to building what matters.

Pillar 1: Align Before You Execute

Your first job is to talk to people. You have to do this very early, long before you even think about planning and prioritizing the team's work.

There are three key outcomes for these meetings:

1. Figure out what matters.

2. Create alignment on what matters.

3. Build peace time relationships.

The secret to x10 output is knowing what work creates x10 output. This sounds trivial, borderline tautological. The issue is that most of the work that's passed around in Jira tickets, Epics, or large meetings with Product Managers don't create x10 output. Most of the time, you will have to do work to find the x10 work.

You will have to invent this work.

The only way to be able to do this is to build a deep understanding of the both the business and technical landscape. You have to invest hours talking with your leadership, business partners, product managers, finance partners, and more. Have meetings to learn about their perspective but also share your ideas and ask them to shred them to pieces. It will take reps and effort.

Once you build this sense of what matters and invent the x10 work (with your team), you need allies. You need to drive alignment with the key leaders and stakeholders that this work matters. Creating a clear narrative, a captivating story of the impact is important. Your job is to create a shared picture of success.

The alignment helps during planning. The relationships will help during execution. Things won't go smoothly because, well, they never seem to go smoothly.

Pillar 2: Prioritize Until It Hurts

You found the x10 work. More likely, you had to sweat and work hard to identify these projects. Then corporate reality crashes your hopes and dreams.

Don't be discouraged. Corporate reality is really just hundreds (thousands) of humans, each trying to do what they think is best. You're smart and brilliant, just don't forget that they are too.

This means pain.

You will have a long list of asks to prioritize. It's all nice and good that you have alignment from your leadership on just how wonderful your project is. That doesn't stop other people from needing your support for their projects. And these other people include the people in your team as well. That technical debt project that your tech lead is passionate about. Or the new feature that your engineer is banking on as their promotion project.

Lots of work that is valuable and important and a net benefit. All work with a positive ROI, and the data to prove it.

The secret with x10 teams? They don't do any of that.

They face the pain of uncomfortable discussions and dashed hopes, and move forward. They throw great ideas to the backlog. Amazing projects to the graveyard of "next time."

If you prioritize your team's work and don't squirm in your chair, you are not prioritizing hard enough.

Pillar 3: The Anti Goals

You did the work (to find x10 projects).
You faced the pain (to drop everything else).
Now you are ready to execute and reap the benefits.

And then, when you don't notice, you wake up one day and notice that you're not accomplishing anything. You're finishing projects, landing impact, doing good work. Just not the great work that you set out to do.

The distraction is subtle. Small asks creep in. Tiny favors from partner teams and your PM. Just one tiny project to pick up. There's always a good reason.

Yes, sometimes it's a really smart Product Manager that got the "no" during planning and circled back later, when you weren't paying attention. That started with a really small ask midway through the project, and then had another ask, and another. Then, before you notice it, you're working on a completely different project. They are not evil, they are just motivated and competent.

Your best protection is the Anti Goal.

Set this exactly after you walked through all of the pain during planning. When everyone is still hurting. That's when you can identify the biggest work that you are not doing. Harness the pain to put this project on a pedestal.

And then refer to it, any time even a tiny ask comes through.

The Results

I'm a solopreneur right now. In many ways, I have it easy right now. I have CEO-level understanding of my business. Sure, a crappy CEO who has no idea what they're doing. But a complete picture of all the five pillars of business, including Marketing, Sales, and Finance. And I don't have to drive alignment with dozens of humans on the direction to go through.

And it's still hard to focus.

I have an Anti Goal for each month. I'm itching to work on September's Anti Goal so much right now. I know that it will improve both the financial rewards and my work-life balance. I actually have the data to back it up. But I'm not working on it right now, thanks to my Anti Goal. You'll have to wait a few more weeks to hear what it is. Hey, I can't be the only one on my toes...

As an Engineering Manager, you have it harder. You need to build a deeper understanding of your business, when you're just not exposed to many aspects of it in your regular work. And after you find a golden opportunity, you have to create alignment with your leadership and stakeholders. You have to push through hard conversations, crushed hopes, and disappointed team members.

And then you have to maintain the focus throughout.

The outcome is x10 performance. Not for yourself, but for your entire team. That's the stuff that transforms the career trajectory of a dozen humans at once.

What's the one project your team should put on a pedestal?