Prioritizing Work

As part of our work at FirstMark, we have the opportunity to learn from accomplished leaders with genuine insight about the world. Each post in this series is a recap of one poignant idea.

I first met Doug Gaff when he was VP Engineering at InVision. He is now VP of Engineering at Zapier. Across both companies, Doug has managed fully distributed engineering teams at scale.

Doug and I are doing a fireside chat on distributed teams at FirstMark’s upcoming CTO & CPO Summit. During our prep call, I asked him to react to something that the CTO of a fully distributed team had shared on remote performance management; that “you can’t tell if someone is working hard or not working hard. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is whether they’re doing what was asked of them.”

Doug partially disagreed, and his response struck me:

“Everyone has a to-do list that exceeds their available time… Success is the ability to effectively prioritize work, not the ability to get all of the work done.”