Building An Impact Brewery: A Toolkit for R&D Leaders to Drive Impact
Imagine this -
You’re holding a cup, standing in front of your soon to be ex employees and colleagues, a tad excited.
It’s your last day as an R&D Leader in “NullEffect Ltd” and it’s that part in the speech that you should mention the impactful things you accomplished together.
You know, It’s these things that “warp” the organization, people, product or user experience for long after you’re gone.
Are you left with user stories, capacity charts and bug dashboards?
Read on pal, this piece is for you
Before you say “great, yet another Medium article with a snappy title on holding Hackatons, Bashes, Blitzes, or god forbid, building a task force” and spend your cup of coffee elsewhere give me a chance :)
Sure, I use the above mentioned methods like every other R&D leader, but that doesn’t cut it.
- How do we make sure impact is a key factor in our every decision?
- How do we drive impact as part of the “mundane” routine?
What you are after is building an organization where impact driving is a second nature in all levels
Crafting the Impact Recipe
“Impact” is an elusive concept. It can mean different things to different organizations in different phases. Heck, even a bunch of team members with joint mileage might totally disagree on the impact an item might produce.
Before we storm on promoting shiny ideas, I suggest to try and assess their impact through building your organization’s “impact formula” — a heuristic that will allow you to compare between items based on more than your gut feeling or a case by case estimation
Here’s an example of a good start for such a formula:
Impact Score = (Staff Engineer Impact Score) * 0.45 + (Team Leads score) * 0.15 + (Innovation Score) * 0.1 + (Is Foundation?) * 0.1 + (Blocks Productivity?) * 0.2
We can learn that the formula is an excellent opportunity to formalize giving an emphasis to contributions you hold dear or in need of in your organization.
Giving increased weights to these factors makes sure you cultivate investing in them through actions — prioritizing hands-on work
Impact on its own only gets you half of the answer. In a non sterile world we work in limited time frames, and we want to make sure that if we have a day or a week we make the best out of them as well as choose an appropriately sized item
Enters ROI — Similar to economics, the return over investment of implementing an item is determined by dividing the potential impact gain by the investment required to achieve it.
ROI Score = Impact Score / Effort Estimation
Establishing Impact Breweries
Now that we’re equipped with a recipe to assess the impact and ROI of ideas flowing from different sources it’s time to help your organization learn how to brew some sweet impact ale!
Here are a few strategies that have proven effective for me -
Easy “Shower Thoughts” Capturing
No. It’s not a ploy to get you tangled up with HR.
Have you ever noticed how the most creative ideas often emerge while you’re in the shower or walking to the train?
“An ‘impact-centric’ organization enables you to capture raw ideas with a single click.
I implemented this by introducing an ‘Idea’ ticket type, which can be easily created from Jira or Slack, accommodating anything from raw thoughts to fully developed visions, with no limitations.
When these ideas are created, they can be automatically published to channels involving other stakeholders and impact enthusiasts, sparking meaningful discussions.
Every few weeks, the raw backlog should be groomed, ranked, and prioritized for the ‘impact production lines’ outlined below
Holding ״Huddles״
The ‘Huddle’ ceremony, a blend of American football and Agile retrospectives, is designed to bring up questions, challenges, and ideas within an R&D group setting and increase transparency and mutual decision taking.
Each member of the group has the option to initiate a discussion topic.
Every other week the group meets to discuss the raised topics
The raising member is given a 5-minute timer to present their thoughts, after which the group votes on whether and how to proceed.
The outcome can result in an action item (such as an offline discussion or process definition), an immediate sprint development task (if it requires up to half a day), or a roadmap item.
At each meeting, we also review any outstanding items pending completion.
Conducting Health Checks
Assessing the health of the organization you lead is crucial for two reasons:
- Unhealthy organizations struggle to generate impact and foster ingenuity.
- Pain points can be viewed as opportunities to improve our workflows or roadmap focus or introduce new tools that enhance the developer experience and morale.
There are various methods for assessing the health of your organization. I have found success with Spotify’s Health Check, as well as creating a customized questionnaire. If you prefer to develop your own, I recommend considering the PPT framework — or its extended version, PPPT — which stands for People, Process, Product, and Technology. The PPPT framework provides a holistic approach to organizational improvement, concentrating on these essential areas.
Here are some example questions for each vector -
People
Process
Product
Tech
The results of these health checks can lead to the formation of action groups tasked with addressing soft spots, such as infrastructure gaps, shifts in roadmap focus, or changes in processes.
Taking A Genuine Interest In Someone Else’s Challenges
If you’re reading this, you hold a unique role within your company as an R&D leader. You’re likely an experienced engineer, leading at least one team, and collaborating with Product Managers, Customer Success Managers, and possibly Sales. In a smaller startup, you might even have direct access to executives and founders. This means you have a comprehensive understanding of your company’s technology, products, and primary customer challenges, positioning you at the center of numerous processes.
This vantage point provides you with valuable tools to connect with others and potentially help solve their challenges.
Take the opportunity to grab a coffee or lunch with stakeholders from other departments and learn about their day-to-day work:
- What are their repetitive tasks? Perhaps you could introduce automation or AI to boost productivity.
- What data or insights do they find invaluable? You might help them access this information to spot business opportunities or anticipate client churn.
- What product ideas from clients aren’t getting prioritized? A prototype you build could help bring these ideas to life.
- What strengths do competitors have over us? Maybe there’s a quick win you could propose.
Showing genuine interest in someone else’s challenges is a wellspring for new initiatives that can engage your team. And, if you succeed in improving a stakeholder’s day-to-day experience, you’ll gain a strong ally for your future projects.
SWOT Before Sweat
Congratulations! You now have a robust backlog of impact-generating initiatives and can even compare the potential impact of each. However, with limited time and energy for you and your team, how do you decide where to focus?
Impact operates on two levels: while we’ve discussed the second level — initiatives — the foundation lies in the first: goals.
Every organization needs a guiding compass for decision-making, and that’s where goals come in.
I recommend updating your team’s goals quarterly. Even if higher-level departmental or company goals aren’t available, you can start by applying a SWOT analysis to your team.
For instance, if you identify “lean manpower” and “only one UX designer” as weaknesses (or simply cold facts), and “high maintenance percentages” as a threat, it might make sense to set a goal of enhancing team productivity.
Initiatives like building a component library, to reduce bug frequency, lower feature costs, and relieve organizational bottlenecks will then make an impact precisely where it’s needed most.
Mass Producing Impact-Ale
With your “north star” in place, it’s time to drive change to the development level and start making regular impact. To get your “brewery” up and running, you’ll need to set up your “impact-ale production lines.”
Here are several approaches that have worked wonders for me -
“Respect The Tech” — Defining an R&D Roadmap
An R&D organization committed to excellence must continually “sharpen the axe.” This means dedicating a portion of engineers’ time to advancing the technological goals you’ve set. This can be achieved by either allocating capacity based on an agreed ratio with Product or by aligning priorities. Regardless of the approach, if you want your team to invest in technology or innovation, you must “put your money where your mouth is” as the saying goes.
This is also a powerful tool to rally your organization around a “noble cause”. For example: “We’re building a component library, and 20% of our time across all teams will be devoted to making it happen.”
“Slow Brew Impact” — Staff Engineers Backlog
If your organization has “unicorn” team members, such as Staff or Principal Engineers or Architects fully dedicated to R&D, you’re in luck — you have the potential for producing “slow-brew” impact!
“Slow-brew impact” refers to initiatives that may take weeks or even months of flexible, focused work before they’re ready to be adopted by the broader organization. Examples include prototyping a new product concept, adopting cutting-edge frameworks, creating a stress testing environment, or building the foundations for a new data or CI/CD pipeline.
These initiatives often require a blend of senior expertise, 100% focus, and adaptable planning — factors that can be challenging to align alongside ongoing product work.
When assigning people to initiatives, it’s wise to consider these needs.
“Impact Yeast” As A Catalyst For People Growth — Performance Appraisal
Most organizations conduct formal performance appraisals annually or biannually. These evaluations offer an excellent opportunity to set SMART goals for your team that focus on creating impact — such as contributing to an open-source project, improving the development experience of core tools, optimizing production performance, reducing costs, or leading a task force to develop a new prototype.
This approach achieves two goals at once: fostering organizational impact while supporting your team’s growth.
Impact Hack #1: The Magic of Impact Weeks
Think back to when you were an engineer — those *eureka* moments when you saw the perfect solution to a complex problem or had an innovative idea, only to sigh and think, “If only I had a week to work on this”, before returning to daily tasks.
Imagine if you gave your team that week every so often. Free from meetings, mails, messages, and routine responsibilities, this is the essence of “Impact Weeks.”
Here’s how it works: team members review groomed ideas from the Staff Engineer’s backlog (or propose their own) and rank them based on personal passion, when crossed with ROI, we ensure we work on the most inspiring as well as impactful projects
Throughout the week, they work in uninterrupted quiet, with mentoring from the Staff Engineer or yourself. At week’s end, a retro is held, and deliverables are shared with stakeholders.
Impact Weeks are a powerful way to ensure ongoing growth for senior team members, facilitate valuable face-time with you as a leader, and provide mentoring from your Staff Engineer. When done well, Impact Weeks become a prestigious token of appreciation — something your team is motivated to earn by exceeding expectations.
Impact Hack #2 — Leaders “Ghost Sprints”
If you’ve ever managed an R&D team, you know that an uninterrupted workday is rare. Team leaders, often former seasoned engineers, remain close to the code and hands-on. But when they do find time to code, how much real impact do they generate? Typically, amid constant context-switching, they end up addressing bugs, routine feature development, or handling customer issues to shield their team from interruptions.
This setup is a lose-lose: the organization loses a skilled engineer capable of driving high-impact work, and the team leader loses energy and motivation.
Enter “Ghost Sprints.”
If your team structure includes a strong “number two” — someone team members turn to in the leader’s absence, or who fills in during leave — this practice can be transformative. Some of these “number twos” may even be considering a future in leadership.
The concept is simple: the “number two” assumes full leadership for an entire sprint, handling dailies, ceremonies, meetings, and interruptions, while the team leader becomes a “ghost,” stepping back to focus fully on their own impactful initiatives.
This creates a win-win-win: the team leader recharges and works on high-value projects; the number two gains real leadership experience and feedback from their “ghost” leader and establishes their role; and the organization benefits from both immediate impact and the development of future leaders.
I recommend implementing Ghost Sprints quarterly.
Impact Hack #3 — Constant Investment In Productivity
Strategic capacity for R&D is, as we’ve established, a scarce resource. Just as with personal savings, I recommend not splurging it all on the most “shiny” impact-generating items. Instead, consider setting aside a portion to invest in what I call the “impact stock exchange.”
This stands for initiatives that increase strategic capacity over time — essentially, any investment that enhances your team’s productivity. Good examples include initiatives that reduce ongoing maintenance costs like technical debt return, creating highly reusable building blocks like component libraries or service templates that reduce the cost of new features, or ramping up core infrastructure that is in the heart of the development cycle such as build and deployment pipelines affecting the cost of every task.
With wise choices, these investments can yield returns within weeks or months, generating even more strategic capacity for impactful work.
Final Thoughts
As you reflect on your journey, remember lasting impact is built over time through smart investments in people, processes, and technology. By empowering your team and fostering a culture of impact, you’ll leave a legacy that transcends your time in the role. Now, sit back, relax, and watch the magic unfold with a cup of cold “impact ale.”
