4 Simple Steps to Work on What Matters
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Stop wasting time and focus on high-impact projects
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Scan your project lists and filter out low-value work to focus on initiatives that align with business outcomes
- Prioritize your current and future projects so you can invest energy in the work with the highest organizational return
- Craft short “profit stories” to communicate impact in a way that managers and executives immediately understand and value
- Continuously align your efforts with company goals, making yourself more visible, promotable, and indispensable
Course description
Roy Weissman, an expert in business development and sales growth, conducts this fast-paced workshop where software developers, product managers, and project managers will discover simple frameworks for spotting high-value projects and focusing your work on what actually drives profit. He’ll show you how to separate high-impact work, such as new features, new clients, cost savings, or smarter systems, from time sinks and how to translate your contributions into business value that gets noticed. You’ll walk away with tools and tips you can use immediately to focus on the work that moves your career and your company forward.
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a developer or a product or project manager who’d like to learn how to better demonstrate your accomplishments.
- You work with team leaders, managers, and cross-discipline employees from other areas of your organization.
- You want to become a senior engineering, brand, or product leader.
Prerequisites
Recommended follow-up:
- Read Communication Patterns (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Understanding “work that matters” (20 minutes)
- Presentation: Doing work that gets noticed because it drives profit; why this matters for career advancement; tying work directly or indirectly to profit; profit levers—revenue growth, efficiency, productivity; building smarter/faster/easier systems; examples from tech/product teams; mapping the value chain; value stream mapping (customer → delivery → support); where tech and product work fits in to the revenue/cost chain; identifying bottlenecks and leverage points
Signals from the organization (20 minutes)
- Presentation: Where to look for signals (strategy docs, quarterly goals, leadership updates, sales/client feedback, videos, press releases, articles); follow your CEO and pay attention to what they say and do; notable M&A deals—why did they do this deal?; understanding the company vision; translating company priorities into actionable projects; red flags
- Q&A
Frameworks for evaluating impact (20 minutes)
- Presentation: The impact-effort matrix; the 3-profit lens framework—does the project help bring in more clients, save time and money, improve adoption/efficiency?; weighting and scoring method
- Hands-on exercise: Choose a project you’re working on and apply both frameworks
- Group discussion: What shifts in priority emerged?
- Break
Reading between the lines (20 minutes)
- Presentation: Decoding leadership signals; recognizing “hidden” profit drivers; bug fixes versus strategic initiatives
- Q&A
Turning insights into action (40 minutes)
- Presentation: Building a business case; framing technical work in business terms; the “profit story” structure (cost, time, adoption → impact); speaking the language of managers; aligning with stakeholders; turning conversations into project ideas
- Hands-on exercise: Practice writing a 2- or 3-sentence business justification for a project
- Break
Building a personal “impact radar” (10 minutes)
- Presentation: A simple system for staying tuned to company priorities; monthly check-in questions; tools—dashboards, reports, informal conversations
Embedding this in career growth (40 minutes)
- Presentation: Going from contributor to strategist; shifting your mindset; becoming the go-to person for high-impact work; communicating impact to managers without bragging; framing updates around business outcomes, not technical details; building your portfolio of impact; tracking projects by profit lens contribution; creating a narrative for reviews, promotions, and interviews
Wrap-up & Q&A (10 min)
Your Instructor
Roy Weissman
Roy Weissman is a strategic senior leader in business development and sustainable sales growth. Roy teaches courses on negotiation at Northeastern University and consults on business development, sales, and sales enablement for companies in the media and tech industries through his consulting business, Octopus, based in New York City. With more than 15 years of experience driving business expansion and new market penetration for both top-ranking digital media corporations and agile, leading-edge innovative startups, he has a demonstrated track record of realizing significant results in revenue, market, and channel growth by forging lucrative online partnerships and shaping core strategies for ecommerce, branding, and media outreach. As both an employee and entrepreneur, he has worked at companies such as Infoseek.com, Viacom, General Electric, Playboy, and Next New Networks (acquired by Google). In his career in the media and tech industries, Roy has initiated, negotiated, and closed hundreds of deals with companies including Amazon, Comcast, News Corp, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner. However, his toughest negotiation to date continues to be with his 2-year-old daughter, who somehow does not always respond to negotiation best practices.