W.D.G.L.L

What Does Good Work Look Like?

I was asked What Does Good Work Look Like?

I gave a rambling answer at first. The points felt right, but they didn’t connect clearly. This is me trying to organise those thoughts properly.

I wanted to answer from a higher vantage point than the usual workflow advice. We all know the formulas (see end of post) for daily effectiveness. What interests me more is that instinctual feeling at day’s end when you just know you’ve done good work. It is something you can’t quite articulate, but deeply recognise.

What I landed on was that good work is making progress.

But progress is more nuanced than gunning toward a desired goal or outcome. True progress requires balancing two forces in tension: advancement toward an outcome, and advancement of your own competencies that serve that outcome.

Furthermore, progress can only be made if the environment within which I am working meets some expected conditions. This is something I explore in How Do I Work.

A Sailing Analogy

In my spare time I sail, and a lot of this time is spent racing. The obvious goal in racing is to win. Winning feels good. But imagine if, at the start of the race, a freak buster wiped the fleet out, leaving only you to finish. Would that win feel good? Not at all. You hadn’t earnt it. You hadn’t been challenged enough to feel accomplished.

Alternatively, what if you came dead last but learned more in that single race than you had in months? You’d feel amazing. You progressed your competency as a sailor, directly improving your chances in the next race. That learning serves the ultimate outcome of winning. But, you would not feel good if you were always improving, progressing your skillset, but this never translated to a podium finish or rising up in the rankings.

Doing good work is about finding balance and harmony as your skills progress toward a goal. Neither feels complete alone. Pure advancement toward outcomes without growth feels hollow. Pure skill development without results feels futile.

Progression in Engineering

In our work, good work happens when we advance toward clear outcomes—customer value through meaningful product improvements—while being challenged enough to grow our competencies. It’s the alignment between shipping value and expanding the skills required to create that value.

Shipping without challenge becomes unrewarding. Learning without impact becomes academic. When you’re achieving outcomes while growing, you know you’re doing good work.

The Usual Testaments of Progress

So, how do we make progress? I suppose a lot of these are how the question was expected to be answered a la what is an effective workflow.

• Understand the problem space. We build a product for users to use. We should ground our understanding in legitimate workflows, have empathy for real pain points. We should know just what we are unlocking for people.
• Design for feedback. We should build early and frequent feedback points into our delivery and development cycle. We should make sure we can course correct based on what we learn.
• Test assumptions relentlessly. We should consistently check our hypotheses against real feedback and adjust any work to reflect new learnings.
• Preserve flexibility. We should make design decisions that keep options open, especially when there are parts of the design that we are unsure about. We have to remember to not commit so hard to early decisions that the hidden cost of rework blindsides us later on.
• Decompose problems. Break problems into chunks you can reason about easily, hold in your head, and understand quickly when returning after time away.
• Ship incrementally. When implementing, slice small and ship often. This maximises learning and minimises risk.
• Communicate clearly. Be concise and decisive. Minimise time re-litigating the same issues as it wears teams down and burns through attention and enthusiasm we can’t afford to waste.