Struggling With Constant Priority Change as a Software Engineer

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Hey folks, we are going to a submitted question today. This one came in on LinkedIn. So, thanks for sending in a message. Just a friendly reminder for folks. If you want stuff answered, leave it below in the comments. Go to codemute.com. You can submit anonymously or just send a message on social media. It's a dev leader on any platform, Codecommute or Nick Costantino. So, this question I feel like is going to be pretty relevant for probably a lot of people and it's around um priorities changing and kind of feeling like it's ambiguous, but work is uh supposed to be prioritized. And there's a couple of different layers to this one. So, the person that submitted it had mentioned that um they do like their team uses like a canban approach.

sounds like um how I would describe you know it's kind of brief how it's written like I haven't sat down with this person and done a deep dive but uh my assumption is that like it's uh probably something like a startup or something that is uh relatively I don't like using the word agile because it feels pretty loaded now but uh like it's pretty nimble in terms of like priorities do seem to change a So, couple things I wanted to touch on super high level before we dive into them because I don't know how the conversation will uh spill out of my face here. But, um I think one is that uh we're going to be talking about just making sure that you can have conversations with your manager around understanding priorities. And it doesn't just have to be your manager. can be whoever is looking at priorities like a product manager or or whoever else in your team or or is the one who's doing that.

The other thing that I'll want to talk through is like um some some businesses and that when I say business, I'm generalizing to like your team, the responsibilities of your team. You can treat that like its own little business. Um some businesses the reality is like priorities will shift a lot. So the domain you're working in or whatever your team is responsible for that could have a lot of flux. Some some it's very much the opposite where things are very very stable. Uh like literally you will know for months at a time like this is what we're sticking to and others it's kind of like could seemingly shift daily. Um so that's something to think about. And then the other thing here is that this person mentioned that their their manager is like um is the sort of like acting product owner and they are uh seemingly like a a bit of a pain in the ass to work with and kind of dismissive.

So I think that this leads to a bit of like a challenge with psychological safety. So those are the the areas I want to talk through. I'm going to start probably with that last one just cuz it came out of my mouth. But when you have a situation like this, right, where like if you're feeling like I don't really have the information I need to be successful, um this is going to the the channel theme which is level set expectations with your manager. And so this this person the way they wrote it makes it sound kind of challenging to actually achieve this which is part of the problem, right? So, uh, what I will always remind folks when I talk through these things is like, um, I I think that getting clarity on things is is key. This could be when you're solving interpersonal conflict, right?

Like, or you're trying to understand your career progression or your like in this case, your your next work priority. If you don't have clarity on these things, it's like uh potentially wasted time. It's potential setup for um for frustration, right? Uh for for not achieving results, missing impact, like all sorts of things. I mean, if you don't have clarity, it might be possible that things just align. Uh but I don't think we just want to hope or leave things to chance. It's like a recipe for uh not such a great time in my opinion. So, in this case, it sounds like this person is at least trying to get clarity from their manager, but their manager is pretty dismissive about it.

Um, I don't I guess what we don't know from how this is written into me, and not that I I like playing devil's advocate just so that people can have different perspective coming in, but I want to be pretty clear that like my intention is to be like, I don't believe a word this person's saying. Uh, it's more like I wonder genuinely like how do these conversations come up when they're asking for clarity? Um, I don't know what that looks like. I'm trying to think of like I'm a little biased because I I certainly as a manager try to make sure that I'm leaning to one extreme, which is I don't care if I literally just spent an hour trying to explain something. If someone's like, I still don't get it. Then I'm like, cool, that's on me. like I'm not doing a good job communicating.

And maybe for some other people, >> maybe they're they're frustrated. Maybe they're like, "Look, I've tried and like I don't want to spend any more time on this." Uh maybe maybe it's a frustration in terms of like I expect that you know this by now. I don't I don't think that these are good reasons, right? I'm not trying to defend someone for being like no, like just go figure it out kind of thing. I don't think that's great. I'm just saying maybe that is what's happening. Um ultimately like I would say if if you are trying to get this kind of clarity whether it's your manager in this case or um if it's a different person in a different role I think we can talk about that a little more but if it's truly your manager and this kind of thing bleeds through and other

sorts of things like I would find it hard to believe that this person has clarity on steps in their career progression if they can't really get clarity from their manager. in terms of like what's important for this week, right? Uh again, I'm speculating, but I would find it hard to believe that they can get one without the other. And so that might be an indicator that like either you're finding ways to improve the working relationship with your manager, which might be going back to some some more fundamental things, not the specific kind of scenario, and improving that. Or maybe it's like maybe, you know, no offense, maybe your manager does suck. Maybe maybe they're inexperienced at this. Maybe they're not a good fit for the team, right? Like I I'm trying to be transparent here that like sure, you might be the one kind of uh seemingly feeling like you're suffering from this, but it might not be you.

It might be them. They might just kind of suck at this. Um that's entirely in the realm of possibility, right? So I would encourage people that if you're like I'm trying to have these types of conversations like you are doing it cuz if you're not doing it that's step one is like go ask for the clarity right you you need to be doing that you need to be proactive to go ask if you are doing that and you're still not getting the support I think that's where we need to have a different conversation and so uh you know just to give you an example if I had employees on my team where we're doing like our like we do kind of like uh weekly syncs for for status in like a team setting and so if we're talking about that we're going through priorities if

they're like leaving that meeting being like I think I know what I'm supposed to do but I'm not sure if like my hope would be that they message me right after or whenever they're comfortable just being like hey like I actually don't think I understand and I have some people that will use some of their one-on-one time right which is offset from that sync meeting and they're like, "Hey, by the way, like now that a couple of days have gone by and you know XYZ has changed, like I actually want to clarify like priorities." And that's perfect. Like in my opinion, as soon as you're getting to a point where you're like, I don't really know. I feel like literally part of my job responsibility is to sit down with you and make sure that you are on the same page, right?

And that doesn't a lot of these conversations are not me like I have it cemented and I'm like no no no like it's it's obviously step 1 2 3 like you have to go do it that way. A lot of the time I'm listening to the new information they have and going oh interesting okay now with this information maybe we should consider a different approach or a different priority. So it's helpful for me too. Um, so I would say like honestly try to have those conversations. If you are trying and they're not working, uh, that might be going back to some more basics with, uh, your working relationship with your manager. I have other videos on trying to do that. Um, if there's followup more specifically on that, we can dive into it, but I want to keep this topic a little bit more focused. But that might be a a thing to consider if this is a different role.

Like, so I'm kind of deviating from the question a little bit. So if it's like a a product owner that's not your manager, okay, and they're the ones setting priorities, I would say the same thing in terms of like please do try to have a conversation with them. And then what I would say is like if you are genuinely not getting support or not getting clarity, they're the one being dismissive. That's something where I would try to bring that up with your manager and being like, "Hey, look, like um I'm finding it really hard to get my my priorities straight or be effective in my position because the priorities are uh ambiguous, right? And I am trying to ask for clarity and it's not working. Uh if I I don't currently have team setups like this. Um, I have team setups currently where there's often people trying to influence priorities.

So, it's not the exact same. It's not like a dedicated product owner that's not me saying, "No, no, no. It's got to be this way." But, I'll have things come up where people are like, "Hey, like," and they'll sometimes go directly to a person on the team and be like, "Hey, can you get this done?" And that can be disruptive for them because they're like, "Now I don't know what is the priority." Um, so you know, if they're trying to go back and forth or they're not getting clarity, like come to me. Let's chat about it. I'm there to support you. That's my recommendation, right? Um, make sure that you're trying to clarify with your manager who is ultimately going to be the person responsible for um, you know, helping you with your career progression. Okay, that's part of this. I think the other thing that I wanted to spend some time on next is like is this idea around you know environments where stuff is changing a lot.

Uh I've I've personally spent a lot of time in environments like this. This is actually my de facto mode is to operate environment in environments where things are changing like on a daily basis. Um, right now at Microsoft, most things are like pretty stable in terms of like, you know, day-to-day things aren't changing that dramatically, but I do run a team right now that has a lot more of a security focus. And that one certainly has things that come up. Um, we have some periods where it feels like daily things are changing. Um, but my goal is like as a manager, like one of my goals is is to reduce chaos, right? And that doesn't necessarily mean like not telling my team things.

It doesn't mean like uh sheltering them so much that they're like, "We don't have any idea what's going on, but you know, we just kind of get the the digested version of like the most simple things." Um I try to be transparent uh about things but at the same time like ultimately if people are confused about what's a priority or things are like the needs are changing dramatically dayto-day like I need to work with the team to make sure that there's uh like the chaos is minimized. The challenging part with that is like literally if the priorities do have to change, I need to be very very clear about why. And I've also made videos on this, but I think why is a question that is so important to answer and a lot of the time, especially when things feel urgent, um, we miss that. I I mean it genuinely that when I'm working with people, I I want people to to understand why something's a priority.

And I want people to feel comfortable either asking if they don't know. So if it's like, okay, like here's the priority list and you know, Bob, you're going to work on this and Sally, you're going to work on this. If they're like, I don't understand why we're doing that. It like it doesn't have to be like a like a challenge necessarily. Like if they're like I hey like I cool I see what we're doing but I don't understand why. Like I want to have that conversation right because what's really interesting about that is that a couple things. One is that they might go oh crap I didn't realize that and something that seems maybe kind of more mundane is actually very interesting now cuz they can see the impact that it has.

The flip side to that can also be that I had a different expectation or someone else had a different expectation of of why we were doing that and someone's like we actually have this this or this that basically do that for us or give us uh you know an alternative to that. So if that's why you want it that might not be why you need it. And so that could be like really interesting knowledge shared the other way, which is another reason why if people do want to challenge things, I want to make sure there's an environment where people feel like they can. Right? So if you don't understand something, I want the environment where you can ask why. And if you understand and you have a different opinion, I want you to be able to speak up and say why you think otherwise. I feel like this is a critical thing to have on a team, right?

This is very much a psychological safety thing. I feel like when you have teams like this, you can have what seem like more difficult conversations and there's no like bad consequences. It's just like things get better. So again, if I have someone on my team, I don't care if they're they're junior and they just started. Like if we're saying, "Hey, this is the priority. Here's what's going on." I want to as much as possible make sure people feel like they can say, "Hey, Nick, I don't agree with that." Or to someone else on their team like, "Hey, I don't think I agree with that. Here's why." Like, can we talk about that? I want people to feel comfortable to do that. And if you're someone listening to this and you're like, I don't know if we really have that on the team, but I want that.

Um, I would say like, you know, if you can be proactive and trying to drive culture in that direction, lead by example, right? Like don't shut people down when they ask things, like welcome it, you know, praise them for asking things. Um, encourage people to do it. uh if you have >> say you have a really good working relationship with someone on the team but like otherwise that that dynamic doesn't work so well like you can work with that person to kind of demonstrate hey look when we do this kind of thing look how good this is right like this person questioned me on this and it was a really good question and we came to a really awesome like understanding of it kind of show that to the team right and you kind of have to keep demonstrating things like this and leading by

example So other people can can kind of latch on and go hey wait like when we do this this is pretty helpful or I do feel better that we can ask questions right I have more clarity in the work I'm doing so lead by example um you know managers can try to like as much as possible to shape the culture but ultimately like the culture is what is being lived out by the team. Um so yeah the the reality is like with different uh domains or businesses like you may very much have work that is changing dramatically. Um I would I would say to people like honestly um it it might not always be the case that things are changing because they need to. It could legitimately be because people are uh not great at prioritizing um maybe the stability of information coming in isn't very good.

Right? So, but we talk about as managers trying to reduce chaos like if people are like not as effective at that part of the job that you might be feeling the impact of that downstream. Um but in other cases maybe someone is doing an awesome job given the circumstances for reducing chaos like that but but genuinely needs of the business are are changing quickly and I would say like if if you find yourself in an environment like that and you can see why priorities are changing and they're changing very frequently that might be uh something to consider if you're like I really like this is too much for me and it's really hard to kind of like get behind. Um, that might not be a great spot to work. Not because it's bad like in general, but maybe it's not a great setup for you, right?

Sometimes these things are kind of like a more of a fit for how you work and operate. So, something to consider there. Um, yeah, I just got to CrossFit, so I think that's all I got for this one. But, uh, I think great question. Uh, super thankful for someone to submit this. And just a reminder, if you have questions you want answered, leave them in the comments. Go to codemute.com. You can submit anonymously. Just send me a message on any social media platform. Uh, some of them I might not see as easily, but Twitter's good, LinkedIn's good. Uh, my profile is premium on LinkedIn, so you should be able to message me. But yeah, thanks and I'll see you in the next one.