- Build a weekly learning routine. Block 30 minutes on your calendar to review coding standards, architecture templates and operational excellence practices. Note gaps you see in the team. Compare against company guidance and industry best practices. Share one short tip or pattern each week. Weekly, visible improvements create momentum and motivation.
- Schedule peer 1:1s that develop people. Meet teammates with a coaching agenda: understand career goals, the projects they are interested in. Provide actionable feedback to improve in the areas of interest. After design reviews or incidents, send a one‑paragraph follow‑up that captures the lesson and links to a reference example.
- Grow your staff network and bring the outside in. Connect with senior and principal engineers across orgs. Ask for one lesson from a recent migration, incident or scale event. Summarize what you learned in a short note and link artifacts your team can copy. This prevents local maxima and speeds adoption.
- Advise leadership with options and risk. For deadlines that may potentially compromise quality, present two plans: hold the date with explicit scope tradeoffs and stated risks or hold the scope with a date that matches capacity. Tie technical debt to user or revenue impact and propose a steady allocation to address it. Surface cultural risks like burnout with data and anecdotes.
- Influence the roadmap from the bottom up. Facilitate brainstorming on long-term architecture and reliability goals. Turn ideas into lightweight proposals with options and tradeoffs. Partner with product to merge user value, technical debt and reliability into a single prioritized roadmap.
- Raise the hiring bar and make it scalable. Invite engineers to shadow your interviews with a clear rubric. Debrief immediately, then graduate them to reverse shadow and go solo. Capture good prompts, work samples and scoring guidance so the loop is consistent and fair across candidates.
- Allocate time to do the multiplying work. If your team participates in sprint planning, make sure to reserve your bandwidth for these activities. Trying to do them outside your project work leads to burnout and inconsistent impact.
One small example
On one project, we were shipping a new feature with a tight deadline. The first rollout exposed a gap in observability: we couldn’t distinguish a configuration drift from a control plane bug. I proposed adding a small, focused set of SLIs and a release checklist that required a canary window, synthetic traffic tests and a rollback plan. I also documented the pattern in our wiki and ran a 20‑minute brownbag to walk through the checklist.
The result: the next rollout caught the issue in the canary phase, we rolled back gracefully and the postmortem was short and constructive. More importantly, the checklist became the team norm. We reduced incident severity in the next two semesters and shortened our mean time to recovery. That is force multiplication in action: a small change in standards yielded outsized reliability gains.
Make force multiplication your operating model
Force multiplication isn’t a personality trait or a side gig – it’s a repeatable operating model. It’s the standards you codify, the reviews you run, the guardrails you build and the automations you ship so the team can move faster with less risk. When senior ICs make this work visible and measurable, the organization gets predictable delivery, fewer surprises and more capacity for innovation.
