A Life Engineered · A Life Engineered · Transcript & summary by WhipScribe
It turns a vague career instruction, be more visible, into a concrete order of operations with Amazon examples and a status-update template you can use this week.
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“Bad news delivered early is just news.” Steve Huynh · at 11:05 — open in the transcript →
“The real risk is that you're invisible, not that you're too loud.” Steve Huynh · at 11:55 — open in the transcript →
Steve Huynh, who spent years as a principal engineer at Amazon and now coaches developers and scientists, argues that most visibility advice gets the order wrong. Before anyone tries to attract attention, the work itself has to deserve it, which in his definition means either moving a metric people genuinely care about or making you an outlier among peers. He borrows a story from a photography workshop with Hudson Henry: a National Geographic editor told a young photographer his technically flawless frames were simply aimed at nothing interesting. Huynh warns that impact you cannot measure, such as developer productivity, rarely earns credit, so measurement belongs in the plan from day one.
His examples come from inside Amazon. A junior engineer turned a missing German-language stock notice into an A/B test that showed roughly $2 million a year in gross sales, won the Just Do It Award, and was promoted. Huynh himself became the owner of a dreaded monthly finance reconciliation, and later marketed his strength at thinking big until teams pulled him in as a consultant. Under stack ranking, he says, amplifying strengths beats patching weaknesses, which only produces an average worker.
Once the work is notable, attention comes from two directions: tie the work to goals leadership already tracks, from team KPIs up to S-Team goals, or pull people toward it with crisp status updates that state green, yellow or red, the blockers, and the help needed. He describes daily emails to nearly a thousand stakeholders during a Prime Video launch involving about 100 teams. He closes by treating discomfort as a signal, citing Alex Hormozi's idea that cringe is a defence others use to protect their status.
Steve Huynh, a former Amazon principal engineer who runs the A Life Engineered channel, defines notable work as work that either has meaningful impact or makes you an outlier. Impact is a measurable change in a metric, and it is meaningful only if people care about that metric, with money the easiest one to understand. He argues that seeking visibility before the work is notable just draws attention to mediocre output.
Steve Huynh tells the story of a junior engineer friend on Amazon's search results team who noticed that a low-stock notice was missing from the German version of the page. Instead of just adding the text to the localization database, he ran an A/B test, which took under an hour to set up at Amazon, and found the string was worth roughly $2 million a year in gross sales. He received the Just Do It Award, shook Jeff Bezos's hand on stage and was promoted immediately.
Steve Huynh says big tech companies like Amazon stack rank engineers against peers, so being visible means landing in roughly the top quartile in some dimension. He recommends finding less competitive ways to stand out, such as becoming the subject matter expert on a system everyone avoids, and amplifying your strengths rather than closing gaps in your weaknesses, which only makes you average.
Steve Huynh describes S-Team goals as prioritized goals set each year by Amazon senior VPs who report to the CEO, usually six to 12 per org, covering areas like customer adoption, revenue, efficiency and operations. Because everyone has already agreed they matter, work that moves them gets attention naturally. Huynh advises engineers who cannot touch S-Team goals to tie their work to team or skip-level manager goals, and to ask their manager which priorities matter most this quarter.
Steve Huynh recommends a short here's-what-you-need-to-know update with a plain subject line such as a project name, milestone and date, followed by three or four top-down bullets. The bullets should answer whether the next delivery is green, yellow or red, what the blockers are, and whether the reader's help is needed and by when. Low-level technical detail goes below a line marked as more detail, or is left out entirely.
Steve Huynh admits that sharing your work feels awkward, and says it is hard for him personally, but calls it strictly necessary. He cites Alex Hormozi's view that cringe is a form of secondhand embarrassment, and that some colleagues use it defensively to keep your status from rising above theirs. Huynh's conclusion is that if impactful or outlier work feels cringey to share, you are on the right track.
Our own transcript of the public episode, with a timestamp about every 90 seconds. Tap a timestamp or the link button on a paragraph to copy a link that opens this page there.
0:00Most advice about getting visibility on your work comes down to being louder and doing more. I'm going to show you why that's the exact wrong thing to do and what the engineers who actually get promoted do instead. I was a principal engineer at Amazon and now I coach software developers and scientists on improving their performance and getting promoted. Visibility is something that the people in my community struggle with a lot and this is exactly how I help them. If you want visibility you need to first understand that step one is doing notable work. Otherwise visibility will be on the things that you'd rather not be associated with like mediocre work. I'm really into photography and I just got back from a photography workshop with
0:40Hudson Henry, another YouTuber. He told me this story about a National Geographic photographer. This is back when people were shooting on film. The photographer goes out on assignment to an exotic place and comes back with a bunch of rolls of film and tosses everything to the photo editors. The photographer is young and inexperienced, so he asked one of the older editors for feedback on his work. "'Is it technically good?' he asks. "'I imagine the editor being this old gruff man with a cigarette in his mouth. The editor says, kid, your photos are fine, but you need to get yourself in front of more interesting shit. The exposure was totally okay. He nailed his focus. The composition followed all of the rules.
1:21The photos were technically perfect. He just wasn't pointing the camera at anything worth looking at. The same thing happens at your job. Before you spend a bunch of energy trying to get more people to look at what you're doing, examine the work itself. The work needs to be notable. To me, that means that it has a meaningful impact or makes you an outlier. Let's examine the term meaningful impact. Impact is a measurable change in a metric. Quantitative is best, qualitative works as well. When I say that it needs to be meaningful impact, that means that people care about the metric. The easiest metric to understand is money. People care about money because companies exist to generate it. If you're bringing in more revenue or you've made things less expensive and therefore increased profit margins, it's easy to
2:08get noticed. But it doesn't have to be revenue related to be meaningful. Maybe the metric people care about is the number of features that were shipped, customer adoption or monthly active users. What's important is highly dependent on where you work. If you haven't already, think about which metrics people care about. You can't have meaningful impact if people don't care. You could increase the number of times the office coffee pot was refilled, for example, and I'm sure people would appreciate it, but it's probably not going to carry into your promotion packet. Early in my career, I was all about counting the number of interviews I did, but in reality, nobody cared. Instead of the number of interviews I did. But in reality, nobody cared. Instead of the number of interviews I
2:45conducted, people cared about how many good people did we hire. The problem is that we didn't measure that. And that's the second thing you need to be wary of. Sometimes it's really difficult to measure the things that are important. There's a trap, which is that you might feel like you're making a big debt in something people care about, but you't measure it i'm thinking about things like productivity or developer experience these things are notoriously hard to measure the sad part is that if you can't directly measure something it may be objectively impactful but you won't get credit for it it's not fair but that's just the way that the world works you can spend a bunch of effort on something but but because you can't measure it, you won't get visibility.
3:27I highly suggest before you start a bunch of work, ask yourself, how will I measure the impact? Sometimes this is just a matter of doing a little bit of high leverage work early. At Amazon, there is an award called the Just Do It Award. You get it by taking initiative, what they call having bias for action, and making a big impact. The CEO recognizes you on stage, shakes your hand, and gives you a Nike shoe. It's a pretty big deal. I had a friend who was a junior engineer at the time get this award and shake Jeff Bezos' hand. He was also immediately promoted. The fix he did saved Amazon millions of dollars per year, and it didn't even involve any code. He worked on the search results team, and he had the German language version of that page
4:12set up on his local computer. He noticed that there was a missing string, a piece of text that said, by now, there are only a few left in stock. That was missing on the German site. A regular person would have just added the missing string to the localization database, but that would not have want him the just do it award. Instead, he set up an AB test on the page to understand the magnitude of the lift. Basically, how much more money the company would make with and without that string. At Amazon, setting up an AB test took less than an hour. It turns out that that string was worth something like $2 million per year in gross sales. The lesson here is that it's always a good idea, before you start your work,
4:53to ask yourself which metric people care about that you're going to affect and how you'll know the magnitude of the impact that you'll make. If it's not a meaningful metric or it's super difficult to measure, think twice about whether it's worth doing. If it takes more work to measure the before and after, it's worth it. So bake those into your estimates. At Amazon, like most big tech companies, we're famous for stack ranking people. The idea is that you're being evaluated relative to your peers. Low performers get put on a pip and eventually get laid off and the high performers get rewarded. If you want to be visible, you need to be on the right side of that curve. Basically the top quartile or better
5:33in some sort of way. Optimally, you want to find ways to differentiate yourself by being an outlier in ways that aren't so competitive. For instance, you could become the subject matter expert on a system that's super annoying to deal with. I once volunteered to be the SME on a system where we had to run monthly transaction reports from the system that had to perfectly reconcile with an internal financial system. The reports always had discrepancies that were really time consuming to bottom out. And of course, every month someone in finance would tell us that this work was crazy urgent. Nobody wanted to be in charge of running the report. Whenever the request came in to reconcile, everybody did the equivalent of whistling and looking up. I decided not just to do the work,
6:17but to own the work. I spoke to my manager and I told them that I wanted to be taken off the on-call rotation to take care of this urgent and important work every month. Then, I fixed all of the issues, and I took my time getting back on the on-call rotation. It was a very high-visibility piece of work, and it just involved doing work that people just didn't want to do. I turned it into a game, which became disturbingly fun. Whenever you notice that people are running away from a task or project, think about whether you could get visibility by running towards it. Right now, many companies are desperately trying to hire back people that were the only ones that knew how certain systems worked
6:57after they laid them off. I'm looking at you, Amazon. You need to always be thinking about how you can become an outlier. You don't have to do amazing work necessarily if you zig while everyone else is zagging. A common mistake I see when people try to differentiate themselves is people spending their energy trying to close the gaps on their weaknesses. This just turns them into the mean or the average worker. Being average makes it hard to be visible. So instead, it's a better idea to identify your strengths and think about how you can amplify them. One of my strengths at Amazon was think big, which is one of the leadership principles. We call these strengths superpowers for some stupid reason.
7:38My stupid power is... My superpower is think big. That's so dumb. How I got visibility was saying to various teams, hey, if you want to think bigger about your project, I'm pretty good at that. I just said it casually. I didn't do a hard sell to try to force myself into high visibility projects, but people started bringing me in. When a team had a sense that they weren't thinking big enough about a project or design, they'd pull me in as a consultant. I became known as the guy you bring in to think bigger. I was associated with these projects because I amplified a strength of mine and shopped it around. Those are the two prerequisites for being notable, being high impact or being an outlier.
8:18Those are your get in front of interesting shit moments. Don't bother with visibility if you don't have either because you'll just draw attention to unnoteworthy work. Let's talk about attention. There are only two ways to get it. You can shift people's attention to your work, or you can connect your work to something that they're already paying attention to. The people you want visibility from are already focused on the business, because that's the job of leadership. So instead of trying to pull their attention towards you, the best way is to meet them where they are and help them understand what your work does for the business. The simple version of this is connecting your work to broader goals or business outcomes.
8:55For example, you're doing a migration from on-prem to the cloud because it's gonna save a ton of money without the need to maintain your own servers or a lot of staff to do this maintenance. We can then take those people and have them focus on other major problems in the business. By framing it this way, you've essentially turned a migration into a connected business outcome, resulting in more natural visibility. You can do this with any work that's already underway, taking the project and making a connection to the outcomes or goals that it supports. But you can also use it to decide what to work on next that will naturally be high visibility. At Amazon, we had this thing called S-Team Goals.
9:31These were prioritized goals that came directly from senior VPs who report to the CEO. Each year, they'd set six to 12 goals for their respective orgs. They could be about customer adoption, revenue, efficiency, operations, or any number of things. The could be about customer adoption, revenue, efficiency, operations, or any number of things. The point was that by definition, everyone had already decided that these things were important. Because if you've worked on accomplishing these goals, that's a reason for people to pay attention naturally. Now, we all can't work on big S-team goals, so you need to work your way up the hierarchy. Can you connect your work to your team's goals, so you need to work your way up the hierarchy. Can you connect your work to your
10:05team's goals or even to your skip level manager's goals? Think about it. Your leadership, the people that will judge your performance, they have their own performance that will be measured by the people above them. If you can make a meaningful impact on these goals, it's super easy to be visible. Now, if you don't know what these goals or KPIs are, just ask your manager, what are the most important things that we need to accomplish this quarter? Where does my project fit into that? That's a very useful conversation to have before spending your quarter on it. Be sure to pay attention where and how a goal can get into trouble. Let's say your team isn't going to hit a deadline because of a dependency on another team. If you can help move that status from we're gonna miss the deadline to we can now deliver
10:48on time, you've given people clear visibility to your contributions. But this is a double-edged sword. If you fail, you may be highly visible but associated with the big miss. But don't worry too much. Generally, you won't be seen in a poor light if you're proactive and have good communication skills. Bad news delivered early is just news. As long as you're being vocal about what the issues are and what you need, you'll be seen as a messenger instead of the reason things slipped. If you're having problems connecting your work to broader goals, then you might have to move people's attention to your good work. The easiest place to start drawing their attention towards your work is by providing status updates
11:27about what you're doing. These can be in the form of an email, Slack message, or whatever forum your team uses. If you're worried that you're sending too many, my advice is to over-communicate your impactful or outlier work because people are good at filtering out things that they don't care about. If someone asks you to adjust your communication frequency, that's fine. Just send fewer updates. There are essentially no consequences to giving status updates about your meaningful impact or outlier work. The real risk is that you're invisible, not that you're too loud. But the main reason people tune out communications is because they're written poorly, like a big dump of work items with a bunch of jargon. This is the recipe to get ignored. So how do we make these communications
12:11high signal? You want to write the update as a here's what you need to know update. Say you're on a project called Orion. Every software project has the same set of names like Artemis or Orion. I've worked on like five Orions. Your project could be as simple as Project Orion milestone one update 1028. Then have three or four bullets about the project top down. People really only care about three things. Are we green, yellow, or red for the next delivery? If we aren't green, do we understand why we're blocked and what all of the blockers are? And do you need help from me? If so, what is it and when do you need it by? It's really important to leave out low-level details because it takes too much cognitive effort to understand small things and why they are irrelevant.
12:58If you must keep the gnarly technical details in the update, put them under the main status points with the line that says, more technical details in the update, put them under the main status points with the line that says, more technical details below. These types of updates will give you visibility as the person that knows what's going on. We want people to be able to easily communicate the high level status of our impact with others and for your name to come up. If somebody on your team or org who reads your update is stopped in the hallway and gets asked, hey, you know how Project Orion is going? They can easily answer, yeah, it's green. Now they're in the loop, so they feel connected,
13:31and they know how to direct people to you for follow-up. I did exactly this on a project that contributed to my promotion to principal engineer. It involved nearly 100 engineering teams in Prime Video, and we had a deadline that wasn't moving. There was already a technical program manager sending weekly formal status updates to the org, but I decided to send a daily email to all of the partners and stakeholders, which I believe was nearly a thousand people, including many directors and VPs, on what was happening technically. I'd go on to send these emails for nearly three months. The updates surfaced blockers quickly and showed the progress we were making. It helped connect people that needed to be connected.
14:09I explained critical pieces of the architecture so that others can understand why these components were important. People would later tell me that these emails gave them confidence that we were actually going to hit the deadline. When we launched on time, everybody knew my role in helping move it along. Now, this doesn't mean that every project needs a daily email for visibility. In my case, this was warranted because of the complexity and high stakes involved. You just need to match the frequency to what people need to know. If sharing status updates feels awkward or cringy, that's natural. To draw attention to your work, you need to draw attention to yourself. For some people, they have no problems doing that.
14:46For others like me, it's really hard to put yourself out there and be judged by others. Putting yourself out there can feel cringe. People will judge you, and this is anxiety inducing, but it's strictly necessary. Alex Hormozy has a great definition on cringe. It can be thought of as a form of secondhand embarrassment, in which you're doing a thing and somebody else is embarrassed for you. Let's take a second and think about how absurd that is. Somebody else's embarrassment is the thing that's preventing you from doing what you need to do. He goes on to say that when you try to raise your status at the company, some people will use cringe as a defensive mechanism to knock you back down so that your status doesn't exceed theirs.
15:27If you're doing impactful and outlier work and it feels cringey, then it means you're on the right track. Embrace the cringe. Let it flow through you. That was so cringe. And if you've watched a peer share their work and try to gain visibility and thought that it was cringe, Turn that around on yourself and ask, is that actually embarrassing? Or am I really scared that what they're doing is going to work and they're going to be higher status than me? Because if you break it down like that, it's a dumb reason to stay invisible. Don't let this be the reason that other people have the opportunity to claim your work as their own. If you want to get some individualized support with this, think about my program, Top Tier.
16:08Understanding the concepts is one thing, but figuring out how to map it to your workplace and your situation is another. In Top Tier, you'll work closely with people one to three levels above you to improve your performance rating and get promoted in record time while avoiding all of the dead ends and false starts you'll experience doing it yourself. If you're interested in fast-forwarding your tech career, see if the program's right for you. If you found this video to be useful, you have to watch this next one. I promise it's super cringey.