Slow Productivity for Engineering Leaders

(This article was published originally on my Substack on the 20th March, 2025)

Hello, this is Eduardo and I’m an Engineering Leader and Certified Running coach. This is the second article in the Leadership Endurance newsletter, a source for leadership, endurance sports, performance, and growth best practices in the confluence of these worlds.

Subscribe now

We’ve all been there at some point; the company’s board, the executive team, and our customers all want more and more outcomes and features delivered faster. Pretty often, this pressure to deliver fast, scale aggressively, and stay ahead leads to an unsustainable cycle of urgency, overload, and burnout. We are drowning in meetings, chasing deadlines, and reacting to crises, leaving little time for deep thinking, strategy, and innovation.

Being in this situation and often struggling to keep a balance, I recently bought and just finished reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, so let’s dive into how engineering leaders can improve their productivity and their teams’ by embracing a more deliberate, thoughtful approach to work.

The Problem: Engineering Leaders Trapped in Pseudo-Productivity

Many companies and leaders work in a pseudo-productivity environment, the illusion of progress driven by excessive busyness. This is shown by endless meetings, the need to be working in the office (although there are pros to this), and putting pressure on the employees. Here’s what that often looks like:

• Constant Firefighting: Leaders get pulled into endless Slack threads, production incidents, and stakeholder demands.
• Meeting Overload: Back-to-back meetings leave no time for strategic thinking or deep technical work.
• Speed Over Quality: Pressure to deliver quickly leads to tech debt, poor architecture decisions, and unsustainable scaling.
• Too Many Business Metrics, Too Little Focus: Teams are stretched across multiple initiatives, leading to mediocrity rather than excellence.

The result? High stress, low innovation, and teams that feel like they’re always behind.

The Slow Productivity Framework for Engineering Leaders

Cal Newport presents us with three core principles that are easily applied to engineering organizations:

1. Do Fewer Things (But Do Them Exceptionally Well)

One of the biggest traps that we fall in is trying to do too much at once. We juggle multiple priorities, platform migrations, hiring, reliability, tech debt, and complicated product roadmaps, spreading the team too thin. What sometimes don’t realize is that we can control some of those levers:

Shift the mindset from “more features” to “fewer, better decisions.”

• Ruthlessly prioritize technical initiatives. It’s been widely proven that limiting WIP (Work in Progress) improves productivity. Less parallel work means more serial work at all levels, both your and your team’s.
• Understand the real impact of your projects, cut low-impact projects and focus on one or two transformational efforts. Every new initiative must justify its impact.
• Protect your time and develop deep work by reducing distractions (fewer meetings, better async processes), blocking your calendar for strategic thinking, arch reviews, deep work, etc.

Further reading on Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis

2. Work at a Natural Pace (Stop Forcing Artificial Urgency)

Engineering leaders often operate in a constant state of urgency, reacting to problems instead of guiding teams toward long-term excellence. While speed is sometimes necessary, not all work should be rushed.

Shift from “velocity obsession” to “sustainable execution.”

• Recognize that tech excellence takes time; building great systems and strong teams is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Push back against arbitrary deadlines that don’t account for the complexity of technical work. Also, using yourself as an example, encourage engineers to push back on unrealistic timelines; in the end, they are the experts in the area.
• Foster a culture where teams deliver predictable, high-quality work instead of short bursts of rushed output. Schedule fewer sync meetings and more async updates (engineering memos > endless Slack messages).

3. Obsess Over Quality (Prioritize Long-Term Impact Over Short-Term Wins)

The best engineering teams that I’ve worked with didn’t just ship fast, they build systems, teams, and cultures that last.

Shift the focus from “delivery speed” to “engineering excellence.”

• Encourage craftsmanship: engineers should take pride in building scalable, well-documented systems. These initiatives should be celebrated the same way as the team delivers the most impactful features.
• Invest in technical debt reduction, as short-term solutions slow teams down in the long run.
• Prioritize mentorship and leadership development; one of your greatest leverage is growing and developing your team. Some organizations don’t have the tools to encourage internal development. Create a leadership pipeline nurturing engineers into future staff+ engineers and leaders. Invest time in career ladders, knowledge transfer, research and development, and team learning sessions.

Leading a High-Impact, Low-Burnout Engineering Team

I’ve worked in organizations with different productivity levels, burnout, and impact. In all of them, applying some of the principles explained in the Slow Productivity, was or could have been a solution to escape the cycle of reactive, high-stress work and pushed or could have pushed these teams to:

• Deliver consistently instead of burning out in unsustainable sprints.
• Have clarity and focus instead of juggling too many priorities.
• Build high-quality systems instead of hacking together short-term fixes.

Slow down to go faster. Your team and your future self will thank you.