Optimize Units of Work, Not Growth Targets

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of leadership teams start with a goal like this:

How do we grow revenue by 20%?

It is a reasonable business question. It is also too abstract to manage directly.

Nobody wakes up and performs a “20% growth” task. Nobody opens a laptop and completes “increase revenue” before lunch. What people actually do every day is much smaller and much more concrete:

Answer customer questions
Create proposals
Follow up on leads
Review contracts
Build features
Resolve support tickets
Generate reports
Onboard customers

Growth is the aggregate result of how well thousands of these units of work happen.

Operations on Engineering Notes

Optimize Units of Work, Not Growth Targets