Targeted excellence

I've been thinking about this concept I call targeted excellence, guiding our impact toward those we want to impact.

Typically, impact is thought on Scale (how many) or Quality (how well). But Targeting (to whom) is a frequently missing characteristic of impact.

To think about who we're impacting, particularly as software engineers, we must discuss the constraints of instrumental impact.

Instrumental impact – I only build tools

Instrumental impact means impact that helps increase other impact. This type of instrumental impact is common in tool builders, such as software engineers, and tends to offer little impact target control.

For example, let's say a software engineer builds an open-source library for other software engineers to use. Assume this new tool would make software engineers much more productive.

If you make other software engineers more productive, what does that mean exactly for your ultimate impact? Well, that's hard to say:

• If your software is then used by a non-profit for a cause you believe in, then your work advances the cause you believe in.
• If your software is, rather, used by a non-profit for a cause you're against, then your work advances a cause you're against.

In the end, the impact you had is the overall sum of the impact your tool had on the impact created by your users.

Software engineers, in particular, tend not to build tools for a specific purpose over their careers. You're building communication tools, networking tools, libraries, and operating systems. The actual usage is done on top of your tools, and the tools themselves are fairly usage-agnostic.

If you work for a CRM software company or a communications software company, and your work makes your customers more productive, your ultimate impact depends a lot on what type of business your customers are in.

This control over what markets your customers play in is at the core of targeted excellence.

Instrumental impact's limited control

It's hard to control how tools are used. If you own a hardware store, you don't know if the shovel you just sold will help build a beautiful garden or dig a ditch for something illegal.

As a hardware store owner (or any other toolmaker), there are two main forces constraining your control.

1. Limits on refusal: For most tools, it's rather difficult to legally refuse service. A hardware store owner can't refuse to sell you a shovel in pretty much any circumstance but the most egregious ones. This lack of control is quite typical in other tools, with a possible exception of highly regulated ones – although these may also regulate to whom you can't refuse service.

2. Market forces: It's a competitive advantage to provide tools widely. If you refuse to provide tools, a demand gap is created for a competitor to provide them instead. This competitor then gets more revenue to reinvest, grows more and provides services that are now harder for you to compete with, creating a reinforcing loop.

Selective toolmakers face significant challenges. It's difficult and expensive to target specific audiences, so they often get excluded or outcompeted, making tool-making tend towards serving wide markets over time.

But what are some ways we can overcome these challenges? How can we have more control over the impact our tool-making creates?

Let's cover what we personally can do to get more control.

Increasing control of instrumental impact

If you are a software developer, an HR generalist, a salesperson, or a manager, whether your work has the impact you want or not depends a lot on who you work with: who uses your software, who you support do day-to-day, what product you sell, what your reports do.

Here are a few things to focus on to pursue targeted impact:

1. Excel in competence
2. Focus on marketing
3. Build resources

As an individual, you can have a significant competitive edge by explicitly focusing on building competence: studying, training, measuring your growth, etc.

It's crucial to keep your skills up to date. Knowledge evolves, whether it's new technologies or innovative ways to manage and sell. Your competitive advantage depends both on what you do and how you do it.

It's not just about excelling at what you already know but also about learning new skills.

Most of us have a single employer, so you only have to win once. While as a competent person, your odds of winning a battle increase, you still need to find the right battles, and that requires marketing.

I think most employees underinvest in marketing themselves – be it developing a personal brand, showcasing achievements, or cultivating a network.

Finally, fewer resources lead to less flexibility, and you need flexibility to target impact.

If you need a specific amount of money, time, or support, your range of options narrows significantly. Because building a targeted impact company is more challenging, their resources are often more limited.

Competence, marketing, and resources will give you the foundation to do more targeted work, but there are some other good differentiators to focus on when you nail the basics:

• Domain motivation
• Specialization
• Credibility

Finding work you truly care about greatly boosts both motivation and performance. If you are passionate about a particular political view, for example, working to advance it can give you an edge over someone indifferent.

The other advantage of targeted impact is that it often benefits from specialization.

Once you have a specific area you want to impact in mind, you can strategically focus on competencies to excel at based on which will have the highest impact in your niche.

Finally, specific credibility often outweighs general credibility.

If you've excelled in a domain and invested in marketing, your options for continuing to make an impact in that area should greatly expand.

Phew! This list should keep us busy for several years!

I thought I'd expand further into increasing instrumental control as a company, but I'll save that for a future article.

So instead, let's circle back to the concept of targeted excellence by evaluating some of its trade-offs.

Targeted excellence trade-offs

To evaluate the impact of our work, we need to measure at least 3 key components:

• Scale (how many)
• Quality (how well)
• Targeting (to whom)

We can increase control over the targeting of our impact by developing our competence, building our marketing, and securing resources.

This means that Quality and Targeting are closely connected: the better we are at what we do, the more control we can exert over who benefits from our work.

In the meantime, because we're being selective about who we impact, our scale is likely to decrease as a result of our targeting.

This means that Scale and Targeting are also closely connected but inversely correlated: the more deliberate we are about who we impact, the fewer total people we're likely to benefit.

And finally, the smaller our scale, the fewer resources we'll have to reinvest in our quality.

This means Scale and Quality are also closely connected and inversely correlated: Increasing quality is harder at smaller scales, with limited access to the best tools and support.

One reason it's crucial to build your competence, marketing, and resources to improve your control is that you're pushing against the inverse correlation between quality and scale while counting on the alignment of quality and targeting.

In short, you're working to break quality's dependence on scale.

By being really good at what you do, not just your technical competence but also your marketing effectiveness and the resources you build, you gain control over your impact. With that control, you can intentionally target (and limit) your audience, finding the right trade-off between scale and targeting.

And it's the choices you make over how you build and use that control that will define the impact you leave behind.