Unfortunately, tech leaders don’t really have version control for their work. Months of hard work pass, and yet you cannot easily show the “release notes” for it. How can you stay on course when you don’t have in front of you what you’ve already achieved? Without it, you’re bound to continue fighting fires constantly.
What Engineers Know
As an engineer, this was never a mystery. git diff tells you exactly what changed and when. The work was visible and reviewable. You ran the tests.
Leadership doesn’t come with that built in, but the logic holds just as well. We need a way to keep track of our progress. Especially when toiling on the important-not-urgent leadership tasks that might not have an immediate payoff, otherwise, you will feel like you’re not achieving anything, get dejected, or just focus on the easy stuff that’s right in front of you.
The Leadership Diff
The simple habit that will help you address this: a regular, deliberate review of what has changed since the last checkpoint. I recommend doing it weekly for the small stuff, quarterly for the bigger changes. Do a genuine comparison: what does the situation look like now versus then?
This started as something I did with clients to assess progress together during our engagements. I would list the different decisions, processes, habits, and other things that we changed during the period by reading my notes back to them.
The value was immediate, for me to report progress, but also for the leaders themselves. It gave them contact with progress they couldn’t otherwise feel, especially on the longer-arc changes where results take months to show.
Diffing Events, Not Just Intentions
To take this further, don’t just assess what you did, but also assess what happened through the lens of what you’ve changed. Try to trace back the undercurrents that were set in motion a while ago.
An outage happened, yet it was handled much more cleanly and smoothly. What changed six months ago that meant this one went differently than it would have before? That delta is the diff. It’s evidence of progress you might never have credited yourself for.
If you do weekly reviews, it can be a goldmine for finding these nuggets of improvement. Review your typical weeks a few months back and note the difference from what is happening today. Do you notice that you were constantly drowning, or handling repeating errors that by now you’ve forgotten about? How did that happen?
Why It Matters
Without the diff, a few things go quietly wrong. You optimize for the urgent and lose contact with the larger trajectory. You undervalue your own work and burn out from feeling like it adds up to nothing. And you lose the feedback loop that would tell you whether the changes you’re making are actually taking hold.
Pick a checkpoint: a month ago, a quarter ago. What does the situation look like now versus then? Not your intentions. The actual reality. It ain’t that difficult (I’ll let myself out).