| So he can't work on the product for the full week as per the article. What about looking internally about tools, techniques and approaches that can help him accelerate the team. It is outside of the product. From what I have seen of hyper productive employees, there are two types: The self aware junkie - they know why, how and what to do. You can ask them, and they will tell you. People won't necessarily agree or understand why it works, but they know. This ability to externalize and communicate allows for step function improvements in the org. IF the team is willing to try new things. The naive "I dunno" - this is much harder, they do what they do, but they don't know how they do it. in this case you just need to fill up the hopper with more work. Of course there are risks here, the velocity my end up making the system "their system" capturing their ideas, conceptualization, etc. If they have a great bar in communication (documents, diagrams, etc) then that can work quite well. But the risk is that people may not understand what it is they are working on in the end (see Tao of Rodney in Stargate Atlantis). But ultimately this is between the engineer and their manager. They need to work it out. The engineer needs to work out what they really want, and the manager needs to work out how to provide. |