Most engineers have probably heard the buzzwords “10x engineer” or “force multiplier.” But in reality, the biggest impact doesn’t come from being a solo hero; it’s about whether your presence helps everyone on the team be quicker, safer, and more effective. That’s what force multiplication truly is.
When I was starting out as a Senior Software Engineer, I really didn’t have a clear roadmap for how to truly shine as a senior individual contributor (IC) and boost my team’s overall impact. So, I chatted with over five mentors and a dozen senior and principal engineers. I boiled down all their wisdom into a super practical checklist that I still use today. I’m excited to share that framework with you and show you how you can use it this week to cut down on risks, bump up quality, and speed up your team’s delivery.
What “force multiplication” really means
When I first joined, I honestly thought being a force multiplier meant just writing more code. It took a few nasty incidents and a couple of painful post-mortems for me to realize that where you can really make a difference is in what you do before an outage hits. A “10x engineer” is someone who really grasps the big picture and helps the whole team achieve more, instead of just focusing on their own output. Force multiplication is all about setting the technical bar high, making team processes smoother, guiding teammates, and providing clear direction so everyone on the team moves quicker and safer.
Lead without authority. You might not have people reporting directly to you, but you still influence how things are built, the quality of the work, and even the roadmap. Your power comes from the clear documents, reviews, and standards you help create, not from your job title. I started by putting together a simple architecture template and a rollout checklist that the team could easily use. That made things much clearer during design and cut down our review times by almost 30 percent.
Establish clear standards. Work with your colleagues to set up templates for design docs, pull requests, release plans, and incident runbooks. Make sure these templates are living documents in your wiki—meaning they’re used and updated regularly. When a new engineer joins, the first question shouldn’t be “How do we do this here?” It should be, “Which template should I use?”
Hold a high bar with clarity. Give really specific and timely feedback on code and designs. When deadlines are tight, lay out all the options with clear pros and cons, risks, and then recommend a path forward. I learned to stop saying “we’ll figure it out later.” Instead, I started presenting two plans: Plan A meant hitting the date with reduced scope and known risks; Plan B meant keeping the full scope but pushing the date to match our capacity. This way, leaders could make tough choices without any nasty shocks later.
Build in quality and operational excellence. Treat code quality, test coverage, observability (the ability to understand your system), error budgets, release safety, and how easily you can roll back changes as fundamental parts of what it means to be “done.” I baked these elements right into our code reviews and on-call routines, so they stuck even when things got crazy. Observability isn’t just an extra perk; it’s a fundamental necessity that needs to be planned for and reviewed. According to the 2023 DORA report, top-tier teams deploy code multiple times a day and get things back online in under an hour, while others might take weeks to recover.
Make learning and knowledge-sharing routine. Hold quick office hours, host informal “brown-bag” sessions, capture lessons learned from incidents, and keep a handy “first 30 days” checklist for new hires. The goal is to move beyond random acts of heroism and establish practices everyone can easily follow.
The senior engineer portfolio: How you spend your time
To avoid burnout and make sure you’re hitting all these important areas, you need a game plan. Here’s the typical mix I use as a guide. The exact percentages will vary depending on your company and team, but if any of these buckets hit zero, you might see quality or culture start to slip.
50%: Individual project delivery. Take full ownership of a good chunk of product or platform work from start to finish. This keeps your skills sharp and your reputation strong. Lead by example, showing that your architecture, code, and testing follow all the best practices.
20%: Reviews and feedback on architecture, code, and processes. Give feedback that people can actually use, helping to make things easier to maintain, more resilient, and clearer to read. Refer to your documented standards so your comments help with more than just one pull request.
10%: Long-term architecture and technical debt. Maintain an up-to-date guide to how things are built, keep an eye out for potential bottlenecks, track a few key performance indicators (SLIs), and keep a list of technical debt that clearly explains the business impact. Advocate for regular time set aside to fix this debt.
10%: Mentoring and unblocking the team. Run office hours, help teammates navigate tricky technical issues, and clear obstacles so work can keep moving.
10%: Learning and sharing best practices. Gather and refine best practices for architectures, code, rollouts, and rollback plans. Encourage the team to contribute and make sure this guidance stays current.
Why this mix matters: culture and quality are as much your job as they are your manager’s. Managers set the stage and priorities. Senior engineers put the standards into action, making quality and learning just *how things are done*.
7 practical steps to multiply impact
Below are the steps I personally took that you might find helpful. Each one is simple in concept but not always easy to execute; they require discipline and a small time investment that yields big returns fast.
Build a weekly learning routine. Block 30 minutes on your calendar to review coding standards, architecture templates, and operational excellence practices. Spot where the team could improve. Compare what you’re doing against company guidance and industry best practices. Share one quick tip or pattern each week. Seeing these small, consistent wins really builds momentum and keeps everyone motivated.
Schedule peer 1:1s that develop people. Meet with teammates with a plan for helping them grow: understand their career goals and the projects they’re interested in. Give them feedback they can actually use to improve in those areas. After design reviews or incidents, send a short follow-up paragraph that sums up what you learned and points to a good example.
Grow your staff network and bring the outside in. Connect with senior and principal engineers in different departments. Ask for one lesson they learned from a recent migration, incident, or scaling challenge. Summarize what you learned in a short note and link to any useful documents your team can copy. This helps prevent getting stuck doing things one way without knowing if there’s a better way and helps everyone quickly pick up new ideas.
Advise leadership with options and risk. For deadlines that might put quality at risk, present two plans: Plan A means hitting the date with clear choices about what to cut and clearly laid out risks; Plan B means keeping the full scope but pushing the date to match your team’s capacity. Show how technical debt affects users or the bottom line, and propose dedicated time to address it. Bring up culture issues like burnout, backing it up with facts and stories.
Influence the roadmap from the bottom up. Lead brainstorming sessions on long-term architecture and reliability goals. Turn those ideas into simple suggestions with various options and their pros and cons. Partner with the product team to combine user needs, tech debt, and reliability improvements into one clear, prioritized plan.
Raise the hiring bar and make it scalable. Invite other engineers to sit in on your interviews to learn the ropes, using a clear rubric. Debrief immediately afterward, then let them try observing others (reverse shadow), and eventually interview on their own. Capture good questions, work samples, and scoring guidance so the whole process is the same and fair for everyone.
Allocate time to do the multiplying work. If your team uses sprint planning, make sure to set aside time for these activities. Trying to squeeze them in outside your regular project work just leads to burnout and inconsistent impact.
One small example
On one project, we were rushing to ship a new feature with a tight deadline. The first rollout quickly showed we couldn’t see what was going on clearly: we couldn’t tell if it was just a settings change (configuration drift) or a real bug in the system (control plane bug). I suggested adding a small, focused set of key performance indicators (SLIs) and a release checklist that required a gradual release (canary window), synthetic traffic tests, and a solid rollback plan. I also documented this pattern in our wiki and did a quick 20-minute presentation (brown-bag session) to walk everyone through the checklist.
The result: the very next rollout caught the issue during the initial gradual release phase, we undid the changes smoothly, and the review after the incident was quick and helpful. More importantly, that checklist became how we just do things now as a team. We cut down how bad incidents were in the next two semesters and shortened our mean time to recovery. That’s force multiplication in action: a small change in standards brought huge improvements in reliability.
Make force multiplication your operating model
Force multiplication isn’t just a personality trait or something you do on the side – it’s a systematic way of working that anyone can follow. It’s about the standards you write down, the reviews you run, the safety nets you build, and the automations you ship so the team can move faster with less risk. When senior individual contributors make this work visible and measurable, the organization gets predictable delivery, fewer surprises, and more capacity for innovation.
Start this week. Pick one of the seven steps and turn it into a tiny experiment:
- Publish a one-page architecture template and a release checklist
- Add 2–3 key performance indicators (SLIs) for a critical service and set alert thresholds
- Draft a one-page A/B decision memo for your next release
Measure the impact. Track 1–2 leading indicators (e.g., failures caught during gradual releases, number of automated recoveries, review cycle time) and 1–2 lagging outcomes (e.g., incident severity, mean time to recovery, rollback rate). Share the results in your next team retrospective and keep refining your approach.
Your next move. Publish your checklist in the team wiki, do a quick 20-minute brown-bag session to get everyone familiar with it, and put one “multiplying work” card on the board this sprint. Then, just keep repeating, measuring, and teaching!
[Note: The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the views of Microsoft.]
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