Brilliant ideas are not enough
As an engineer, you can have a brilliant idea on how to solve a problem, but its value will be tied to how fast it can be executed. Your credit on the other hand is tied to how fast you can make it happen. Another way to frame it is that an idea is worth very little by itself. Writing design docs/vision docs brings value only if you can implement them or converge toward them.
The same goes for startup ideas – there’s no market for such ideas because what matters is how you execute on such ideas (I vaguely remember a VC saying this).
In practice, once you have a good idea, you can do one of the two:
- Plow your way through and just execute it like a machine
- Convince people that it’s a good idea and get staffing allocated for it
My personal take from there is that becoming more efficient and being able to execute yourself faster is a better investment because
- You don’t need to convince people to work on a good idea
- You get full credit for the impact
- You actually learn more – there are a lot of gotcha/issues that you fully process unless you run into them yourself
- It’s the fastest way to build trust with your peers and to naturally become a lead
In practice, it means that the next time you have an idea you can’t execute just by yourself, it will be much easier to rally troops around you because you will be able to build better understand the work needed, compute more accurate estimates and easily gather, people around you.
Yes you should develop your soft skills at some point but that can come later – as long as your technical skills are growing, you should focus on them.