In my first engineering manager role, I found it hard to judge whether I was spending time on the right things. It’s a common struggle. As an engineer you see fast feedback loops everywhere: passing tests, code reviews, and observability metrics. Suddenly as a manager you’re accountable for decisions that will play out over weeks or months with fuzzy success criteria.

Defining 3 levels of work helped me to get more intentional with my time. Foundational, tactical, and strategic work form a hierarchy of needs. The idea is that you strive to spend time further up the pyramid, but this is hard to do without satisfying the needs at the lower levels. I still use this model. Sometimes the simplest frameworks are the most durable.

Foundational

Foundational work creates the basic conditions for a team to deliver, for example:

Team health (feedback, hiring, coaching)
Delivery processes (planning, retrospectives)
Technical standards (on-call, SLAs)

These are the same sort of topics you might cover in a team charter. Who are we? What are we trying to do? What’s our operating model? Success looks like a fully-staffed team of motivated individuals pulling in the same direction and delivering value predictably.

Tactical

Tactical work is the realm of prioritization and optimisation. Have we selected the most impactful projects? Are we sequencing them in the right way? Are we paying down technical debt?

Building high-performing teams also falls in this bucket. A healthy and productive team is a foundation, but teams usually don’t achieve their full potential without targeted interventions. Perhaps that’s fostering a deep connection to users, creating a culture of ownership, or sponsoring an innovative technical approach.

Strategic

At the top of the pyramid is strategy. It’s often difficult to create space for strategy when you’re busy managing a team, but luckily this type of work has a long time horizon and changes infrequently if you get it right. Examples include aligning team missions to broader business goals (perhaps in a quarterly planning cycle) and technical strategy (like major vendor or technology choices).

Navigating the pyramid

Just like Maslow’s original hierarchy of needs, you can always skip to higher levels at your own risk. I’d find it uncomfortable to invest time on prioritisation if my team was struggling with a more basic need like morale. However, there might be cases where you need the bones of a strategy to build the right foundations.

Interrupts

Managers deal with unexpected events all the time. A sudden resignation will pull you into the foundational level. A must-do regulatory project will pull you into the tactical level. This is totally normal. In these scenarios, the pyramid is a useful prompt to consider what you’re actively deprioritising.

Growing as a manager