As mentioned in my recent post on not being invisible, it's important to be intentional about the projects you choose to work on. It's a deceptively simple idea that can have an outsized impact on your career, and putting it into practice often feels like navigating a maze. It's less about picking "hard" or "easy" tasks and more about understanding what will actually make a difference, and that's where it gets tricky: defining what "make a difference" even means.

In corpo-speak, prioritisation should start with alignment. It's about understanding what the organisation values most and where it's heading. When you focus your energy on work that aligns with those goals, you're making yourself part of the solution. Nobody gets promoted for solving problems nobody asked about.

Does your team have an overarching objective for the quarter? Maybe it's delivering a big-ticket feature, reducing technical debt (doubtful), or improving the reliability of the system. Whatever it is, that's the X on the map leading you to treasure. The closer your work ties in the better. Visibility becomes almost effortless when everything you do has a direct impact on what leadership is already keeping an eye on.

It doesn't always need to be glamorous, either. Sometimes, the unsexy problem like deploying new content or reducing abuse is far more critical than the flashy feature everyone's talking about. If you can fix it, you become the person who made everyone else's job easier, and that kind of impact doesn't go unnoticed.

Choosing impactful work isn't just about the work itself either. It's about how obvious the impact of that work is to others. Developers love to pine about coding as an art form, which is noble and all, but careers don't operate in a vacuum. If people don't understand the significance of what you're doing, it's easy for your contributions to fade into the background, no matter how valuable you believe they are. The work that gets recognised isn't the most technically hard or proficient, it's the work that leads to a clear outcome that people can see.

Hint: Work that most developers believe is "hard" and "important" is often work that isn't easy to see the impact of. If you want to be seen, work on projects that are easy to understand and have a clear outcome.

It doesn't just have to be flashy feature work either. Working on projects with broad visibility (things that touch either customer experience or the workflow of the team) can be a strategic choice. Take, for example a pain point that's been plaguing users for months, or an issue in deployment that is caused by the application code. By solving those problems, you're making an impact that stakeholders can feel, not just hear about in a sprint review. Those are the projects that emerge in retros and stick in people's minds during performance reviews.

Hint: The best people to talk to about these kind of problems are customer support and dev ops. They are the ones on the front lines dealing with the actual pain.

It can be tempting to sprint for every shiny project because it has the potential to stand out. Your tech lead pitches a flashy new microservice architecture? Sounds cool, lets spike our next feature on it. Another team is implementing cutting edge performance rendering improvements? Lets get that into our code before it's out of alpha! Wrong. These might sound flashy, but you have to return to the fundamental: what is the impact of this work, and does it align with the business goals of the company? If you can't answer both of those questions then this project is a distraction.

Caveat: If you do take on a project that's outside the main priority, have a solid reason for doing so, measurable outcomes, and make sure your chain of command is on board.

This has all been framed in terms of promotions, but what if you're not looking for a promotion? What if you just want to do good work for good work's sake? That's very noble, but ignoring the politics of your workplace will not only impact your ability to get promoted, but if layoffs come around it also gives them an easy target to cut. If you're not visible, you're not a team player, and if you're not a team player, you're not a priority. It's a harsh, but it's the world we live in.

You don't need to always be angling for credit either. No-one likes that person. But being the one who your leaders see as someone who can "get stuff done" is a valuable trait. Inversely, don't let promotion or layoff anxiety push you into an unsustainable mindset. The fastest way to burnout is saying yes to every project in a desperate bid for attention. Instead, aim for focused impact. You don't need to rack up a long list of contributions that barely scratch the surface of what matters. A handful of well-chosen, high-impact projects will serve you better than a dozen trivial ones.

Choosing the right projects is less about being lucky enough to stumble upon the perfect one and more about staying intentional. And trust me, when you're intentional about your work, the impact follows.