Impact Accelerator Bootcamp Flashcards

The Bootcamp: Amplify Impact and Get Promoted Faster

• The Bootcamp helps you:
  • Set up systems to amplify your impact and get promoted faster.
  • Understand the mindset of executives while evaluating your promotion.
  • Learn how to position, differentiate, and work backwards for your promotion strategy.
  • Become a top performer by setting up systems that deliver outsized impact.

Course Content

• How to deliver an outsized impact in your role.
• How to redesign your work for impact that drives high motivation, energy, and job satisfaction.
• How to design and align your growth plan with your manager.
• How to position yourself for fast growth, more responsibility, and fast promotion.
• How to work through Imposter Syndrome when taking on big-scope projects.
• How to develop business acumen and deliver an outsized business impact.
• How to identify high leverage opportunities to work on.
• How to create high-leverage work when opportunities are scarce.
• How to partner with your leadership team and stakeholders to earn trust.
• How to estimate like a pro and never miss your estimate, even with ambiguous projects.
• How to earn trust to move fast, using trust as a currency.
• How to design your work by stepping up for the right things to work on.
• How to Influence Your Way Up.
• How to uncover and remove blockers holding you back.
• How to differentiate between signal and noise.
• How to build a recession-proof career.
• How to mentor and amplify your teammates to earn team trust and the right to lead.
• Career strength finder tool access to get 360-degree feedback from peers and stakeholders.
• Career Accelerator Playbook (after BootCamp).

Bootcamp Outcomes

• A personalized 1-year career growth plan created during the bootcamp.
• Over 900+ engineers from top companies have highly rated this bootcamp.

Why take a workshop with Krishna?

• Krishna's Background:
  • Started as an engineer and grew to be a computer scientist at Adobe.
  • Moved to leadership at Amazon, heading engineering for a 146-person organization.
  • Now running his startup profile.fyi and teaching cohort-based career workshops after 18 years in tech.
• Krishna was known in Amazon for building high-performance teams and developing his team and mentees.
• The core of this bootcamp is to set up systems/mechanisms that help you differentiate, give you leverage, and help you achieve outstanding outcomes without stress.
• Impact Accelerator Bootcamp for Engineers and IC's in Tech rated 4.7 (70) over 3 Weeks.

Career Growth Flywheel

• Accelerate your career by building yourself a Career Growth Flywheel
• Learn how to apply 7 steps to create a flywheel effect to deliver stellar results and influence your way up.
• Dissect the non-obvious factors that lead to product success.

Part 1 – Building Your 7-Step Career-Growth Flywheel

A flywheel works because every spin makes the next one easier. Nail each step once → momentum → repeat faster → outsized outcomes.

• How to run the flywheel
  1. Weekly – Reflect on which step is weakest right now; pick one experiment.
  2. Monthly – Review metrics + feedback with your manager; recalibrate.
  3. Quarterly – Publish a short write-up of outcomes and learnings to org leads (quiet brand-building).

Part 2 – Dissecting Non-Obvious Drivers of Product Success

• Putting It All Together (90-Day Plan)
  1. Days 1-7 – Diagnose & Align: Draft your brag-doc outline, agree on 1–2 business metrics with manager.
  2. Days 8-30 – First Flywheel Spin: Ship an impactful slice; instrument, broadcast, iterate.
  3. Days 31-60 – Influence & Amplify: Teach teammates a technique that sped you up; shadow a stakeholder to learn their KPI world.
  4. Days 61-90 – Narrative & Promotion Prep: Compile evidence mapped to next-level rubric; preview with manager, tweak.
• Repeat → momentum compounds.

Quick-Start Checklist

• Identify one high-leverage pain point you can solve in <4 weeks.
• Add success metrics + dashboard on day 1.
• Send weekly status mail (3-bullet format: delivered / next / asks).
• Keep a living brag-doc; update every Friday.
• Schedule a 30-min monthly “career sync” with your manager.
• Teach or document one thing that saves the team time each sprint.
• Two weeks before performance cycle, convert brag-doc → promo packet draft.
• Work this system and the flywheel will start spinning—first slowly, then unmistakably.
• You’ll see not just stronger performance ratings, but a reputation for “always moving the needle,” which is exactly what Krishna’s bootcamp is engineered to instill.

Impact Accelerator Bootcamp (Krishna Kiran)

• Bootcamp Roadmap (3-Week Sprint)
  • Rhythm: 3 live-style sessions per week (≈ 45 min each) + light async “performance reps”.
  • Outcome: a working Career-Growth Flywheel + a 1-year Growth Plan ready to review with your manager.

• Optional office hours after each week for Q&A and unblockers.

WEEK 0 — Orientation & Baseline

🎯 Session 1 — “Know Your Starting Line”

“You can’t compound what you don’t measure.”

1. The Baseline Spectrum

• Score yourself 1-5 on each dimension—Impact, Trust, Influence, Amplification, Promo-readiness— using the quick rubric below. Be brutally honest; no one sees this but you.

• Record the numbers; we’ll revisit them in Week 3.

1. Define a Business Metric

• Pick one metric your VP cares about (latency p95, seller GMV, churn, etc.).
  • Write: Baseline value (today)
  • Target (+ X % or – Y ms in 90 days)
• We’ll wire this into an Impact Dashboard next session.

1. Quick Win Inventory (15 min brainstorm)

• List 3 tasks you can complete in <10 days that move that metric. Prioritize the one with:
  1. Clear metric lift
  2. Visible blast radius (others will notice)
  3. Low external dependency

📝 Your Assignment (do before Session 2)

1. Fill the Baseline Spectrum (five numbers).
2. Pick your Business Metric (baseline & 90-day target).
3. Select one Quick Win to execute this sprint.
4. Drop a one-paragraph summary here—think of it as your first status update.

• Small lift, but sets the foundation for everything that follows.

What Happens Next

• After you post your summary, we’ll jump into Session 2: High-Leverage Work—you’ll learn the 4 filters that separate “busy” from “impactful” and design your first leverage map.

Session 2: High-Leverage Work

Turning 1 Hour into 10 Hours of Impact

💡 The Core Idea

$Leverage = (Business Impact × Reach) ÷ Time Spent$

• Business Impact → Does it move the metric your VP/CEO watches?

• Reach → How many teams, customers, or quarters does the result touch?

• Time Spent → Not calendar days—focused hours of your attention.

• Your calendar should increasingly tilt toward activities with 10× leverage ratios.

• Anything ≤ 1× is a candidate for delegation, automation, or polite deletion.

💡 The 4-Filter Lens for Picking Work

Pass ≥ 3 filters → keep. Pass 2 → scrutinise. < 2 → kill or delegate.

💡 Tools & Tactics

💡 Mini-Case (Amazon‐style)

• Problem: Pager alerts were drowning a team (40 hrs/week).
• Move: One SDE built a self-healing Lambda + wrote a 2-page SOP.
• Impact: Reduced alerts 85 %, saved ~35 FTE hrs/wk, adopted by 5 teams.
• Leverage Score: Business Impact (High) × Reach (5 teams) ÷ Time (12 hrs) ≈ 42×.
• Result: SDE’s promo packet headlined this project; promoted 6 months later.

💡 Your Hands-On Exercises (90 min total)

1. Time Audit (30 min)

   • Open a blank sheet → rows = tasks from last week.
   • Add columns: Impact 1-5, Reach 1-5, Hours.
   • Compute Leverage = (Impact × Reach)/Hours.

2. Kill/Keep Decisions (15 min)

   • Anything < 1× → mark “Kill/Delegate”.
   • Draft a 3-bullet proposal for your manager explaining why these should go.

3. Opportunity Stack (30 min)

   • Brainstorm 10 potential tasks aligned to the metric you chose in Session 1.
   • Score each with the 4-Filter Lens (1-5 per filter).
   • Sort; highlight top 3.

4. Leverage Loop Plan (15 min)

   • For your #1 opportunity, fill:
     1. Design — success definition & metric lift.
     2. Automate — which steps can code/scripts handle?
     3. Teach — doc or demo you’ll share.
     4. Delegate — who maintains it after v1?

💡 Deliverable for Next Session

• Post one slide or short paragraph covering:
  1. Your biggest low-leverage task you’re proposing to drop.
  2. Your #1 high-leverage opportunity (include filter scores).
  3. Planned metric lift and ETA.
     *Think of it as your executive update.

🌟 Pro-Tips While You Work

• Batch similar tasks (context-switching kills leverage).
• Instrument from day 1 so you can prove impact—no metrics, no story.
• If you hit resistance dropping tasks, frame it as “freeing cycles to hit OKR X faster.”
• Celebrate tiny leverage wins publicly; they seed trust for bigger bets.

Week 1 — Session 3: Measurement & Pre-Mortems

“See the Game, Before You Play the Game”

💡 Why Metrics + Pre-mortems Are Non-Negotiable

1. Visibility → Focus: Teams chase whatever shows up on a chart.
2. Focus → Speed: Clear success criteria kill debate later.
3. Speed → Trust: Leaders grant scope to people who surface risks before they explode.

Rule: If you can’t show a metric improving week-over-week, it didn’t really happen.

💡 The 4-Lens Metric Stack

Pitfall: Engineers stop at Output (“we shipped!”). Execs care about Business (“revenue moved?”). Track both or your story won’t land.

💡 Fast-&-Cheap Dashboarding

Tip: Start ugly. A CSV pasted into Sheets that updates every Friday is 100× better than a “coming soon” Grafana board.

💡 Pre-mortem: Run the Failure Drill Before You Launch

1. Gather 4-6 brains — engineer, PM, QA, maybe ops.
2. Prompt: “It’s six months after launch. The project was a train-wreck. What went wrong?”
3. Silent write (5 min) → share → cluster risks.
4. Score each risk on Impact (1-5) × Likelihood (1-5).
5. Top 3 risks → Guard-rails & Owners (mitigation tasks enter your backlog).

💡 Hands-On Exercises (≈ 90 min)

(Yes, that adds to > 90 min, but part C can ride tomorrow’s stand-up slot. Split it if needed.)

💡 Deliverable for Session 4

Post one screenshot or bullet summary covering:

1. Dashboard v1 link or description (the 4 metrics).
2. Top risk from your pre-mortem and the guard-rail you set.
3. Any metric surprise you saw after instrumenting (e.g., “p99 latency was 3× worse than I thought!”).

Think of it as the concise, exec-ready update. *

🚀 Pro-Tips While You Execute

• Automate data pulls early (cron + CSV dump is fine). Manual updates die in week 3.
• Alert, don’t report: set thresholds that ping you when off-track; staring at dashboards is low leverage.
• Roll the risk log forward—every retro, revisit scores and add new risks.
• Share wins and near-misses; psychological safety fuels faster iteration.
• Example of Pre-mortem Template:
  Project:
  Date: ___
  Attendees: __
  Failure Headlines (sticky-note style)
  Risk Matrix
  Metric alert at warns us early.
  Rollback plan stored at .

Week 2 — Session 4 Earning Trust Fast

Be the Person Leaders Never Worry About

💡 The Trust–Velocity Loop

Trust ⇒ Autonomy ⇒ Speed ⇒ More Trust ⇒ …

1. Visible, reliable execution grants you trust.
2. Trust shrinks review cycles → you get autonomy.
3. With autonomy you ship faster → org moves quicker → leaders extend trust further.

Your job is to kick-start and protect this loop.

💡 Krishna’s 3-Pillar Trust Equation

(Notice skill > brilliance—trust is a reputation game, not an IQ test.)

💡 Tactical Systems to Broadcast Trust

Set calendar reminders—systems run the habit.

💡 Krishna’s Renegotiation Script (when you’ll slip)

1. State the delta — “The new API dep is 4 days late; our ship date moves +2 days.”
2. Show the mitigation — “We can parallelise QA to claw back 1 day.”
3. Ask, don’t tell — “I plan to adopt option B unless you prefer otherwise.”

Outcome: stakeholders feel informed + consulted, not ambushed.

💡 Mini-Case: “Trust Debt” Paid Back in 2 Weeks

• Context: SDE missed two silent deadlines; PM escalated.
• Actions:
  1. Published a daily Slack burndown with p95 latency graph.
  2. Scheduled 10-min morning sync w/ PM; ended after a week.
  3. Took an unrelated on-call shift for teammate who’d covered her bug-fix.
• Result: Trust score in 360 feedback jumped from 2.8 → 4.4; given new green-field prototype.

🚀 Hands-On Exercises (≈ 75 min)

(If you’re déjà-vu with on-call, choose any reputationally “expensive” chore and take it.)

💡 Deliverable for Session 5

Post a single message that contains:

1. Screenshot or text of your “Day 0” 3-Bullet Update.
2. One Red or Yellow open loop you identified and how you’ll close/renegotiate it.
3. Calendar snapshot or bullets of the comms cadence you scheduled.

🌟 Pro-Tips While You Execute

• Timebox updates to 5 min; over-long mails signal uncertainty.
• Use the same template every week—consistency breeds confidence.
• Close the loop publicly e.g., “✅ Risk #2 resolved—latency now 120 ms.”
• If you’re truly blocked, escalate sooner; fast bad news > slow surprises.

Week 2 — Session 5 Stepping Up & Gap-Hunting

Find the Un-Owned Work That Makes You Un-Ignorable

💡 Why “Stepping Up” Beats “Waiting Up”

Doctrine: Scope is discovered, not gifted. The people who surf to Staff/Principal/Director levels are the ones who proactively claim high-leverage, high-ambiguity problems.

💡 The Gap-Hunting Radar

💡 Krishna’s 2-Slide “Step-Up” Pitch

Target time: 12 minutes to draft; 3 minutes to deliver.

• Slide 1 — Problem & Impact
  1. Headline (1 line): “Checkout p95 latency blocks $42 M/Q revenue-growth target.”
  2. Evidence: Chart or bullet w/ current metric vs goal.
  3. Risk of Inaction: Lost revenue, CSAT drop, dev toil …
• Slide 2 — Plan & Ask
  1. Leverage Plan (3 bullets): Assess root cause w/ trace logs (1 wk). Prototype index/cache (2 wks, guarded by canary). Automate regression alert (adds 2 hrs/wk maintenance).
  2. Metric Target: p95 ↓ 30 %, by Sep 30.
  3. Resources/Authority Needed: 10 % DBA time, 2 SRE review hrs.
  4. Owner: You, accountable E2E.

Send to manager + key stakeholders; offer to present in next sprint-planning. Most will just say, “Great— run with it.”

💡 Tactics to Win the Scope Quickly

💡 Mini-Case: “Ghost OKR” → Staff Engineer Ticket

• Context: Login funnel had 1 % silent failure—no explicit owner.
• Move: IC scraped logs, quantified lost sign-ups, pitched 2-slide fix (auto-retry + observability).
• Impact: Failure → 0.1 %; ARPU +$1.2 M/Q; Staff promo 4 months later.
• Key: Work was invisible until someone claimed and framed it.

💡 Hands-On Exercises (~ 90 min)

(Chunk B-D can span two days if calendars are tight—speed beats polish.)

💡 Deliverable for Session 6

Reply here with:

1. One-liner of the gap you selected (metric + why it matters).
2. Snapshot/bullets of your Slide 2 Plan & Ask.
3. Name/role of the sponsor who pre-aligned with you (just first name / title is fine).

🔑 Pro-Tips While You Work

• Anchor to metrics every time—feelings don’t win scope.
• If multiple “owners” surface, volunteer to be single-threaded leader; others become collaborators.
• Keep the pitch < 2 slides—brevity signals clarity.
• Celebrate even partial yes-es publicly; momentum attracts allies.

Week 2 — Session 6 Stakeholder Maps & Storytelling

Get People to Pull for Your Project

💡 Why Mapping Stakeholders Is Non-Optional

Doctrine: Code moves bits; narratives move headcount and roadmaps.

💡 Build Your Stakeholder Map 1-Pager

💡 Krishna’s Narrative Stack

💡 Storytelling Frameworks (pick one)

💡 Influence Tactics That Compound

💡 Hands-On Exercises (~90 min)

(If calendars tight, overlap DMs with tomorrow’s stand-ups.)

💡 Deliverable for Session 7

Reply here with:

1. Your Tweet-length narrative.
2. Screenshot or bullet table of Stakeholder Map (at least top 4 high/high).
3. One insight you got from a preview DM (e.g., “Legal flagged