Two Spruce Partners

I joined Microsoft as an individual contributor, a program manager on a product team. It’s a big company. Tens of thousands of employees, dozens of business units, layer upon layer of hierarchy. When you’re new and junior, it’s easy to feel like your work doesn’t really matter at the company level.

Early on, I found a simple way to fight that feeling.

Every morning, before I started work, I asked myself one question:

How can I, from the position I sit in on this team and in this company, make the biggest, broadest impact today?

That’s it. One question. But over time, it fundamentally changed how I worked, and I believe it’s the single biggest reason I advanced quickly through promotions and expanded responsibilities during my time there.

Why this question works

Most people, especially early in their careers, orient their day around their task list. What did my manager assign me? What’s due this week? That’s not a bad instinct. Delivering on your responsibilities matters.

But it’s a narrow lens.

The question I was asking pushed me to look wider. And here’s what made it actually powerful: it forced me to stop thinking only about my own output.

Every day it pushed me to think about the team, the systems, and the people around me. Not just what I was delivering, but what was slowing everyone else down. What gaps existed that nobody owned. Where I could make something better for more than just myself.

That shift, from “what’s my job?” to “what would actually move things forward?”, is where the real leverage lives.

What it looked like in practice

Early on, that looked like rewriting the spec template my team used so everyone wrote better, clearer specs, then sharing it with program managers on other teams. It meant improving how we collected and shared customer input across the team rather than keeping it siloed.

Later it meant thinking more broadly about the business, aligning with other teams, and finding ways to create impact beyond my immediate group.

None of those were on my assigned task list. All of them made the team more effective.

The compounding effect

Here’s what I noticed over time: doing your core job well gets you a solid performance review. Looking for ways to make the system around you better gets you noticed, trusted, and promoted.

Leaders at big companies aren’t looking for people who execute their task list. They’re looking for people who improve the team around them. People who identify friction and remove it. People who see leverage that others miss.

The impact question trains you to look for exactly that.

A note on scope

This isn’t about doing other people’s jobs or overstepping. It’s about staying curious about what’s holding the team back and being willing to help fix it when you can.

The scope of what you can influence grows as you advance. But the habit of asking the question works at every level. I still ask a version of it today across the companies I work with.

This question is even more relevant now

When I was coming up at Microsoft, the tools available to an individual contributor were largely the same ones everyone else had. Your leverage came from how you thought, how hard you worked, and how well you understood the system around you.

AI changes that equation.

If you’re early in your career right now and you’re already asking “how do I make the biggest impact from where I sit?”, AI gives you a force multiplier to act on the answers in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

You can do in hours what used to take days. You can take on projects that would have felt out of reach. You can make your team better in ways that weren’t possible when you were just one person.

The mindset is the same. The leverage is just bigger.

If you’re early in your career

Stop starting your day with your task list. Start with this:

From where I sit right now, what’s the highest-impact thing I can do today?

Let the answer guide your priorities. Look for leverage in the systems around you. Help your teammates be more effective, not just yourself.

That shift in mindset, more than any specific skill or credential, is what separates people who advance quickly from people who stay stuck.

And right now, for the first time, the tools exist to act on that mindset at a scale that wasn’t available to any of us when we were starting out.