Starting a new role is equally overwhelming and exciting. New systems, people, responsibilites, and more than anything expectations. Even if it’s a lot to take in, it’s also the best time to set the tone for your next career chapter. The first few months are when you build momentum, earn trust, and lay the foundation for how you’re perceived.

This post isn’t about the shiny new code you’ll read or waiting for your manager to hand you perfect opportunities, but how to spot the wins that might be overlooked, claiming something as your own, and compounding your satisfaction and value.

When you’re starting, your biggest advantage is fresh eyes but biggest weakness is lack of context. These can be easy wins for you to claim credit through these newfound fixes and take the needed time to expose yourself to all the context while still contributing.

These are typically simple issues like missing documentation, awkward workflows, small performance hiccups. They don’t make it onto roadmaps because they aren’t glamorous, yet they quietly drag on productivity and morale across many staff.

How to find them:

• Pay attention to moments where you think: “This should exist already.”
• Notice what slows you down when onboarding, it’s likely slowing others too.
• Listen for grumbles in standups or Slack channels that get brushed off.
• Ask teammates what annoys them daily but “isn’t worth fixing.”

By picking off these quick wins, you earn credibility fast and develop the necessary context for bigger contributions into the future. Don’t overstay this regime if possible.

When you’re new, it’s easy to focus on your immedate team, but most meaningful systems don’t live comfortably in a single team’s boundary. Local optimizations are good for early wins, but org-level impact and most of the friction lives in the overall system between teams.

How to work cross-functionally:

• Spend time with neighboring teams early and ask what they own and what slows them
• Follow dependencies: understand flows from your work into other systems
• Watch for recurring cross-team handoffs that stall progress, these are ripe
• Invite others into your design reviews or post-mortems to gain wider perspective

By reaching beyond your immediate scope, you’ll uncover higher-leverage improvements and avoid local optimizations that don’t matter at scale. Just as importantly, you build relationships and credibility across the org, influence that compounds over time.

Just remember, teams like their boundaries, don’t invite yourself to fix their problems

Not all work has the same return. Some changes only help you briefly, while others ripple outward and continue paying dividends long after you’ve moved on. These are effort multipliers, the small investments that scale disproportionately with usage.

They come in two main forms.

System multipliers are technical improvements where even a tiny efficiency gain compounds at scale i.e. a 1% optimization might save millions of requests or hours of compute.

People multipliers are improvements to tools, documentation, or workflows that dozens of engineers rely on often. The upfront cost is the same, but you gain a wider audience.

How to find them:

• Look for hot paths: code, queries, or services that constantly run at scale
• Identify tools or processes every engineer interacts with regularly
• Notice where recurring manual work can be automated and removed forever
• Ask: “If this got just a little bit better, how many people would notice?”

Focusing on multipliers turns your effort into leverage. The work you do once keeps saving time, reducing costs, or speeding up velocity long after you’ve finished it.

Quick wins are great, but they’re not enough to define you. To really make a mark, you need a project that you can point to and say: “I built that.” Something end-to-end, with your name on the design, implementation, responsibility, and follow-through.

A namesake project matters because it creates identity. It gives your teammates a shorthand for your impact (“they’re the one who built X”), shows that you can carry something from start to finish, and develops the deeper context that only comes from true ownership.

How to own one:

• Look for gaps nobody claims but everyone needs
• Frame the project in terms of team benefit, not just personal interest
• Keep it scoped in phases so you can deliver and maintain it without getting buried
• Bring your manager in early so they see alignment, not distraction
• Don’t let the rest of your work slip, this cannot become your obsession

Do this well, and you’ll be known for more than incremental fixes. You’ll be the person who took an idea to completion, building credibility, pride, and trust that follow.

No side questing, it’s great if you also enjoy building it but it has to be necessary

Beyond specific strategies, a few habits make the early months smoother:

• Have weekly 1:1s with your manager: Feedback loops should be tight at the start so you can adjust quickly and keep your manager informed of your intent/progres.
• Keep a running list of observations: Capture friction points, questions, or oddities as you go. Fresh eyes fade fast and your memory of issues even faster.
• Ask “why” often: Most systems have history; understanding the context behind choices builds empathy and avoids naive fixes because you think you found a golden ticket.
• Share progress early and often. Small demos or updates build trust and show momentum.
• Shadow teammates. Watching how others debug, test, or ship code reveals shortcuts you’d never find alone, sometimes team or org specific tooling and patterns.
• Balance breadth with depth. Explore widely in your first weeks, then commit to one or two areas where you can make a visible impact, learning is fun progress is better.

Early wins aren’t just about making life easier or shaving seconds off a workflow. They’re how you shape your reputation, earn trust, and set the trajectory for everything that comes after.

These wins compound to create momentum, credibility, relationships, and pride that carry into bigger and more enjoyable responsibilities.

The trick is knowing when to move on. Low-hanging fruit, effort multipliers, and namesake projects are foundations, but not finish lines. The real growth comes from tackling harder, riskier problems with the confidence you’ve built.

Start strong, build smart, and take pride in what you create, and more than anything enjoy it because what’s the point otherwise.