I have a bit of a secret, a way to keep dev enjoyable/actually do some chores in between the stream of sales driven development feature requests and the (luckily rare) bug reports. I call them submarine tasks.

The concept is simple. You want to show a new chart on a page. Great. The chart is added. Behind the scenes though, you take the time to finally get around to that refactor you needed to do on merging two previous chart libraries.

Need to shift permissions to a lower level? Finally denormalize it all so performance improves across the board.

Ostensibly they’re not tasks that needed to get done. You could still get the original request done. Also the team is actually incredibly receptive, there’s never push back if I say something needs to get done, even if it’s not saleable. But it feels good to do something while fixing something else.

Enjoyable might be too strong a word, but I just like the idea of using a small point to push through a broader arrowhead.