Putting a dollar $ign on your impact
Proving how your work contributes to the bottom line, even when your job is about the squishy feely stuff
Unless you’re in sales, it’s likely you don’t have an exact price tag for how much money your efforts brought in last quarter. But even though attributing specific value to our work is a hard thing to do, that doesn’t stop the question from being asked…
Hey, can you get me numbers on your business impact this year? Kgreatthanks.
To which you probably reply, “Uh…sure thing,” then stare into space for a good 45 minutes wondering how you’re going to pull this off. Maybe you try and find the number of hours your team spent building product this year, determine your percentage of that total, multiply it by the revenue your product reported earning, hope it comes out to a positive number and that nobody asks about your maths. Or maybe you take the philosophical approach, grabbing a few too-pretentious-to-question quotes on the value of design from the latest issue of Fast Company.
Yep, that’s one way to do it.
But friends, I’m here to tell you, this scenario does not have to leave you with that Tom Cruise finds out he’s doing yet another Mission Impossible and swears he’s super stoked about it, no really feeling.
Get out your super agent gear because I’m going to teach you my “bullet proof, game on sucker, let’s lawyer up, Pentagon down, next level this” method in 5 kind’ve sort’ve easy steps:
1. Make your mission matter: Objectives
2. Prove your results: Key Results
3. Make a plan that tracks: Epics
4. Prepare your case: Tracking
5. Crunch the numbers: Reporting
Anytime, anywhere boss person. Let’s do this.
Step 1. Make your mission matter
Objectives and key results, also known as…the dreaded OKRs. Terrible acronym, great practice, most importantly a way to make sure your mission is valued and rewarded by the powers that be.
This is where I start every new year, new job, or new role — defining the objectives that I’m going to focus my efforts on for the next 6 to 12 months. Why start with objectives? If I don’t consider how my work contributes to the goals of my company, team, boss and myself as an individual, there’s a good chance I’ll never reach them. And there’s a better chance I’m going to waste time on tasks that won’t contribute to my impact, sense of accomplishment, or overall happiness. And what are the odds that my non-value adding work will be valued or rewarded? Not very good.
There are lots of guides on how to write objectives, but here’s what’s been working for me and what I’d recommend for you:
- Have a conversation with your manager about what’s expected of you. Try to get them to state it in a few concise points, like “get all of our teams using design thinking” or “deliver at least 3 valuable AI features into our product this year.”
- Find your company’s main goals for the year. If your boss doesn’t know them or your company doesn’t do OKRs, extract what they’d be from annual reports, the company website, the news, internal quarterly updates, leadership town halls, or wherever your top executives share important messages.
- Consider where you’d like to be a year from now and the kind of work you’ll need to do to get there.
With all of that feedback in mind, craft up 3–5 general statements that categorize the work you’ll be doing to contribute to these goals — a.k.a. your objectives. OKR fans will tell you the most important part of writing an objective is to include a measurable target. I tend to save the numbers for my key results (see section 2 > Prove your results). I prefer focusing on getting the categories my work will fall into right because they’re so important to everything that comes after this. Here are a few of my objectives for this year:
Objective 1: Enable teams to recognize and implement the most valuable AI use cases into their products.
Objective 2: Accelerate AI design and delivery.
Objective 3: Actively develop my own leadership skills.
They’re broad enough to hold lots of solutions, big enough that they’ll take me a good long while to deliver, and distinct enough that I won’t get confused about which objective I’m contributing to with a task.
With objectives, you know for certain that the work you’re doing is going to be valued.
Step 2: Prove your results
Objectives are just a lot of pretty words if you don’t have a way to prove you’ve accomplished them. For each of my objectives, I try to come up with the best ways to measure my progress, these are my key results (KRs). For my first objective this year, here are my two KRs:
Objective 1: Enable teams to recognize and implement the most valuable AI use cases into their products.
Key result 1: Deliver new or improved AI features into 80% of our products
Key result 2: Improve our AI feature NPS scores by 50%
Those key results might seem weirdly unrelated to my objective, but consider how they’d be evidence that teams are better understanding AI–and they’re numbers I know we have. You rarely have an obvious way to measure the impact of your work. Get creative and think about all the different effects your efforts will have. What can you capture, either quantitatively or qualitatively, as a direct result or indirect outcome? Also, ask your offering managers, product managers…the business school grads hanging around. They know about this stuff.
I’ve done some KRs that, at first, I felt uncomfortable using because I could only estimate my progress towards them–until I realized a rough guess is better than no guess:
Key result: Teams I work with deliver AI implementations 3x faster than other teams
How I measure it: I can’t tell you exactly how much faster teams I work with delivered, but I can ask them to give me an estimate and take the average.
Key result: New AI features contribute to 30% of the product’s sales pipeline
How I measure it: I can’t ask clients exactly what percentage of their decision was influenced by seeing a feature my team worked on, but I can ask the sales person to make an educated guess and claim that percentage of the total sale.
Key result: Reach more than 3000 people with my company’s AI messaging in 2020
How I measure it: I can’t tell you exactly how many people heard me speak at different events, but I can find out how many people attended each event and then estimate how many people were at my presentation.
When you’re trying to prove impact, exactness isn’t the point. Doing what you can to give your leadership a way of confidently quantifying your value is the point.
Step 3. Make a trackable plan
So you have some A-OK OKRs, now comes the question…
“Well, how do I get there?”
Same as you always do, crank up those Talking Heads and start get that brain to storming. Write down all the things you could do to deliver on your key results. Get crazy, have fun with it, share it with others, ask them for ideas. This is what you’re going to spend your life doing for awhile, so make it good.
Once you’re liking your lists, synthesize them down into 2–3 main epics per objective. Save the ones you don’t choose for when you finish early (which you probably will because this method is also going to make you super efficient, you super agent, you).
Now group your objectives, key results, and epics together and send that list to your manager with an invitation to discuss.
You have 2 goals for this meeting:
- Get your manager’s edits and approval on your OKRs and epics.
- Show them (don’t tell them–that’s far too blasé) that you can manage yourself, plan a goal oriented strategy, and that you care about impacting the success of your future, your team, your company and yes, them.
Use this process 2–3 times over and you’ll find your manager asks less and less about what you’re doing. Instead, they ask you to help others organize what they’re doing. Or better yet, to do cooler stuff.
P.S. Now that we’re down to epics I can tell you, you can change any of your OKRs or epics at any time. Hopefully you only need to change epics a little bit, key results even less, and objectives almost never. But do what yo gotta do, things change.
Step 4. Prepare your case
You know that thing Warren Beatty says to Madonna in Truth or Dare when she loses her voice?
He was being Saucy Beatty, but hey — I could ask the same thing about every task you did today. Why would you do something if it doesn’t contribute to the big picture? Pretty much everything you do should be trackable up to the CEO’s OKRs.
But howwwwwwwww???? It’s not as daunting as you think. Here we go, last part, it’s dense but it’s quick:
A. Get your approved OKRs and epics into a goal tracking system
You want a place to list each OKR, complete with its description, key results, and epics. Doesn’t have to be fancy, use a text doc if you want. The trick is in how you update it. Once a month, once a quarter, or maybe as it happens, quickly add notes about significant steps you’ve achieved to deliver on it.
I use snapshots, links, quotes — anything that validates progress I’ve made. You can use this goal tracker when someone asks you for an impromptu progress update, and it’ll be especially helpful in generating your end of year report (see section 5 > Crunch the numbers). My goal tracker looks like this:
B. Start your own your kanban board
Wait, you don’t have a personal kanban board for tracking, like, everything you do at work?
It may sound massively redundant, but to fully report on your impact, you need to be tracking all of your efforts in one place. You should have stories and issues linked up to epics and KRs about
- what you do on your team
- the side projects you’re involved in
- little things you do to make work better
- personal initiatives that are making you a more valuable employee
- and anything else that takes up your time each day.
Everything you work on should be able to be categorized under one or more of your objectives. This board will make sure you’re never without something to do, remind you of your goals, keep you focused on your progress, and get you thinking more critically about where to invest your time and energy.
You can use any kanban tool that lets you filter to see what issues feed up to a main card. Organize it using your OKRs and epics, something like this:
From left to right…
Column 1: New issues and ideas I need to categorize later
Column 2: My big objectives
Column 3: A card for each key result, tied to its objective card
Column 4: A card for each epic, tied to its key result card
Column 5: Break epics down into cards with stories and issues
Columns 6: Issues I need to do this sprint
Column 7: Issues I’m doing right now
Now we’re getting serious, y’all.
C. Regular, but non-annoying, manager updates
Once a week, every week, send your manager an email update. It should be a list of short, direct bullet points describing what you did that week, categorized by epic and listed under their objective heading.
I try to send mine every Friday at 10am. I use colors and text weights to make it scannable. I include a section at the top of the most important things my manager needs to know in case he doesn’t read the whole thing. Usually it looks like this (unless it’s Friday the 13th, or my birthday, or any other happening I simply must theme it with):
Update for week of 3.13
This makes check-ins with my manager almost non-existent. He knows what I’m focused on, how it relates to his goals, and he can quickly message me if he wants to change priorities. It also stops any questions like, “Hey, what’s happening with this? Why haven’t you done that? Why didn’t you tell me about that thingamabob?,” which is nice for both of us.
The times we do talk are saved for big picture strategy topics.
5. Crunch the numbers
If you use all of these ideas, or even some of them, make some time at the end of the year to pull the data from these tools into an easy-to-read report. The documentation you’ve been keeping should tell the story of what you delivered, your role on various efforts, key achievements you were a part of, even nice things people said about your work. To complete your story, you need to know what impact your efforts have made since you completed them. This means reaching out to people you worked with throughout the year to get those final, final key result numbers. You’re going to ask questions about:
- The impact your work had on their success this year (NPS scores go up? Clients giving great reviews? Executives featuring it at conferences? Press releases?)
- Latest sales numbers or incoming sales estimates they can attribute to something you did or contributed (Ask if they discussed or showed off your feature at a sales pitch and how the client responded)
- Less tangible wins or positive outcomes they can attribute to something you did or contributed (The team culture improved because they felt productive? New IP came out of your ideas? The connections you introduced them to lead to entirely new outcomes?)
- What the people you’ve helped and mentored achieved because of your guidance and support (New skills? Confidence? More connections? Better at their job?)
- And finally, confirmation that any numbers or quotes they may have have given you earlier in the year are still accurate and you have their permission to use them.
Doing this might take a week or two or even three, but if you get those last comments and key results in…
…you’ll have real numbers and real quotes that prove your value and demonstrate how everything you did this year measurably contributed to your company’s goals!
The whole point of this impact report is to make it super easy for managers to understand exactly what you’re good at, how much time and effort you put in, quantify the company’s return on their investment in you, and give them the objective data they need to say yes to that raise you’re asking for.
In fact, you can just go ahead and calculate exactly how much that raise should be for based on your estimated value divided by working hours in the year and have that contract ready for them to sign at the end!
Just kidding, doooooon’t do that. But isn’t it cool that you could now?
Super agent degree: complete.
Update
I just found out about this awesome online MBA course for designers. Can’t recommend continuously learning more about the business of design and design of business enough:
If you have ways of determining the value of the work you do I’d love to hear about them, please comment below!
Jennifer Sukis is a Design Director for AI Transformation at IBM, based in Austin, TX. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
