Promote Yourself with a Personal Value Story

At Dreamforce 2022, I co-led a workshop in the Architect Vista called “Create Your Architect Value Story”. This workshop was full both times I presented, and many attendees asked if there was information about value stories available online. This post is a response to those inquiries and the demand I’ve seen for more information about value stories.

You might be surprised to learn that there are actually two types of value stories: project value stories and personal value stories. This post focuses on creating a personal value story. You can learn more about the project value story here.

What is a personal value story?

A personal value story enables you to communicate your value as an architect. It’s the opportunity for you to showcase that you are a trusted digital advisor in terms that both technical and non-technical stakeholders can understand. Ultimately, a personal value story enables you to demonstrate the value of your solutions and also the unique value that you as an architect have brought to the projects you’ve worked on. This story can be used to promote yourself at your current job or to market yourself to a new potential employer.

Why do architects need a personal value story?

Architects do a lot on a project. They don’t just configure or code. They influence the business and advise on how to manage people, processes, and technology. As an architect, you are solving complex problems that span multiple functional areas, you’re taking strategic approaches to enable new business capabilities, and you’re constantly evaluating trade-offs to find optimal solutions for your business stakeholders.

But let’s face it. Many of our stakeholders don’t know exactly what we do. And to make matters worse, the strategic work that architects do can be hard to quantify. This is where a personal value story comes in!

So what’s in a personal value story, anyway?

The formula for a good value story looks like this:

Business Challenge + Solution + Value = Value Story

Business challenges are the problems the business wants to solve. The solution is how you’ve applied people, processes, and technology to solve the business problem. Finally, the value is the measurable ways your solution brings value.

We’ve all written a resume or summarized our work experience for a LinkedIn profile. So what makes creating a personal value story different from these activities? In my experience, many resumes or profiles focus too much on technical solutions. In fact, many resumes I’ve seen only include the technical solution and nothing else! Let’s take an example: a resume might state that “I worked with CDP and Marketing Cloud.” True as it may be, this statement doesn’t tell a complete story, especially for someone who might not be deeply familiar with the technology. Let’s apply the personal value story equation to improve this statement. “I worked with CDP and Marketing Cloud” turns into something like: “I led a marketing modernization project (the business challenge) by implementing Marketing Cloud and CDP (the solution). This resulted in a 30% increase in lead generation (the value).”

Let’s try another one. Instead of saying “I helped deliver a service cloud project, and I’m also familiar with Einstein bots” you could say “I delivered a project involving Einstein bots and automation (the solution) to reduce customer support calls (the business challenge), decreasing the overall cost of support by $1M annually (the value).”

There are two important details to note here. First, in your personal value story, employ strong verbs to describe your work. The example above used the verb “led” instead of “helped”. While everyone understands that you aren’t delivering an entire project by yourself, as an architect you are the leader of the team. Take credit for this!

Second, it’s important to use metrics to quantify value. In order to do this, you’ll need a baseline. This is why it’s important to start crafting your value story while you’re actively working on a project. Don’t let your value story be an afterthought. In some cases, it can be difficult to baseline your metrics retroactively. For example, if you’re working on an org migration, be sure to measure performance of the original system before it is retired.

Finally, remember that your value story is a living document. Once you’ve written your personal value story, revisit it annually, at minimum, to keep it up to date. Use your new value story to update your resume and your LinkedIn profile.

Conclusion

A personal value story helps you communicate the value of your solutions and also the unique value you bring to the table as an architect. A good value story includes the business challenge, the solution, and the value the solution has provided to the business.

Ready to craft your own personal value story? We created the following resources to help you faster:

• Architect Value Story Metrics — A list of common success metrics for a variety of capabilities you might be working on.
• Personal Value Story Template in Lucidchart — This template is useful when you want to visualize your personal value story
• Create Your Architect Value Story — The slides from our Dreamforce workshop