If you are a senior engineer, PM or designer, you should own a graph.
One of the fastest ways to get better at your job is to own a graph.
There are many ways to do work that don’t matter, and there are many ways to do work that do matter but don’t articulate that value well. Owning a chart solves both problems.
Solving problems that matter
At senior level you must have big problems. Basically any problem worth owning can be graphed. On a multi-quarter time frame, the things you do should be visible in graph form. Things like:
- Reduce pages
- Improve performance
- Save money
- Generate revenue
- Reduction of customer churn
Not every piece of work you do needs to be part of a chart, but if you don’t have at least one chart under your belt, you’re not operating at a higher level.
Concise communication
One of the most common frustrations for seniors is that their impact is not understood. One of the hardest truths for people to learn is that this is their problem: they don’t communicate well enough.
Charts are the most powerful tool you have for communicating your impact.
People often try to explain their impact in words. They might say something like, “I reduced the number of pages by 15%.” If you send that to your leadership, good leaders immediately have twenty follow-up questions. 15% from what to what? Over what period? Did it happen suddenly or gradually? Was it already declining or did your actions clearly influence that?
Charts show all this information right away. You see scale, history, volatility. One graph can replace paragraphs of text. You will often also be given a free link to the data so that the recipient can check the graph on site to gain confidence in its integrity.
Furthermore, this ability to succinctly communicate impact and efforts is a crucial tool for obtaining feedback. Sometimes you’re not working on the right thing. Sometimes the size of your impact isn’t worth the time you put into it. If you present your work in ambiguous prose, you will not get direct feedback on it.
Displaying your work on a graph gives you an extremely concise way to both gain recognition and receive feedback.
Tying everything together
In On Achieving Goals we talked about the radical simplicity of getting things done: set a goal and check it.
This is an addition to that concept – you should do that process, with a graph.
This combination is so effective that it can be the difference between high performance and unemployment.
Summary
Charts are a crucial unit of ownership for seniors to track their progress, communicate results, and get feedback. If you don’t have one, fix that as soon as possible.
Appendix: Tips & Tricks
Various tips and checks:
- You know you’re on the right track when other people refer to your chart. People are lazy and if your chart is useful and accurate, it will boost your career.
- Your chart doesn’t have to be perfect on day 1. You’ll get feedback on it and iterate on it over time, and that’s fine (that’s actually proprietary).
- There is an anti-pattern to avoid, which is ‘owning too many charts’. Some people have a thousand charts that they “own” by showing them in a meeting when it suits their story. You should own some very important charts. You have too many metrics, so the charts you own should be few and extremely valuable.
- If you’re an engineer looking for a graph to own, quality issues are a good place to start. Pages, incidents, bugs, and achievements all have graphs that beg to be owned. If you are a PM/designer: support tickets, revenue, competitive win rates, add retention rates are all great things to own.
- You don’t always have to have the ability to move the metric solo (although it’s great if you can). Simply keeping an eye on something important and following up persistently to steer it in the right direction is enough to get your career going.
#chart