Thank you for your patience over the last six weeks while I released much less content than usual. I am especially appreciative because a few were vocal about their displeasure with my low productivity. I’m not one to share personal details, so I understand how it could feel like I ghosted my responsibilities to this community. I am grateful to everyone who trusted me enough to stay with the community and continue supporting it.
Earlier in my career, the negative voices would have taken all my attention, and I would have missed the overwhelming number of positive voices. One of my most valuable pieces of career advice is how to change that. A few negative voices deter so many people from advancing personally and professionally. Sometimes, a single negative comment or individual lives rent-free in our heads and stops us from doing what we’re good at.
If you don’t see your own value, it’s easier to focus on the few people who doubt it and miss the hundreds who don’t. This article is about value and the importance of being able to quantify it. The quantifying step is the difference between:
I have value and can prove it. That leads to seeking out and listening to people who see that same value.
I don’t know if I have value and need people to reinforce it. That leads to overemphasizing negative voices and feeling the need to prove yourself to everyone.
Shortcuts Don’t Work
If we can’t define our value, how do we articulate it to others? How do we defend it and ensure our value is respected? These are personal and professional challenges. The first sale you make is to yourself, and you will always be the first person to give yourself a chance.
True confidence in our own value comes from proving it to ourselves. Faking it until you make it or developing an overinflated sense of value is not enough. In both cases, small challenges result in outsized responses. Those who know what to look for will immediately see through the deception and can manipulate people through their insecurities.
There are more genuine shortcuts, but they don’t work either. You see ex-Google, ex-Uber, etc., in people’s resumes or LinkedIn profiles. Those are external sources of credibility, authority, and value. The challenge is that we don’t own them, and value is transferred to us by something outside our control.
‘Ex-Google’ and ‘former Apple’ used to be highly prestigious. Now, being a former leader or part of the AI organization means being associated with those companies’ declines. ‘Ex-Intel’ has been overtaken by ‘ex-NVIDIA’. ‘Previously Uber’ has lost its shine, and now it’s all about ‘former OpenAI’ or Anthropic.
I spend so much time on value frameworks because everything else gets easier once you can quantify your value in a way that convinces you. Knowing what you get paid for becomes a source of professional confidence. We must find ways to define our value that we own and control.
Leaders
Value should begin with leadership, but few leaders realize they have a role to play. I coach leaders to create a space in their team for each person. Leaders know they must clearly define roles, but most overlook the need to clearly define value creation as well. Both are critical to create space and belonging for everyone.
It begins with understanding how to define roles in terms of value. I build job descriptions around work products and capabilities.
“We need someone who can optimize Spark data pipelines for {use case}.”
The use case is just as important as the capabilities and work product. People use skills to deliver artifacts. When those artifacts are applied to a use case, they create value. The person who fills the role can answer questions about how they create value.
“I optimize Spark data pipelines for {use case and team(s)}.”
Effective leaders track their teams’ value creation and communicate it up (leadership visibility) and down (team visibility). When that happens, each team member can add the amount of value they deliver to the end of the last statement. Knowing we deliver work products is one thing, but understanding our work products’ impacts is more meaningful. Quantifying value increases team member confidence.
It’s not enough to just tell the team member. Leaders must also explain each member’s role and value creation to the team. Mutual respect starts with everyone knowing where everyone else fits. It’s important to know how to quantify our value. It’s empowering to see people around us understand and respect it.
Effective leaders communicate what each team member can be trusted to do and what they can hold each other accountable for. Respect, trust, and accountability are the characteristics that great teams share. Leaders should measure and reinforce all three, but we don’t do a great job preparing tech leaders for their roles.
Leaders As Individuals
Leaders should teach us to quantify our value and expect those around us to respect it. However, few of us are fortunate enough to get quality leaders early in our careers. Few leaders in tech have been given formal leadership training or mentorship. Unprepared leaders focus on technology as our primary means of creating value, but that makes them overlook:
The people on our teams who create the technology.
The people who consume and derive value from the technology we create.
Leaders who view technology as the primary value generator also minimize the value created by exceptional leadership. They focus on continuing to deliver technology. Leaders build a team that’s more productive together than they would be as a collection of individuals. The improved productivity is how leaders become multipliers. One hour of a leader’s time is multiplied across each team member.
Leaders are also individuals, and quantifying their value is a critical first step to making a place for each team member. When leaders are held back by defining their value in terms of technical work products, each team member is a competitor. When a team member is more productive or delivers higher quality work, it threatens the leader.
That changes after leaders measure their value as a function of increased team productivity. Every improvement in team productivity is a positive reflection on their leadership. Team members get credit for the work product. The leader gets credit for the incremental improvements.
Individual Contributors Without Leadership
Most technical individual contributors (ICs) aren’t getting value defined for them. We must fill the gap ourselves. Defining your value, creating a place for yourself in the team, and quantifying your work products’ value is more of a challenge from the bottom up. However, it’s not impossible.
We need to define the work products we deliver. For many technical ICs, that’s a long list. We are hired with one role in mind, but we are drafted into service doing a lot more. It’s a function of teams being understaffed and their value creation being poorly understood.
When the team leader can’t define how their team creates value, no one else in the business can either. The result is being pulled in multiple directions and being asked to deliver a range of work products. Rather than listing everything you’re asked to do, it’s best to list the most valuable work products you deliver.
Problem two is we don’t always have enough information to define how much value each work product type creates. It’s possible the business doesn’t track value creation that way. I often see metrics like the number of models delivered as the primary method of determining value. AI Product Managers and Strategists can help, but not every business has those roles.
The combination of immature processes and unsupported leaders creates much of the impostor syndrome and self-doubt that technical ICs experience. Doubt is ever present until we have the numbers to make that first sale to ourselves. That feeling is compounded by the rest of the business's failure to see the team’s value. CEOs commoditize technical teams and marginalize the value of great technical ICs with layoffs.
Solving The Value Definition Problem For ICs
It’s difficult to move around your leader, but getting close to stakeholders, users, and possibly customers is an effective way to do it. Stakeholders understand the value implicitly and can give you guidance on how they measure impact. You can create a connection between their KPIs or metrics and your work products.
Baselines are critical to defining value creation. Once you have an idea of how stakeholders measure impact, you can use those metrics and KPIs as a baseline. The value your work products deliver is measured by the improvement over the baseline.
The doubts I hear most often are:
I don’t know how to prove that I was responsible for all the improvement.
I was part of a group effort and didn’t deliver everything necessary to create the improvement.
Would the result have been the same if you hadn’t been on the team? Would the improvement have been the same if you hadn’t delivered the work product? When you feel like anyone could have taken your place on the team and delivered the same outcome, you might be right. Focusing on your value means finding places where you deliver better than others do.
This often leads to a sobering realization. External forces have pulled you in the directions they considered valuable. That robs us of focusing our careers and learning paths on what we consider valuable and get satisfaction from delivering. Most never become better than average because they don’t control that focus.
When we can’t define our value, we get pulled in several directions and never master any of them. While it’s good to sample multiple career possibilities, the goal must be to find one to focus on.
Solving the value definition problem requires us to take control of our careers and define the value we want to create. HROI’s mission is “Create your own opportunities. Define your impact.” This is a critical step in moving from being internally motivated to being externally motivated.
What do you do better than most others? If you don’t have an answer, reframe the question: What would you enjoy learning to do better than others? Leaders should help us define this early in our careers, but that doesn’t always happen. Leaders should also help us through transitions when our answer to that question changes. It’s up to us to fill that gap when they don't.
As an IC transitioning to strategist, this is the foundation for a personal career roadmap- thanks again Vin for sharing your insights!
I am immensely grateful to you for writing this poignant article! I often think that in the absence of feedback we tend to reinforce the wrong beliefs. There is so much value in receiving the right feedback, but we're not taught to/how to solicit/provide/receive it.
In many ways, this article reads as being part of the leadership maturity levels. <3