Why does describing what I did leave something out?
When people describe the work that they do, they often are simply describing an output, or a tangible thing they created.
You hear it in interviews, on resumes, in LinkedIn profiles, and in everyday conversations about someone’s job:
“I created new messaging.”
“I booked 40 sales calls.”
“I updated the product roadmap.”
Those statements tell us something about the work we did and what consumed our time, sure, but they leave another far more important question unanswered:
What did that work allow to happen?
Creating something and understanding its impact are two completely different parts of the story. When we stop at what we produced, we can miss the very thing that helps us understand whether the work made a difference. And when we anchor ourselves more in that difference, we start to unlock a whole new way of telling our story.
What is the difference between an output and an outcome?
This is probably obvious for many of you, maybe? But also worth being on the same page, because I’ve seen a lot of managers and leaders not understand this difference.
An output is the thing you produce or deliver. It’s often tangible and a direct result of something you physically do.
An outcome is what changes because of an output you created. This is less tangible but often something more measurable.
A messaging document is an output. Helping teams explain a product consistently, answer customer questions, or make clearer decisions about how to position it can be outcomes. Having clearer messaging across all forms of media which closes deals faster is also an outcome. Two different types, which I’ll touch on in a bit.
The document itself tells us what you created. What happens when people use it tells us more about its impact.
This does not mean output or volume is unimportant. If you work in support, the number of tickets you handle can help someone understand the scale of your work. If you work in quality assurance, the issues you identify and help resolve can provide useful context.
Those details belong in the picture and part of your story, but I consider them more as a way to set the scene rather than win over your listener.
Can a small amount of work have a large impact?
One of the things I look for is what I call (I’m sure others do too) an outsized impact: a piece of work that creates a substantial benefit relative to the effort required to produce it.
Sometimes we put enormous amounts of time and effort into work, create a lot of output, and then discover that very little changed because of it.
Other times, a relatively small contribution helps several people move forward.
For a hypothetical example, imagine a recurring handoff between two teams keeps causing confusion. A short clarification of who owns the next step and what information they need could help both teams avoid repeatedly working through the same misunderstanding.
The output might be a few lines in a shared document. The potential impact extends across the work those teams do afterward.
This way of thinking also influences how I prioritize. I look for work that can create meaningful impact without requiring an unnecessarily large amount of effort or output.
That does not mean every worthwhile task will be quick or easy. It means the amount of effort something requires is not, by itself, a measure of how useful it will be.
If you are putting a great deal into a piece of work, it is worth asking what that investment is actually enabling.
I won’t go into this too much more here, but this is also how you eventually get promoted into a principal role. The principal role is often a very coveted role in the tech industry, where you’re paid for the amount of impact you can deliver, far more than the amount of hours it takes you. And often, you actually need to be working fewer direct hours on a problem, because you need more time to simply think.
Do outcomes only mean the final business result?
The second place I see people get stuck often, is at the other end of the project.
Once they start thinking about outcomes, they jump straight to the final number: revenue growth, customer retention, or customer satisfaction.
And while sure those can be important results, and ones we see on resumes all of the time. A project has many steps between your contribution and that final number.
What happened at those steps?
Maybe your work allowed another team to operate more efficiently. Maybe it changed a process, helped you work more effectively, or brought an error to someone’s attention early enough to address it.
Those are outcomes too. 1000%
You do not have to jump all the way to revenue to find something meaningful. There may be a much clearer connection between your work and what it allowed the next person or team to do.
Consider a hypothetical sales guide. Producing the guide is the output, we’re on the same page about that now. If a salesperson uses it to answer a customer question accurately without waiting for another team, that is an intermediate outcome. A sale may happen later, but many other factors influence that decision.
It also means you can have a great impact, even if the final measurable result doesn’t reflect it. Which many people will argue and say “well if the final result didn’t move, how can your contribution have mattered.” And, well, those people just don’t think in systems.
You can explain the value of helping that salesperson without claiming that your guide caused the sale (or didn’t).
Why can intermediate outcomes tell a stronger story?
Final business results are often a group effort.
When you attach a large company-level metric to one small contribution, it can sound as though you are taking responsibility for work that was shared among many people.
I explore that distinction further in the article on explaining your contribution when a project was a team effort. The important point here is to stay clear about the connection between your work and the result.
Intermediate outcomes are often closer to what you actually did, which can make them easier to explain and support.
They can also make for more compelling interview stories, in my experience, because they help an employer understand how your approach might apply to a problem they recognize.
A hypothetical 30% increase in pipeline at one company does not tell another company exactly what you could help it accomplish. Its starting point, customers, resources, and business conditions may be (and often are) completely different. The same increase might not be feasible or even the result it needs.
But explaining how you identified a problem, changed an approach, and helped a team move forward gives someone more to work with.
They can understand your thinking. They can see what your contribution enabled. They may recognize a similar problem in their own business.
The headline number still has a place. It becomes more useful when you can explain the work and the intermediate changes that helped support it.
How can I look for the impact of my own work?
Choose one recent piece of work and ask:
- What did I produce or deliver? Name the output plainly.
- What did it allow to happen next? Look at what changed for you, another person, a team, or a process.
- How do I know that happened? Use a specific observation, example, piece of feedback, or relevant measure.
- How did that change support the wider project? Explain the connection without claiming responsibility for everything that followed.
If you are unsure what happened after you delivered the work, that is a great place to start your investigation. Ask someone who used it what it helped them do. You might discover an outcome you had overlooked, or find that the work needs adjusting to be useful. Or… in some cases… you might actually realize that thing you produced didn’t have any outcome, which we should also want to know!
You can also consider the effort involved. Was a lot of work creating very little change? Was there one small contribution that made a meaningful difference?
These questions help you understand your craft: how your particular approach creates something useful for other people.
When you look at your work, keep following the story one step beyond what you produced.
Because I did this, what became possible next?
