The question that changes how you talk about your work

Look at your CV for a second, or your LinkedIn.

Mine used to say things like: “Launched the new product.” “Rebuilt the process.” “Delivered the programme.”

All of these were true. But they didn’t show at all what value I created, and could have been written by anyone in a similar role.

I thought about this a lot after a recent coffee chat with one of my mentors.

How charities show the value they create

We were catching up, and she told me about her work with a charity that supports young people in the local community, to get educated and find employment. In many cases, that changes the life of these young people and their families.

None of that shows up as revenue — however, the value still has to be shown to someone, because that’s how the next round of funding gets agreed for the charity.

There’s a model for charities, my mentor said. It’s called the logic model, and it has five steps.

Input — your resources. Time, budget, tools.

Activities — what you do with them. The charity runs a programme for young people.

Output — the countable result. 40 young people finished the programme.

Outcome — what changed because of it. They started applying for jobs.

Impact — the second-order effect. Youth unemployment in the area went down.

This model is powerful — and I will show you how it applies to your work.

What impact means in your work context
 

Two things that are easy to misunderstand about impact:

#1: You might think that the impact of your work has to be a number. Yes, a number helps, but an impact could also be that someone’s life quality improved - that’s nothing quantifiable. You can describe the change instead. More examples on that later.

#2: You might also think that to claim an impact, you have to have caused it on our own. I used to think like that: If revenue went up after we launched something I’d worked on, I thought: There are probably more factors involved. Better to stay quiet than say something I couldn’t prove.

Charities don’t work that way. Youth unemployment doesn’t fall because of one programme — local businesses are hiring, the economy might change. The charity is one part of it — they say so, and funders accept it.

Similarly, you can say “my work led to this” without saying “I did this by myself.” Listen to how Senior leaders in your business articulate this — they will do that naturally.

Your CV probably stops at the output
 

“Released the new feature.” “Fixed the issue.” “Built the plan.” That’s output. It’s what’s on your mind every day, because delivering it is your job.

But: Nobody promotes you for output. They promote you for what your work was worth, and that’s two further steps to think through — outcome and impact.

Ask: and what changed?
 

Say you rebuilt a deployment process at your company. The output is the new pipeline: what took two days now takes two hours.

Now ask: what changed because of it?

Your team used to release once a month, now they release every week.

That’s the outcome. Same output, but it already sounds like a different achievement.

Make it a habit to ask this question every week when you write down your wins.

What did I do, and what changed?

Be specific. Use numbers where you have them: revenue, downtime avoided, hours saved, users. Where you don’t have numbers, describe the change.

What to do when you don’t know
 

Often you won’t know exactly what changed. You’re several steps away from the customer, and nobody came back to tell you what happened.

Ask the people who do know — the product manager, business analyst, or whoever sits closest to the money or the customer.

Something like: “I’m putting together my review notes — do you know what happened to customer renewals after we shipped that?”

And if nobody knows, go and find out. That is an important knowledge gap for the company — and even if you are not the one responsible for filling the gap, you’ll be the one who noticed.

Ask: so what?
 

Now go one step further with the deployment example. Releases went from monthly to weekly.

So what?

It means that when a competitor launched something, your company could answer in 2 weeks instead of waiting months.

That’s impact — and it sounds fundamentally different than “improved CI/CD pipeline” on your CV.

It can reach further than you’d expect. If your users work in healthcare, a feature you shipped might mean a clinician gets a result the same day instead of waiting for the overnight run. Which in extreme cases means this could save lives.

Now say it out loud
 

How do you use this framework in a review, or to talk to someone at an event who asked what you do?

Three sentences: output, outcome, impact.

For example:

Output: “I rebuilt our deployment process.”

Outcome: “It used to take two days, now it takes two hours, so the team went from monthly releases to weekly.”

Impact: “When a competitor launched last spring, we responded in two weeks instead of a quarter.”

Practice it with couple of your achievements — so it feels natural when it comes up in a conversation.

The pattern you only see when you look across everything

After that coffee chat, I sat down to look at my CV and my LinkedIn and asked the impact question (so what?) of everything on there.

One answer kept coming back. Again and again, in different roles and companies, my work had led to a company being able to build a second revenue stream.

I had never told it to anyone like that. Instead, I’d been describing the jobs I had done.

That’s what happens when you ask the question across several pieces of work at once. The pattern gives you the thing you’re known for.

Your next step

Pick one bullet point from your CV or LinkedIn — something that you did or achieved (output).

Ask what changed because of it (outcome). Then ask so what (impact).

Make sure you say it aloud, to practice.

And if you then have time, look across several of them — is there a pattern in the impact you are creating?