Read this in a blog:
"I persistently documented promotional evidence.
It’s critical to learn how to sell your work through quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Before starting a task, I searched for metrics that would show the current state of the system.
After working the task, I referred back to those metrics and performed a calculation to measure impact.
Then, I documented everything about the task in my promotion documents. I included a STAR write-up, quantitative metrics, and links to code reviews, graphs, or other work artifacts."
Could someone break this down into more step by step instructions? Was curious how you would search for metrics and then measure impact.
Let's start by looking at metrics and measuring impact with it since that was explicitly called out.
How would you prove your code actually did something for your team/company?
Some line that the company is tracking is going up. That line is a metric. If your project helped the company, the line's slope goes up more. That change of slope is your project's impact.
I recommend going through these lessons in the promotion course:
It is hard to come up with a step-by-step guide as this will vary by company. At a very, very broad level, the process is:
At Big Tech, this process will be super complicated as you'll need to set up an A/B test, dashboards, and a bunch of other stuff to measure the impact with extremely high granularity.
At startups, you might not even have to do this at all. A lot of startups will just ship stuff with minimal or even 0 logging. At early-stage startups where they're just building prototypes, the feedback can be purely qualitative/anecdotal.
Talk to your manager and tech lead about what success looks like in your team and how to measure it.