The 5 levels of communicating your impact as an engineer in tech:

Level 1: What you did

Migrated the user authentication system to OAuth 2.0

Level 2: Had impact

...which reduced login failures

Level 3: Specific impact

...by 40% (from 15% to 9%)

Level 4: Tied to a goal

...exceeded our Q2 reliability target by 2x

Level 5: and dollars or top-level business metrics

...and prevented $2.1M in annual revenue loss and saved 15 hours/week in support

If you can include all of these in your self-reviews or resume, it's the strongest impact you can communicate. Still, reaching Level 5 is hard. You might not have all the data to get there, so Level 3-4 is ok too.

The key is being as specific as possible with the data you have.

If you found this helpful, you might also like the free custom GPT I created that provides instant tips to improve any impact statement using this framework.

Check it out and a lot more details on what to do/not to do in the latest High Growth Engineer article!