Own a Graph

If you are a senior engineer or PM or designer, you should own a graph.

One of the quickest ways to get better at your job is to own a graph.

There are many ways to do work that don’t matter and there are many ways to do work that matters but fail to articulate that value well. Owning a graph solves both of these problems.

Solving Problems That Matter

At a senior level, you must own big problems. Basically every problem worth owning can be shown on a graph. On a multi-quarter timeframe, the things you’re doing should be visible in graph format. Things like:

• Reducing pages
• Improving performance
• Saving money
• Driving revenue
• Reducing churn

Not every bit of work you do has to be part of a graph, but if you don’t have at least one graph you’re owning, you’re not operating at a senior level.

Concise Communication

One of the most common frustrations of senior people is that their impact isn’t understood. One of the hardest truths for people to learn is that that’s a them problem - they’re not communicating well enough.

Graphs are the most powerful tool you have to communicate your impact.

People often try to explain their impact in words. They might say something like “I reduced pages by 15%.” If you send that to your leadership, good leaders will immediately have 20 followup questions. 15% from what to what? Over what time period? Did it happen all at once or steadily? Was it already declining or did your actions clearly impact it?

Graphs show all of this information right away. You see scale, history, volatility. One graph can replace paragraphs of language. You also often get a free link to the data, so the recipient can spot-check the graph to gain confidence in it’s integrity.

Further, this ability to concisely communicate impact and effort is a critical tool for getting feedback. Sometimes you’re not working on the right thing. Sometimes the scale of your impact isn’t worth the time you’re putting in. If you represent your work in ambiguous prose, you’re not going to get direct feedback on it.

Representing your work as a graph gives you an ultra-concise way to both get credit but also get feedback.

Tying It All Together

In On Achieving Goals we talked about the radical simplicity of getting things done - set a goal and check in on it.

This is an addendum to that concept - you should do that process, with a graph.

This combination is so effective that it can be the difference between high performance and unemployment.

Summary

Graphs are a critical unit of ownership for senior people to track their progress, communicate outcomes, and get feedback. If you don’t own one, fix that ASAP.

Appendix: Tips & Tricks

Assorted tips and ticks:

• You’ll know that you’re on the right track when other people reference your graph. People are lazy and if your graph is helpful and accurate you will boost your career with it.
• Your graph doesn’t have to be perfect on day 1. You’ll get feedback on it and iterate over time, and that’s fine (that’s actual ownership).
• There is an anti-pattern to avoid which is “owning too many graphs.” Some people have a thousand graphs that they “own” by showing in a meeting when it fits their narrative. You should own a few really important graphs. You have too many metrics, so the graphs you own should be few and extremely valuable.
• If you’re an engineer trying to find a graph to own, quality issues are a great place to start. Pages, incidents, bugs, performance all have graphs that are begging to be owned. If you’re a PM/designer: support tickets, revenue, competitive win rates, attach rates for retention are all great things to own.
• You don’t always need to have the ability to move the metric solo (although it’s great if you can). Just monitoring something important and following up tenaciously to move it in the right direction is enough to get your career going.