4 ways to describe your results
There’s only 4 ways to frame your results:
- Faster
- Cheaper
- Innovative
- Lucrative
Yeah, you can talk about quality, but that’s really cheaper and/or faster. Sure you can say something about the UX of the product or service, but typically that falls under innovative or lucrative.
In this blog, I’ll share how you can explain your outcomes in ways that reflect an impact to the business. You can use these categories for your personal performance reviews or for product reviews with your upline stakeholders and investors.
Faster
The faster category is the easiest to communicate. In the product world, your IT product can handle data faster, automate manual tasks, speed up webpage loading, streamline business processes, auto-resolve errors, and so forth.
In the human performance world, you can measure productivity in how fast a team or an individual can get something done:
- Sprint velocity
- Reduced time to value
- Reduced time to productivity
- Scalable processes (going from hundreds to thousands)
Cheaper
The cheaper category is when you, your team, or your product costs less than previously. So if your job includes purchasing, you get to focus on how you found a lower cost alternative to the current state, either through negotiation, a new vendor, or asset optimization.
Often, cheaper is reflected by stating lower labor costs (and often correlated with reduced time to productivity). Another way to think about cheaper is how you avoid costs, such as with predictive maintenance, inventory management, fraud detection, or security scans. One of my favorite flavors of cheaper is CAC or customer acquisition cost.
Innovative
The innovative category is often the trickiest to claim. This where you get to talk about hot new technologies and “disrupting the market.” In the last 12 months, generative AI and ChatGPT are good examples of innovative results. Another angle on innovative is how others perceive your product, such as through NPS, review sites, social followers, usability, churn rate, attrition, and other sentiment measurements. Innovative can be a catch-all category for things like environmental impact, safety, cybersecurity, ethical responsibility, or societal improvements in healthcare, education, and so forth.
But remember, innovative often means that your business outcome is uniquely differentiated in the market or in your organization. The inverse also is true — just because something is new and different doesn’t make innovative. It could be just whacky or ill-timed, such as New Coke, Segway, and Google Glass.
Lucrative
This last category is the most compelling way to frame your business results: lucrative. If you can demonstrate that yourself or your product drives revenue, then you hit the pot of gold (goofy metaphor intended).
Examples of how to describe lucrative:
- LTV: customer lifetime value
- ARR: annually recurring revenue
- MRR: monthly recurring revenue
- ACV: annual contract value
- NRR: net revenue retention
- Number of new customers and conversion rate
- Sales pipeline or marketing funnel
- … (talk with your Finance team to learn what revenue metrics are most important to your organization)
Thanks to Isabelle Tchakoute for inspiring me to write up these 4 ways to describe your business results. It’s the conversations that help me frame up my blogs. So please do share your own thoughts on this topic.
