Take charge of your career plan through Impact Logs
In 2005, while preparing for the Microsoft MCSE: Messaging certification, I discussed it with a senior colleague, whom I considered a reference. That person mentioned that they would never invest time in something the company didn’t require us to be certified in.
At the time, I was a junior sysadmin responsible for maintaining our clients’ Exchange 2000 and 2003 servers. I couldn’t understand their point of view and still recall the strange attitude of relying so heavily on company decisions to determine what we should learn.
Preparing for that certification helped me gain a deep understanding of concepts like DNS and email messaging protocols, Active Directory, and security systems and policies. It also gave me a valuable perspective on how email and calendar systems operate at scale, which has been beneficial throughout my tech career.
Now, as a manager, one of the most satisfying things to me is seeing how people grow year by year. Being able to help engineers and other managers with their growth or even influence it is a unique experience and, of course, a huge responsibility too.
Learning and development are key motivators for high-performing professionals and play a crucial role in their retention at tech companies. According to an HR Digest report, in 2022, when tech companies were dealing with the huge challenge of growing while retaining talent, companies that invested in employee development saw a 58% increase in employee retention and a 24% increase in productivity.
In recent years, well-structured career paths and growth-focused initiatives, such as mentoring programs and personalized development plans, have become essential for fostering growth within the tech industry. Ongoing conversations between managers and their team members have become standard practice for identifying real growth opportunities within companies.
However, not all organizations have reached this level of maturity in their management practices when it comes to supporting the growth of engineers and managers. If we rely solely on these organizations' initiatives for our career development, we may be limited by the input of external individuals who may not fully understand our intrinsic motivations, strengths, and weaknesses as well as we do.
Even in mature organizations, taking full ownership of our growth plans offers unique advantages. It elevates discussions with our managers, allowing us to engage more deeply. When we take responsibility for our development, we undergo personal reflection, forcing us to assess our current situation carefully, identify potential next steps, and engage in more meaningful conversations with our manager.
This is particularly important if we are working toward a promotion for a specific role. While understanding our next role’s expectations and our reasons for pursuing it is a logical first step, the key lies in how we approach our promotion process. By actively identifying areas for improvement, registering and reflecting on our impacts, and recognizing our strengths, we can build compelling arguments to support our promotion case or prepare for interviews for that role.
If our manager cannot provide guidance, these self-reflections can help us find a mentor or closely observe our environment to identify individuals who can serve as role models for our growth.
Registering your impacts
A few years ago, around 2017, I was having coffee with a friend in Bilbao, and we discussed different topics. At the time, I was finishing my cycle in my previous company before starting a new job while he was also nearing the end of his tenure at a Big Four firm.
During our conversation, he mentioned the importance of keeping a diary to track our professional impacts. He remarked how that diary was incredibly useful, helping him remember his contributions over the years and effectively prepare for behavioral interviews using the STAR method.
The advice about developing the habit of registering my impacts resonated with me. Since that conversation, I’ve been iterating on a personal impact log process that I also use with my team members.
In recent years, many HR departments, especially in tech companies, have implemented robust processes for Performance Reviews and Promotion Cases. In these processes, both managers and engineers are asked to reflect on their impacts over a certain period. (I wrote about performance reviews in another article: Performance management: strategies, practices, and key insights published on LeadDev)
For those who haven’t maintained an impact log regularly, recalling all their contributions over the past six months — or even a year — can be a real challenge. This is particularly true for high-performing teams in tech, who face numerous challenges and changes within a single year.
In my opinion, managers and engineers should regularly discuss their impacts without relying solely on formal processes. These conversations can naturally lead to discussions about growth opportunities and performance feedback. However, not all companies or departments have the same level of cultural maturity, which is why some HR departments have introduced quarterly performance reviews to encourage more frequent discussions.
While this approach works well in some cases, it can be less effective in others.
Maintaining a personal impact log fosters a strong habit of reflecting on your work. It enriches your conversations with your manager about performance and goals and helps you prepare for performance reviews or promotions, saving valuable preparation time.
Additionally, this habit can be beneficial for future job interview processes, just as it was for my friend.
The impact log can be as simple as a list of contributions in a document. However, I recommend a couple of things to enhance its value:
Focus on impacts (outcomes) and not just tasks (output).
It’s essential to describe the value of our impacts rather than simply listing the tasks we completed. Every impact should tell its own story.
Below are some examples of weak and strong descriptions of impacts:
Weak: I developed a feature that personalizes product sorting in our e-commerce based on customers' last orders.
Better: I developed a feature that personalizes product sorting in our e-commerce platform, using customer order history to enhance the shopping experience.
Even Better: I implemented a feature for our e-commerce platform that uses customer order history to personalize product sorting. By integrating this with our recommendation engine, we increased repeat purchases by 15% and improved customer engagement by 20%, significantly boosting the user experience and conversion rates.
Even when impacts appear too technical, they still have underlying value. Everything we do has a ‘why’ behind it, and adopting an outcome-based mindset helps us uncover that reason.
Weak: I led the migration of our microservices platform from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes.
Better: I led the migration of our microservices platform from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, improving scalability and reliability.
Even Better: I led the migration of our microservices platform from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, enabling autoscaling and improved load balancing, which reduced downtime by 30% and lowered infrastructure costs by 20% through better resource management. This also enhanced the platform’s resilience to traffic spikes.
For those unfamiliar with practices like OKRs, Strategic Intents, A/B testing, or describing impacts with metrics in user stories, shifting to an outcome-focused approach may initially seem challenging. If that’s your case, describe your impacts as less weak as possible, then iterate progressively; you can always ask your Engineering or Product Manager for metrics or numbers to quantify it.
Impacts can result from individual or team efforts. While it may feel uncomfortable to claim credit for team-based impacts, if you contributed, it’s important to acknowledge your role in the impact and register it.
Scope your list of impacts for a specific time period.
For example, I find it helpful to create a list per quarter. This practice encourages me to hold a personal retrospective to review the impacts during that period, allowing me to quickly adjust my goals during the year to ensure my efforts are aligned with the right priorities.
Review it regularly.
If you are a manager, promoting the Impact Log with your team members and dedicating part of your one-on-one meetings to discussing the most recent impacts recorded in their logs will help keep performance and growth aligned with the company goals and expectations.
If you are an engineer, maintaining a personal impact log is important, even if your manager isn’t used to this practice. Proactively ask your manager to review your impacts with them to get feedback and ensure alignment with your development goals. Taking ownership of your performance and growth by leading the conversation will demonstrate initiative.
Goals setting and alignment
Doing meaningful work doesn’t always mean focusing on the right things or aligning your efforts with your personal growth and learning strategy.
Your company may have different categories in its career path, such as Communication or Leadership, and you might want to develop skills in one of these areas, or perhaps you aim to become an expert in a specific technology. The most important thing is to reflect on your goals and determine the next improvement steps.
I recommend being specific when you reflect on your next goals, ensuring they are realistic and ideally measurable. But be pragmatic; what truly matters is this self-reflection and the productive discussions it leads to with your manager.
Goals should serve as a guide, not as a rigid contract. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t achieve every goal; timing, opportunities, and alignment between daily tasks and personal plans aren’t always within your control.
Remember the principle: ‘Trust your adaptability, not your plans.’; being flexible and adapting yourself and your goals is far more effective than adhering to a detailed, exhaustive plan.
To maintain flexibility, I prefer setting goals quarterly. Reality can shift, and we need to adapt.
Tracking your contributions through an impact log will help you assess whether your work aligns with the goals you set at the start of the quarter and allows you to set more adequate goals for the next quarter.
Feedback and self-reflection
As mentioned throughout this article, self-reflection is crucial for assessing your current situation, opportunities, and the context in which you work. By developing a strong habit of recording your impacts, you can review your contributions each quarter, ensuring you are on the right path and aligned with your goals.
For me, another important outcome of self-reflection is the ability to evaluate which factors positively or negatively influenced my progress. This helps me learn deeply, make necessary adjustments, and continuously improve.
I’m obsessed with fostering a feedback culture, and I believe the self-reflection exercise is more productive when complemented with external feedback. Asking your colleagues for feedback is essential to gaining a holistic view of your skills and identifying areas for growth. It’s also a powerful way to build trust within the team and ensure continuous development.
All together in a template
You can maintain your impact logs in various formats, whether as a simple list in a document, a note on your device, or even handwritten in your favorite notebook before transferring them to a digital platform. Personally, I keep a “kind of” diary in my Moleskine notebook and then transfer my notes on Notion for my personal impact log.
Over the years, I’ve iterated on the format of my impact logs and created a template you can use for your impact logs process.
While this template is designed in Notion, feel free to copy or adapt it in Google Docs, Confluence, or any documentation tool that works best for you.
Some recommendations and notes about the use of the template:
Instead of creating a document per period, I suggest you maintain one document per year or context (for example, I use a single impact log document for each company I’ve worked for). This allows you to add new sections over time, showcasing your progression and impacts related to a specific context.
If you want to keep it simple, you can omit the goals and feedback/reflection sections; the most important aspect is documenting your impacts.
The ‘skill categories’ refer to specific categories defined in a career path and are used to label and align impacts with them. I wrote about these categories and my experience creating a career path in the article, ‘The Path of Our Career Path,’ published on the Packlink Tech Medium site.
If you’re implementing this format with your team members, the feedback and self-reflection parts can be less engaging than the other sections, especially in teams lacking a strong feedback culture. I recommend starting with self-reflections only, then iterating as necessary.
Use this template just as a guideline and modify it to create your own one. I have iterated on this template over the years based on my experiences and personal approach, and I adjust it depending on the person or company when I share it with my team members.
Conclusions
Owning your growth plan is essential to avoid dependency on others to set your career goals. By taking charge, you can better align your efforts with your personal aspirations and long-term development.
Additionally, developing the habit of regularly logging your impacts is crucial for both self-reflection and goal-setting. It provides insight into your achievements and helps identify areas for growth, allowing you to define clear, actionable goals tailored to your progress.
As managers, encouraging our team members to take ownership of their impact logs will make our growth and performance conversations more effective and engaging.
