This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.
A few years ago I got to the last round for a job I wanted, and the head of marketing asked me about customer acquisition cost.
I told her how we pulled the data. How we modelled it in dbt, how we kept it consistent, how we handled quality. I talked about reverse ETL, which I still think is a good problem.
Light nodding. Then she stopped me.
I already knew. I’d worked on exactly the projects she was asking about, and I had nothing to say about them that she could use. Everything I knew about that work stopped at the point where it left my hands.
I got the head of data engineering job about a year later, and I still hold it.
You already have the three columns
If you’ve read this newsletter a while, you have the framework already, and I’m not going to teach it again.
Stop talking about tables. Start talking about revenue, cost & risk has all three columns with worked examples. Your Best Work Is Invisible Because You Describe It Wrong has them again under a different heading. Technical input. Enablement outcome. Business driver. 8 words maximum in column one, and column three lands in revenue, cost or risk or it doesn’t count.
You can learn the shape of a three-column sentence in about 4 minutes.
Then you sit down with your own year and fill column three in out of your head, because that feels like where the answer lives. Your head only holds your half of it.
The Column 2 Trap
Almost everyone who thinks they’ve translated a win has stopped at column two, and the number is what fools them.
“Pipeline failures down 80%.” Real improvement. Yours. Provable, because the logs are sitting right there. Every engineer who reads it nods.
It reads finished because it has a percentage in it.
Column two is the part you can prove on your own, in an afternoon, without talking to anybody. Column three needs a person who does a completely different job from you to tell you something, and going to get it takes effort, and it feels awkward. It felt awkward to me for years and some of it still does.
I’ve had engineers tell me they don’t have access to those people. That’s bullshit. They have access. They don’t want the conversation.
Here’s the column-three version of that same 80%. The report to the board started going out on time, so finance stopped keeping a parallel spreadsheet just in case.
Read the two out loud, one after the other. One has a percentage in it. The other has somebody changing what they do on a Tuesday morning.
Column three is somebody else’s behaviour or somebody else’s trust. Nothing else counts.
Which brings me to a correction I owe you. In the business value mapping playbook I told you to quantify the business driver in money, and I gave you examples like $300K in incremental revenue and $60K a year of analyst time. I’m reversing that here. Put a dollar figure in column three only when you have one. Estimate it and somebody asks how you got there, and the whole sentence falls over. It feels naked.
“We stopped finance submitting the wrong numbers again.” There’s no money in that sentence and no percentage, and it’s still the best line in this article.
And before everything else, here’s the link to the third part of my Promotion OS, the one I use with all my coaching clients.
