Stop talking about tables. Start talking about revenue, cost & risk
Your technical output doesn’t make you valuable. Framing it in business outcomes does.
This article is part of the Translating data work into business value playlist. Click here to explore the full series.
This article is part of the Business impact translation system playlist. Click here to explore the full series.
Hi fellow data pro, Yordan here,
When I finally sped up the slowest job in our pipeline, I thought I’d finally get noticed.
It was a beast of a job. Took six hours, blocked half the DAG, and made dashboards go stale. I reworked it top to bottom. Partitioning. Caching. Monitoring. The works.
I pushed the change. Felt like a rockstar. Slapped a clean update in Slack.
And then?
One emoji.
No questions. No reactions. No stakeholder sliding into my DMs asking how I pulled it off.
So I figured I just had to be more precise. Add more tests. More lineage diagrams. Better doc coverage. Maybe they didn’t get it.
I polished it up. Shared again.
Still nothing.
Then a PM got praised in a big meeting. For “speeding up forecasting.” With a number that literally came from my update.
That’s when it hit me.
I wasn’t invisible. I was just speaking the wrong language.
Most data engineers talk about the wrong things
Here’s what we say:
“We rebuilt the ETL.”
“We added model tests.”
“We moved to incremental loads.”
All true. All technically correct.
But to the business, none of that matters. They don’t speak in tables. They speak in outcomes. And that’s why our work gets ignored.
Your work gets ignored because it’s it’s illegible.
The only 3 things execs care about
I don’t care if it’s a SaaS startup or a 200-year-old bank. Every decision-maker I’ve worked with filters everything through three lenses:
Revenue: Can we make more money?
Cost: Can we save money or time?
Risk: Can we prevent something painful?
That’s it. That’s the whole framework.
If your update doesn’t plug into one of those directly, it gets filtered out like spam.
Even if it’s the most technically elegant DAG anyone’s ever seen.
How I started reframing my work (and how you can too)
This part took practice. And to be blunt, it felt kind of fake at first.
Like I was “selling” my work. But I wasn’t.
Instead of telling the schema diff, I was telling the full story.
Here’s how you can start reframing things:
Instead of:
We created a new model for product_events.
Say:
We gave Product visibility into onboarding drop-off, which helped them cut churn by 12%.
Instead of:
We fixed late-arriving data issues.
Say:
We prevented Finance from submitting the wrong numbers again.
Instead of:
We migrated pipelines to Airflow.
Say:
We reduced pipeline failures by 80%, so exec reports go out on time.
It’s not spin. It’s just clarity.
Same work. Different story. Huge difference in who listens.
This isn’t hype. It’s honesty with context
Here’s the thing that clicked for me:
I wasn’t exaggerating impact. I was surfacing it.
I was telling the truth in a way that made sense to someone who didn’t live in dbt or Airflow all day.
The business doesn’t need every line of code. They just need the “why this matters” part.
Once I started doing that, the recognition came. Slowly at first. Then faster.
Try this one small thing
Go find the last Slack update, JIRA ticket, or Notion doc where you explained your work.
Now rewrite it like this:
We did [technical thing] so [team/person] could [save/make/protect] [revenue/cost/risk].
It’ll feel awkward. Like you’re bragging.
But do it anyway.
Because this is how your work stops getting ignored and starts getting budget.
Final thoughts
As technical people, you and I are not trained to do that. We are taught to value clean code, fast queries, and lean infrastructure.
But this is not how you get bigger budget, autonomy, and ownership of strategic projects.
Your work already has value.
Now give it a voice.
Stop reporting what you built. Start explaining what it changed.
That’s how you get noticed. That’s how you grow.
Thanks for reading,
PS: Do you want the full playbook on framing your work for growth, with real examples and a bonus rubric? Grab it here.
PPS: We are running a group coaching call for Data Gibberish Pro members next week. Subscribe now and I will answer your questions.
Love this quote: I wasn’t exaggerating impact. I was surfacing it. Perfect way of saying it :)