The Career Conversation That Changed Everything

I have sat through hundreds of performance reviews over the years of my career in financial services, and I keep watching the same thing happen over and over.

Someone walks in with a document full of impressive technical work. Lots of pages. Databases migrated, queries optimized, models built, new tools mastered. All great accomplishments.

Then they walk out confused about why the promotion did not happen.

Here’s the thing, their technical work was solid. They just fundamentally misunderstood what the conversation was actually evaluating.

When you say “I built a customer segmentation model with 89% accuracy”, your manager hears “I did some technical work that I think is impressive”.

What they actually need to hear is “I identified $2.3M in revenue opportunity by segmenting high value customers that Marketing was ignoring, which led to the Q3 campaign restructure”.

When you say “I reduced dashboard load time from 45 seconds to 8 seconds”, all they hear is “I made something faster”.

What they need to hear is "I enabled realtime decision making in operations meeting, which cut incident response time by 40% and prevented three major service disruptions last quarter”.

Same technical work. Completely different framing. And that framing determines whether you get promoted or not.

Most of us came up learning to value technical excellence. We celebrate clean code, elegant solutions, performance optimization. All those things do matter.

But somewhere along the way, nobody taught us how to translate technical work into business language.

I have watched brilliant analysts, people who could code get passed over while less technical skilled colleagues moved up. The difference was never the quality of the work. The people who advanced could articulate business value. The people who stayed put kept talking about technical metrics.

Your manager does not really care about your technical stack. They care about whether you made the business better, faster or more profitable.

More importantly, they need to explain your value to their manager, who cares even less about your technical decisions. If you can’t translate your work into business impact, you are making it impossible for anyone to advocate for you.

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After watching this pattern for years, I developed a way of thinking about and documenting work that I know share with every analyst I mentor. It requires a shift in how your frame what you do, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Before any career conversation, performance reviews, promotion discussions, salary negotiations, I prep using five categories.

Not what you built. What changed because you built it.

What does not work: “Created executive dashboard with 15 KPIs tracking company performance”

What works: “Gave executives real time visibility into operational risks, directly supporting the decision to exit an underperforming market segment, saving $1.2M annually”.

The mental model: What business problem existed? What did you do (one technical sentence)? What measurable outcome resulted? What would have happened without your work?

This category gets missed constantly, but it is often the most important. Your job is not to create reports. Your job is to enable better decisions.

An analyst on my team built an analysis showing that customer churn was concentrated in accounts from a specific acquisition channel. That analysis led to a complete restructuring of the onboarding process.

Think about: What decision did someone make because of your work? Who made it (titles matter, C suite decisions count more)? What was the alternative they were considering? What was the outcome?

Most data professionals forget this entirely. But what fifteen years taught me is that technical skills might you to senior analyst. Relationships get you to leadership.

Early in my career, I watched a colleague systematically build a relationship with our Head of Operations. Started by fixing small data issues she complained about. Eventually become her go to person for anything data related.

When a manager position opened in her org, she requested him specifically. That relationship led to a two level promotion and a substantial raise.

Ask yourself: Which business leaders come to you directly now? What departments do you work with outside your immediate team? Have you been invited to meetings above your level? Who has specifically mentioned your value to their leadership?

This is the most undervalued category and often the hardest to articulate. But preventing disasters is just as valuable as creating wins.

I learned the hard way with the $200k dashboard disaster I have written about before, the MORT/MTG coding issue that created a $25M discrepancy.

After the incident, I implemented reconciliation protocols across all our projects. Over the next two years, we caught similar issues in five othe projects before they went live.

When I was being considered for my first VP role, I made sure leadership understood “Developed data quality validation framework that prevented five high severity incidents over 24 months, including two that would have required external audit and regulatory filing. Estimated value: $2M + in fines and remediation costs avoided”.

Consider: What disasters did you catch before they became disasters? What would have happened without your intervention? How much time, money, or reputation did this save? What systems did you put in place to prevent future issues?

Here’s where you can actually mention technical skills, but only if you tie them to what the business actually cares about.

Does not work: “Learned Python, dbt, Snowflake or Tableau”.

Works: “Devleoped cloud data engineering capabilities that positioned our team to migrate off legacy systems, reducing infrastructure costs by $180k annually and cutting project delivery by 35%”.

Think about: What new capability did you develop? Why does the business care about this capability right now? What business outcome did it enable? How does it align with company strategic priorities?

The opening I tell people: “ I want to start by highlighting the business outcomes I drove this year, then walk through the strategic capabilities I have developed that position me for (desired role)”.

Notice what you are not saying:

You are framing around business value and strategic positioning from the first sentence.

Then work through your prep sheet. Spend about 2 minutes per major achievement. Tell the story, the problem, your work, the outcome. Keep it concise and business focused. Make it easy for your manager to say yes.