Writing Accomplishments that pass the CFO Test

June 13, 2022

The “CFO test” is “will someone who cares about the business but doesn’t do your job understand that you had an impact.” It is a great way to make sure your accomplishments are strong in a resume, performance review, etc.

Getting your accomplishments to pass the “CFO” test

There are some very straightforward transformations you can make to get your accomplishment to pass the CFO test.

Here is a typical “meh” accomplishment for a resume or a performance review that doesn’t yet pass the CFO test:

Built authentication page of the billing project launch as member of frontend design team.

Don’t say you were the member of a team (it is implied)

It may feel like you’re taking credit for other people’s work, but ALL work is group work and so it is implied that you were part of a team. Unless you specifically say otherwise, all accomplishments are assumed to be a group effort. You don’t need to qualify your accomplishment, although you can clarify what you did.

Built authentication page for the self-serve billing project launch.

Actually, I’ll encourage something stronger here: if you were a leader of any part of the planning, execution, or delivery for the project, you should take responsibility for the whole project (remember early point that all accomplishments are assumed to be group efforts, espescially on resumes).

Launched the self-serve billing project.

Add business impact

This “business” impact should ideally be a concrete number describing something external to your team.

Built authentication page for the self-serve billing project launch and got 1000 new paid customers signed up in 3 months.

Direct improvements of revenue or a org/team KPI are best. If a project benefited a stakeholder, it can be good to report that stakeholder’s impact (e.g. a platform team that added a new feature used by the self-serve billing project would say “Added dynamic kubernetes instances used by the self-serve billing project which got 1000 new paid customers in 3 months.”)

Good proxy measures of impact include:

  • Number of users or uses cases adopted and level of adoption or retention
  • Improvements in reliability: number or severity of incidents, service availability, number of support cases, recovery time, time-to-detect or time-to-mitigate, user-found-it-first rate
  • Improvements in throughput: latency, throughput, or liveness of a pipeline
  • Velocity or productivity: time to complete a project, number of projects completed per capita or time, number or level of persons required to solve, how often escalation to expert is needed
  • Influence: number of decisions changed, number of views or citations or shares
  • Efficiency and cost: utilization improved, capacity affected, cost

If there is no metric, there can still be externally visible evidence: shout outs, citations of the work by others, etc.

Again results are external: a good litmus test is “did we demonstrate that someone else’s behavior changed as a result of this accomplishment.”

Put your number in context

Please put your number in context by expressing it relative to one of “3 P’s of concrete performance” (past, predicted, or peer/population)

Built authentication page for the self-serve billing project launch and increased number of users increased by 1000 (+10%) in 3 months.

And remember — accomplishments are assumed to be a group effort, so it is ok to take responsibility for the sales impact as an engineer

Built authentication page for the self-serve billing project launch and increased Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 7% (vs 30% baseline).

Giving percentile of a population can be powerful and clarifying:

Presentation viewed by 103 colleagues in last 3mo (65% of 158 people in Foobar org), making it the top 2% presentation generated by the team in last 3mo.

Lead with the effect of actions

Finally, put the business impact first in the accomplishment. Barbara Minto says to summarize a group of actions using the effect they produce. For more, see State the Effect of Actions

 We want to do that here too – our resume point should not be about the actions we performed, but about the implication of those actions.

One common difficulty people have here is they want to talk about the complexity of the task; don’t fall into this trap. Talk about the impact first, and only imply the complexity.

Increased Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 7% (vs 30% baseline) via building authentication page for the self-serve billing project

(optional) Include technical keywords

Since some Applicant Tracking Systems search by keywords, it can be helpful to have them in your resume. Rather than artificial list of proficiencies or artificial lists of keywords, its better to weave details inline or tag on the accomplishment.

Increased Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 7% (vs 30% baseline) via building authentication page for the self-serve billing project (NextJS, Flask)

Some other examples

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