Writing Accomplishments that pass the CFO Test
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:
Worked on the billing project launch as member of ops 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.
Worked on 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).
Launched the self-serve billing project.
Add business impact
This “business” impact should ideally be a concrete number describing something external to your team. Usually, this is a Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); if you don’t have one, remember that its better to increase value or decrease risk than to decrease cost.
Launched the self-serve billing project and 1000 new paid customers signed up in 3 months.
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)
Launched the self-serve billing project and increased number of users increased by 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
Launched the self-serve billing project and increased Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 10%.
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 10% via launching the self-serve billing project
Some other examples
“Got a 5 on the AP Physics C exam (top 5% of class)”
“Decreased time until first push for new engineers by 10% via creating 5k LOC puppet provisioning system”
“Got “Engineer of the Year” award (top 1 of 300)"
“Decreased # of SEV0 incidents by 10% via creating automatic canary analysis service”