- to understand one's value in $ terms, it needs to be measurable in some way.
Some possible ways to measure:
- for a product already being sold to customers, my features are helping retain customers (bug fixes, performance improvements etc) as measure by A/B testing or sales guys saying "that fix landed the sale".
- for a product not yet being sold, my performance in building the product is helping time to market as measured by improvement in sales and marketing results : "we landed a field trial today with the features I helped implement" or "those demo videos have improved response to our marketing campaign"
- for work in a large company, my performance helps my organization achieve some stated goal by its general manager. As measure by : "we got that thing done the GM laid our last quarter, his meetings with upper management were very positive and landed additional funding to the project"
Interestingly, for each of these, value in terms of $ gets more and more difficult to measure.
in my experience, working in smaller companies, value is much easier to understand, but the work tends to be "everyone sweeps the floor".
In larger companies the work tends to be more specialized - and potentially more "cool" but driven by harder to pin down dynamics of the larger corporation organism. It also tends to be more "maddening" as the organization flip-flops around trying while seeking extremely difficult to attain growth.
- to understand one's value in $ terms, it needs to be measurable in some way.
Some possible ways to measure:
- for a product already being sold to customers, my features are helping retain customers (bug fixes, performance improvements etc) as measure by A/B testing or sales guys saying "that fix landed the sale".
- for a product not yet being sold, my performance in building the product is helping time to market as measured by improvement in sales and marketing results : "we landed a field trial today with the features I helped implement" or "those demo videos have improved response to our marketing campaign"
- for work in a large company, my performance helps my organization achieve some stated goal by its general manager. As measure by : "we got that thing done the GM laid our last quarter, his meetings with upper management were very positive and landed additional funding to the project"
Interestingly, for each of these, value in terms of $ gets more and more difficult to measure.
in my experience, working in smaller companies, value is much easier to understand, but the work tends to be "everyone sweeps the floor". In larger companies the work tends to be more specialized - and potentially more "cool" but driven by harder to pin down dynamics of the larger corporation organism. It also tends to be more "maddening" as the organization flip-flops around trying while seeking extremely difficult to attain growth.