What is an achievement diary?

The achievement diary is a living document designed to help engineers track and communicate their achievements. It records all their contributions in a way that is aligned with their role expectations, fostering visibility, self-reflection, and structured career growth.

Engineers

Engineers must advocate for their career development. They own the achievement diary and are responsible for regularly updating it to ensure all significant contributions are recorded. This diary will serve as a record of accomplishments and a basis for discussions on career growth and alignment with their role expectations.

Managers

Managers are responsible for consistently reviewing the achievement diary during 1:1s, providing feedback, and driving career development discussions to ensure the engineer meets the role expectations.

What are the benefits?

• Tracking Achievements: It’s easy to forget specific contributions during performance reviews or promotion discussions. The achievement diary records all initiatives, projects, and tasks throughout the year.
• Clear Impact: Engineers document how their work contributes to the success of the product, team and company. This allows for more objective and data-driven conversations with managers.
• Self-Assessment: Writing down achievements forces engineers to reflect on their progress and identify areas for improvement. It helps them understand if they are meeting the role expectations and highlight their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to set better personal development goals.
• Record for Managers: Some managers may not always have visibility into every task or project an engineer works on. Sharing key achievements with them through the diary allows managers to better understand and advocate for their engineers.
• Progression: By keeping a consistent record, the engineer can look back and see how their role and responsibilities have evolved. This can help them recognise when they’re ready to take on more responsibility or get promoted.

How to measure impact?

The concept of impact can be broad when discussing achievements. The impact must focus on the outcome rather than the input. For example, an engineer took the initiative to build a library, so the output is a reusable library, which is excellent. What about the outcome? How did the library impact the business? Did other teams adopt the library? Did the library reduce technical debt or delivery cycle time shipping new features? These are the questions that should be answered to measure the impact.

We should look into the impact dimensions: influence, scope and ownership.

Influence

Influence is the ability to share ideas and convince others about their value. It drives meaningful change at various organisational levels.

Levels of influence:

• Personal: Focused on themselves and their individual growth. They absorb knowledge, enhance their skills, and leverage feedback to grow as professionals.
• Team: Influence at the team level by proposing improvements on processes and technical strategy and mentoring other team members.
• Department: When working on a common project, the individual can influence the department by collaborating with multiple teams, aligning dependencies, and guiding technical solutions.
• Organisation: Influencing the entire engineering organisation by making decisions, sharing the technical vision and setting scalable processes across all teams.

Scope

The scope refers to the level of complexity at which an individual can operate. It pertains to the type of work they can handle with minimal support while achieving positive results. Usually, seniority should reflect on the ability to handle more complex scopes.

Levels of scope:

• Task: A task is the smallest and simplest unit of work. Implementing it should be simple, such as improving logging or adding testing.
• Feature: A feature is more complex than a task and should require some decision-making. Usually, it’s a piece of work that provides customer value (internally or externally). A feature is mainly composed of multiple tasks.
• Project: A project is a set of features significantly impacting the business outcome. It requires the individual to write a technical specification, get feedback, identify dependencies and implement it end to end.
• Domain: The domain level requires deep expertise in a particular part of the business (payments, shipping, etc.). This individual usually overviews and acts as a consultant when that business domain requires change.

Ownership

Ownership is the responsibility that the individual takes to achieve the desired outcome.

Levels of ownership:

• Execution: The first level of ownership is when an engineer successfully executes a detailed plan. In this scenario, they can take an existing technical brief and tasks to deliver the work from coding and testing to release to production.
• Delivery: At the delivery level, engineers are expected to create a well-defined delivery plan for a technical specification that solves a problem. They can break down the problem, create the required tickets and milestones, and execute the plan flawlessly.
• Solution Discovery: In solution discovery, the individual is expected to find the solution to a problem. It requires the engineer to understand the problem and the expected outcome clearly. The engineer must explore multiple solutions, consider trade-offs, identify dependencies, and collaborate with the teams involved to formulate a plan. Lastly, the engineer must be able to articulate the solution to technical and non-technical audiences.

What to Document?

In the achievement diary, engineers must include all their relevant contributions to the team and business following the impact dimensions discussed above.

All records in the diary must include the following:

• Impact: A description of the accomplishment and its impact on the team, product, or business. The impact should focus on quantifiable outcomes to make it clear and specific, e.g. “Increased conversion by X%” rather than simply output.
• Influence: Self, Team, Department, Organisation
• Scope: Personal, Feature, Initiative, Domain
• Ownership: Execution, Delivery, Solution Discovery, Problem Discovery
• Responsibilities: Highlight the responsibilities during the achievement based on the role expectations.
• Skills: A list of required skills to complete the achievement. The skills must be aligned with the role expectations.
• Role: This field helps understand whether the engineer’s impact matches the role expectations or goes beyond them. If most of the impact is related to the role above, the engineer can be a good candidate for promotion.
• [Optional] Company Values: What are the company values embodied during the achievement?
• [Optional] Behaviours: A description of the behaviours applied during the achievement, which are expected from the role.
• [Optional] Notes: Observations or links to relevant documents and tickets.

Template

• Template using Excel

In conclusion, the achievement diary is a powerful tool for engineers to document their contributions, measure their impact, and align their progress with role expectations. By maintaining a structured record of achievements, engineers can engage in more objective and data-driven career growth discussions with their managers, ensuring continuous development and visibility. This proactive approach not only supports individual growth but also fosters a clearer path to career progression and increased responsibility.