> … it means delivering the kind of things that are legible to the decision-makers at the company: i.e. visible to your manager, plus 1-3 skip levels, depending on your title. The easiest way to do this is to deliver things that they already know about, such as projects that they’ve asked you to do, or incidents that are serious enough that they’re involved in them. It’s possible to make other work legible to them as well. If your work produces or saves money, that will make it immediately legible, for instance (or you could just be really convincing). By default, work you do isn’t legible: to the decision-makers, it’s generic technical nonsense. They don’t know whether it’s crucial high-impact work or pointless code reshuffling, and will tend to assume the latter.

This person understands the “business” side of the tech business. I couldn’t agree more. Where many struggle is that they can’t communicate legibly about the indirect benefits their work has for the business. The classic “refactoring” (which he mentions) is a great example.

Refactoring code has a context dependent benefit to a business. When you’re searching for product/market fit is has essentially no benefit, and then you’re Microsoft and the code is deep within Windows and affects the performance of every Win32 app it can have extreme benefits. In the end it’s all about how you relate your work to either making or saving the organization money, and doing so indirectly can be legible if you take the time to figure out how to best communicate it to the target audience (and how it can be conveyed to customers).