In this instructional video, engineering leader Gregor Ojstersek warns engineers that doing great technical work without actively communicating its impact can stall promotions, lead to layoffs, and cause burnout. He explains that perception, not just performance, determines career outcomes, and that engineers must manage expectations and make their contributions visible. Drawing on his own journey from engineer to CTO and his freelance experience, he outlines why lack of impact communication fuels demotivation and burnout. He then presents five concrete strategies: (1) keep a "brag list" of wins and share it in one‑on‑ones and performance reviews; (2) read the room and tailor communication to the audience (technical details for engineers, impact and trade‑offs for executives); (3) share progress, not just final results, via documentation, specs, and internal blogs; (4) quantify outcomes with before/after numbers (e.g., time saved, cost reduced); and (5) write publicly (blog posts, articles) to build credibility and external visibility. He offers a Notion template for the brag list to paid newsletter subscribers and encourages viewers to comment, subscribe to his Engineering Leadership newsletter, and apply the tips to avoid career stagnation.
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In my career, I've seen countless engineers doing great work but afraid to come across as if they're bragging or selling. But then when it's time to announce the next promotion, they get overlooked, or worse, they might be part of the next layoffs. It's really important that you take ownership and find ways to not only do great work but also make sure that everyone knows about it as well. If you don't know me yet, my name is Gregor Ojstersek. I am writing the Engineering Leadership Newsletter, and in my career, I grew from engineer all the way to CTO. And in this video, I'll share my top tips on what to do to make sure you communicate your impact as an engineer. I heard from many engineers saying that their work speaks for itself. Well, if you find yourself in these exact words, there's a good chance that you haven't been communicating your impact well, and it's time to make some adjustments. There are two things I like to say. The first one: you can do the best work in the world, but if the expectations are not managed correctly, it will not be perceived that way. And the second one is: Doing great work is only half of the work. Making sure that everyone knows about it is the other half. You need to do both. Assuming that everyone knows that you're doing good work is in most cases going to be a wrong assumption. You need to actively ensure that people know that you're doing great work. You may be thinking, hey, this sounds like I need to brag or I need to sell. This is not me. I like to just be in the fine details. Well, let me tell you a very important thing. We are all always selling all the time. Both personally and professionally. And I don't even see it as selling or bragging. I see it as being clear and ensuring that our work is perceived the right way. It's also important to mention that if you're not actively communicating your impact, you may be close to burning out. I found for myself that hard work alone does not burn me out, but what really burns me out is if I'm doing something for a longer time and that doesn't fit within my goals or Or if my work doesn't necessarily fit the expectations I set for myself. That's why when I was a senior software engineer and didn't know what the next step is going to be, that really demotivated me and was burning me out. I believe the biggest reason for burning out is not the hard work itself, but not seeing the necessary outcomes or not being able to achieve what you wish to achieve, or you haven't received the deserved recognition. As we said earlier, when you're putting a lot of effort into, into something, and after some time you see it as a total waste of time, that's where there's a big chance of burning out, especially if you're putting a lot of effort for longer time. Now, let me share how did I learn to communicate my impact. If you're a regular reader of my newsletter, you know that I mentioned freelance work as being the secret to my growth in my career. And yes, freelance work has been key for me to learn not only to communicate what was needed, but also to communicate my impact the right way. I needed to ensure that I built the right things and that the whole communication with the client was on point. When you're doing freelance work, you actually don't have a choice. Either you communicate your impact the right way and your work is perceived a good way, or you will ultimately receive the dissatisfaction from the client. Which do you prefer? Now let's go to my top 5 tips on how to effectively communicate your impact. The first one: keep a brag list of all the wins that you achieve. This is one of the most important ones. And the reason is that your manager doesn't see all the great things that you do. So it's, it's really important that you keep the list of all the achievements and then you share them in a one-to-one meeting and also before the performance review meeting with your manager. If you're looking for a template on how to do that, you can use my Notion template, which is available to the paid subscribers on my Engineering Leadership newsletter. Link is in the description. The second one, learn to read the room. Learn to communicate based on your audience. When talking with fellow engineers, provide technical details. When you're talking with executives or product, product leaders or product teams, focus on impact, trade-offs, and timelines. This is very important thing to understand, and you will not come across as impactful if you don't understand what resonates with, with the people in the room and speak in a way that, that resonates with them. Let's go to the third one. Share progress, not just results. When you share the thought process behind the decision, either you or maybe your team has made, It gives a lot more visibility to, to people on how much effort has been actually put in a certain thing. Write good documentation, technical specifications, contribute to the company blog or some other internal ways to share about your progress. Let's go to the fourth one. Use numbers that tell a before and after story. It's very important that you quantify your effort with the actual results. Your work needs to map to a certain value for the business. Think in percentages of improvements, time saved, decrease in cost, boost of uptime, etc. This is a good example. Completely automated the deployment pipeline, which resulted in reducing release time from 2 hours to 10 minutes. And the last but not least, start writing online. I just needed to include this as the last tip because I think it's one of the biggest leverage activities that you can do. It will not only improve your credibility, but it will also showcase you as an expert in the topics that you write about. This will ensure that you get visibility with people that you are not mainly working with, inside and also outside of the organization, which can help you a lot. Personally, it has helped me immensely to get the buy-in from stakeholders a lot faster, and also with my team as well. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on how to communicate your impact the right way. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 150,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
