Marketing Your Business Value vs. Your Coding Skills
Let's explore how you can market your business value vs. your coding skills.
We'll cover the following...
Business value
A large genre of “Marketing for Developers” advice basically reduces you to an abstract business black box where your only role and value to the company is to grow revenue or reduce cost (or Die Trying?). I call this “marketing your business value”. Of course, this is technically correct. Technology is a means to an end, and ultimately, your employer has to cover costs and justify your salary. It is especially in your interest to help them justify as high a salary as possible.
Remember relevant data
Have at your fingertips all the relevant statistics, data, quotes, and anecdotes for when you solved major product pain points or contributed a major revenue-generating/cost-saving feature. Julia Evans calls this a “Brag Document.” You should be able to recite your big wins on-demand and frame it in terms of what’s in it for them because you will probably have to. Managers and employers are well-intentioned and want to evaluate you fairly and objectively, but the topic of your contributions usually comes up completely without warning and out of context. Therefore, you want to put yourself on the best footing every time.