Instrument Your Work

You shipped the feature. Great. Now what?

Most engineers move on. Ticket closed, PR merged, next thing. But the best engineers I've worked with do something different — they stay curious. They ask: is this thing actually working? How would I know?

That question changes everything.

The habit starts small. You push a business metric to your observability stack. Not just latency and error rates — the business stuff. How many users activated this feature. How often the workflow completes. How many times that internal tool link actually gets clicked.

You do this once and it feels like extra work. You do it three times and it becomes second nature.

Here's where it compounds.

End of quarter, your manager asks for impact. Most people scramble — digging through Jira, reconstructing what they did. You open a dashboard. You shipped billing v2, here's the revenue it unlocked. You shipped the caching layer, here's the latency improvement over 8 weeks. You built that internal tool, and — it's being used once every three weeks.

That last one is the most valuable insight. Next quarter, when a similar request lands on the table, you won't just estimate effort. You'll ask: should we really invest in this? Last time, usage was near zero.

That's product sense. Not something you learn from a book. Something you develop by closing the loop on what you built.

Zoom out to a year. Every feature is instrumented. Your self-review isn't a memory exercise — it's a data pull. "Shipped usage-based billing in Q1, drove $400K in new ARR by Q3." "Built the prefetch optimization, reduced p95 from 1.2s to 340ms." "Built team notifications — usage plateaued at 12 DAU. Recommended sunsetting it, freed up 2 eng-weeks for higher-impact work."

Anyone can list what they built. The person who also knows what wasn't worth building — that's the person whose judgment compounds every quarter.

This applies to engineers and PMs equally. Instrument your work. In a year, your accomplishments write themselves — and your judgment gets sharper every quarter.