A reorg gives you a new manager. A layoff gives you a recruiter. A new team gives you a skip-level introduction. Each one opens with the same question: what do you do?
Most strong performers answer with a title. Then they answer with a list: the accounts, the launches, the escalations. It is accurate, and it is long, and the person listening is already deciding how to file you.
The work was good. That is not in question. But the work finished the day it shipped, and it stays finished. What gets used afterward is the description of it: the sentence someone repeats in a staffing conversation, a promotion discussion, an introduction. A description keeps getting used. That is the part that compounds.
Which is why the timing matters. If you build the description after something forces the question, you are writing it under pressure, for an audience that is already deciding. If you build it before, you are writing it while you have time, access to all of your own evidence, and people nearby who still remember what you did.
The second set of conditions does not last. Teams get reorganized and managers move on. The people who could say what you did are the first thing a change takes with it, and the evidence often goes with them.
Here is a version I have seen. Someone’s proof lived in the shout-out channel they kept in Slack: the thank-yous, the escalations someone noticed, the quiet recognition from other teams. It was real, and it was theirs. Then a layoff arrived without warning, and the access ended with the job. Everything that showed what they had done sat in a system they no longer owned.
So do not wait for the crisis.
Two places to start. Within your company’s rules, save the thank-yous, and write one line next to each on what it was for and who said it. Then answer the new-manager question out loud, in one breath, without your title, and listen back. If what you hear is a list, you know what to work on.
The Two-Sentence Career Check is a free 20-minute place to start.
→ Get the Two-Sentence Career Check
Onward, Laurie
