Are you unsure how to quantify the impact an achievement on your resume has? Take a page from product management and “size the market.”
Market sizing is the process by which we size the market for an offering (e.g. a product or service). It’s an important skills for product managers, because it:
- Helps set goals
- Helps identify opportunities
- Helps prioritize features
- Helps measure success
What does that mean for you and your resume? If you’ve been reading my stuff for awhile now, you know that I’m a big champion of asking “so what?” Sure, you developed and released 300 features, so what? Okay, you took that product from ideation to launch, so what?
Asking “so what” is rooted on you understanding the value of your achievement; what impact did your achievement have on the business and your end-users?
The bottom line is that the metrics you highlight on your resume are only as meaningful as the context and impact you associate with them.
That being said, if you’re at a loss of what impact a particular achievement of yours had, what we can do is size the market that that achievement affects.
I won’t go into a step-by-step on how to do it (there are plenty of guides out there a Google search away), but I’ll make my point that market sizing your achievements can dig into a statement like:
“Achieved over 500 million downloads across Google Play and App Store.”
And pull out something meaningful like:
“Launched an application that captured 12% of market share, generating over $1.2B in revenue.”
The first statement quantifies what you did. The second one illustrates why it mattered.
Happy market sizing, and try not to act too surprised when you discover how much more of an impact you actually had.
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