I spent an afternoon a few years ago going through a senior candidate's record and finding it oddly weightless. A decade of scope: teams built, functions established, disciplines stood up, and almost nothing about what any of it had done to a company. Then I went and read my own record, and it had exactly the same problem.
By then I had run four organizations. What I had written down was scope: headcount grown, functions established, transitions led. What I had not written down was what any of it did to the business. I rebuilt the whole thing so the commercial result came first and the leadership work sat underneath it as the explanation.
The part worth writing about is not the rewrite. I had been making the argument in public for years, that a function exists to move the business, and my own record was still written in the language of the function.
Why design records read this way
Three reasons, and none of them are laziness.
We are trained to document process, because process is what a portfolio review asks for and what a hiring manager can audit. A case study that shows research, iteration and rationale reads as rigorous. A case study that says "revenue went up" reads as a claim.
The outcome also belongs to the company rather than to you. By the time a number moves, engineering shipped it, marketing sold it, and somebody in finance decided how it was counted. Claiming it feels dishonest, so a lot of careful people claim nothing at all, which is worse.
And the timing rarely cooperates. The results that matter most arrive twelve or eighteen months after the decision that produced them, which is frequently after you have left. You are writing your record at the exact moment the evidence is least available.
Three kinds of work
The distinction that unlocked this for me, and I am fairly sure it is the one that matters most, is that design work is not uniformly attributable, and treating it as though it were is what produces both the vague version and the dishonest one.
Directly attributable. Growth surfaces, pricing, onboarding, upgrade paths, checkout (the places with a control group). There is an experiment, a control, and a number. This is a small share of what a design organization does and a disproportionate share of what gets cited, which is its own distortion.
Mechanism-attributable. You cannot own the number, but you can name the chain that produced it. At Honor, better tools for Care Pros meant Care Pros stayed, retention drove supply, and supply was the marketplace. At Lyft, the move from a car-based app to bikes, scooters and transit rested on a rider using three modes being worth more than a rider using one, and on the company needing a defensible position in cities that were turning against cars. In our own user testing of the resulting tab view, use of the modes beyond rideshare rose by about half. Going from a browser extension to native Mac and Windows applications at Grammarly was a distribution question, and the enterprise side of that business was reported at around thirty thousand teams by the time I left, against a valuation, publicly reported, of about thirteen billion dollars.
I did not personally produce any of those numbers. My teams did, and I was lucky if I got to push them in the generally right direction. I can describe, in one sentence each, the mechanism by which the work I led was supposed to move them, and that turns out to be the thing worth writing down.
Unattributable. Most craft work sits here: the migration nobody noticed, the failure you prevented, brand for years at a time, and design systems, whose entire return is in work that did not have to be redone.
Write the mechanism down before the result arrives. The same claim dated after the number is a story; dated before it, it is evidence.
What to actually write down
The mistake is to try to promote the third category into the first by inventing a number for it. The move is to say which category a piece of work is in, and to defend the third category on the terms of the second.
Date the mechanism. Write the causal chain at the moment you commit to the work, not when the result lands. A claim made in advance is falsifiable and therefore worth something. The identical sentence written afterwards is a reconstruction, and any experienced reader treats it as one.
Name who else was in it. A record survives scrutiny roughly in proportion to how much credit it distributes. The version where one person moved the number is the version that collapses on the first reference call.
Say what would have happened otherwise. Most of the value of the unattributable category lives in the counterfactual, and almost nobody writes the counterfactual down while they still remember it.
The dishonest version, and why it gets caught
The failure mode is easy to spot. A senior candidate attaches a large company number to their own tenure with no mechanism in between, and the follow-up question is always the same and never hostile: how did the work move it?
Someone who has the mechanism answers in about forty seconds and usually gets more specific than you asked for. Someone who does not will restate the number in different words. I have sat on both sides of that exchange, and I have been the one restating the number, early on, when I thought the number was the point.
The reference call finishes the job. The former colleague is not trying to catch anybody out, but when you ask what someone was hired to do and what changed, the answer either contains the mechanism or it does not. Reference calls thankfully saved me a few times from bombed onsites.
Reading these from the other side
I now spend a fair amount of time on the receiving end, reading founder updates and putting together the case for a small investment, and the same structure separates the credible documents from the rest.
A good update gives you the number, the mechanism the team believes produced it, and something that would falsify that belief. A weaker one gives you a large number attached to an undated claim, and the reader has to decide whether to trust the author, which is exactly the position a good update keeps you out of.
The related thing I look for, and find more often than I expected, is a metric defined so that it flatters. A founder counting active users where a session counts as a user. A retention figure quoted with no window attached, so that sixty percent could mean almost anything. I do not think this is usually deception. It is usually a house measurement that nobody has ever had reason to stress test, and asking about it is the fastest way I know to find out how a team thinks.
Which is the same question in the other direction. The rewrite itself took an afternoon. The habit it forced, of writing the mechanism down at the point of commitment rather than at the point of retrospective, is the part I would have wanted twenty years earlier.
I've led design and product at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly and Pitch, and today I build at GrowthX and run Noord, an early-stage fund and studio in Amsterdam. The objection I take most seriously is that this framework rewards work that happens to sit near a number. My proudest decision at Honor, committing to the product working over a landline as well as over a smartphone, had nothing measurable attached to it for a long time, and a leader who applies the test strictly will underinvest in exactly that kind of work. Use it to defend your record, not to choose what to build.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos