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Comment by econner | Hacker News Reader

In a promotion review, being able to say my project drove $X in revenue wins almost every time against any other metric. It's easy to state and directly relates to the companies business goals.

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I always have been uncomfortable with the honesty of those kinds of claims (although I hypocritically use similar language on my own resume). Say there were 100 people on the project that drove $X in revenue: Was the contribution evenly distributed? Did your contribution account for $X/100? If you were not on the team, would it have driven $X-Y revenue (in which case you only added $Y in value)? Surely employers aren't dumb or fooled by such wording.

You're not claiming you personally drove $X in revenue. You're claiming that the project did, and that you were critical or at least instrumental to its success. If you can back those claims, you're not lying and you have no cause to worry over your honesty. If you can't back them, don't make them.

The project didn't drive the revenue though. The customer demand did.

Which you could say about pretty much any feature on a customer based business model.

But customer demand is only useful if you can turn the demand into a sale and a happy customer. Measuring the conversion of an interested user to a customer is how you measure return on investment for features.

If what you did meant an increase in revenue from those customers, then it is fair to say it drove revenue.

Customer demand by itself is worthless in real terms. You have to give people something to buy. Having successfully done so, there's no reason you need to shy away from saying as much.

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