Improve Market Value

dennyzhang

URL: https://quantcodedenny.com/posts/improve-market-value/

Working deeply in a specialized area like Meta or Google ML infra can easily make your expertise feel too narrow — you solve critical problems, but your broader market value may not fully reflect your capabilities. Often, the challenge isn’t lack of knowledge; it’s being too busy with daily work, leaving no time for high-impact but non-urgent improvements or blindspots.

This post is a living document to help tech leads organically increase market value, stay visible, and continuously improve.

1. Guiding Principles

  • Think End-to-End and Prioritize Impact
    • Keep a mental map of the full system — data flows, dependencies, upstream/downstream impacts, and business objectives.
    • Ask daily: “How does this change affect other teams, user experience, and business metrics?”
  • Focus on Important but Not Urgent Work
    • Identify blindspots: recurring issues, cross-team dependencies, systemic technical debt.
    • Block weekly time for reflection, documentation, and proactive improvement.
  • Translate Work into Marketable Achievements
    • Frame accomplishments in revenue, cost savings, reliability, or scale.
    • Capture not just what was fixed, but why it mattered: “Reduced ad delivery latency by 15%, improving ad revenue predictability by X%.”
  • Document, Share, and Learn Across Teams
    • Maintain daily notes or internal posts capturing problem, options, tradeoffs, and decisions.
    • Summarize patterns weekly to increase visibility and influence.

2. Good Practices

  • Frame P0/SEV incidents with business impact
    • Log root cause, mitigation, and downstream effect.
    • Highlight prevented losses or restored capacity in marketable terms.
  • Design for scale and reliability
    • Ask: “If traffic/data grows 5–10x, will this design hold?”
    • Document assumptions, constraints, and failure modes.
  • Share reusable learnings
    • Daily: note patterns, gotchas, scripts that saved time.
    • Weekly: summarize in central doc or chat to benefit team.
  • Ask strategic, end-to-end questions
    • Before implementation, ask about downstream impact or hidden dependencies.
    • Capture tradeoffs even if the decision is local.
  • Allocate deliberate focus time
    • Weekly: protect 1–2 hours for reflection, blindspot review, systemic improvements, or skill expansion.

3. Bad Practices

  • Local optimization without context
    • Fixing minor metrics without measuring system-wide or business impact.
    • Mitigation: document downstream consequences.
  • Not documenting decisions
    • Knowledge gets siloed; team forgets key context.
    • Mitigation: 3 bullets per decision — problem, options, chosen path, rationale.
  • Avoiding ambiguous or cross-team problems
    • Appears reactive or narrow.
    • Mitigation: log ambiguous issues and track next steps.
  • Over-reliance on internal tech
    • Limits marketable skillset.
    • Mitigation: note underlying principles, patterns, and reasoning for tech choices.

4. Daily Runbook Approach

  1. Daily Reflection: Capture what you learned, decisions made, tradeoffs, and why they matter.
  2. Weekly Focus Block: 1–2 hours for important but non-urgent work (blindspots, systemic improvements, cross-team learning).
  3. Weekly Market Mapping: Reframe work in industry terms; highlight transferable impact.
  4. Monthly Patterns Review: Aggregate recurring issues, lessons, systemic improvements.
  5. Quarterly LLM Update: Use an LLM to summarize, reframe, and extract marketable insights.

5. LLM Prompt Template for Continuous Improvement

Context:
I am a tech lead working in Meta Ads Infra.
I maintain a runbook of learnings, decisions, tradeoffs, and weekly focus work on blindspots and non-urgent improvements.

Task:
1. Summarize key patterns and decisions from the notes.
2. Highlight marketable achievements understandable outside my company.
3. Identify gaps in breadth, end-to-end thinking, or neglected blindspots that could increase market value.
4. Suggest improvements or principles to focus on next.
5. Output in org-mode format with actionable bullets suitable for daily practice.

Notes:
[PASTE YOUR RUNBOOK OR WEEKLY NOTES HERE]