The 6 Types of Developer Impact

Source: Dev.to

1. Shipping Features, Bugs, and Technical Work

What it is: The features you build, the bugs you fix, the technical work that ships to production.

Why it matters: This is the most visible work. It’s what users see, what product teams request, and what leadership tracks.

How to document it:

• Focus on business impact, not just technical implementation.
• Answer: What problem did this solve? Who did it help? What metrics improved?

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Built user dashboard”
  ✅ Clear: “Built a user analytics dashboard that surfaced usage patterns and feature adoption metrics. The product team now uses it daily to inform roadmap decisions, reducing the time to identify underperforming features from weeks to minutes.”

• ❌ Vague: “Fixed payment processing bug”
  ✅ Clear: “Identified and resolved a race condition in payment processing that was causing 2–3 % of transactions to fail. This recovered ~$45 K in monthly revenue and eliminated 30+ weekly support tickets.”

Pro tip: Keep a running log of PRs you ship. Note the business context, not just the technical changes. Tools like BragDoc’s achievement extraction can capture this from your Git history automatically.
If you want to learn more about why this matters, read our guide on why developers need automated brag docs.

2. Mentoring, Code Reviews, and Knowledge Sharing

What it is: Code reviews, pair programming, onboarding new team members, writing documentation, answering questions, giving tech talks.

Why it matters: Senior developers are force multipliers. Your ability to accelerate others is often more valuable than your individual output.

How to document it:

• Quantify the time and scope.
• Name the people you helped and what they accomplished as a result.

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Mentored junior developers”
  ✅ Clear: “Mentored two junior engineers through their first production features, spending 4–5 hours per week on code reviews, pair programming, and 1‑on‑1 technical guidance. Both engineers now contribute independently and have taken on increasingly complex work.”

• ❌ Vague: “Improved documentation”
  ✅ Clear: “Wrote comprehensive onboarding docs for our GraphQL API after noticing new engineers spent 2–3 days ramping up. New team members now become productive in under a day, and the docs are referenced 50+ times per month by the broader engineering team.”

Pro tip: Track code reviews separately. Example: “Reviewed 120+ PRs this quarter, averaging 1–2 hours daily. Provided detailed feedback that improved code quality and caught 3 security issues before they reached production.”

3. System Design, Architecture, and Technical Strategy

What it is: System design, technology choices, technical strategy, refactoring, reducing technical debt, setting technical direction.

Why it matters: These decisions compound over time. Good architecture enables faster development; bad architecture creates years of pain.

How to document it:

• Explain the problem, the options you considered, why you chose what you did, and the long‑term impact.

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Led architecture discussions”
  ✅ Clear: “Proposed and championed migrating our monolithic API to a microservices architecture after identifying scalability bottlenecks. Led technical design discussions, evaluated trade‑offs, and built consensus across four engineering teams. The migration is now underway and will enable us to scale to 10× current traffic.”

• ❌ Vague: “Refactored legacy code”
  ✅ Clear: “Refactored our authentication system to eliminate a 3‑year‑old legacy codebase that was blocking feature development. This unblocked five engineers who were previously spending 30 % of their time working around limitations in the old system. New auth features that previously took weeks now take days.”

Pro tip: Architecture decisions often happen in RFCs, design docs, or Slack threads. Save these artifacts—they’re evidence of your technical judgment and leadership.

4. Process Improvements (CI/CD, Tooling, Automation)

What it is: Improving CI/CD pipelines, dev tooling, testing infrastructure, deployment processes, reducing build times, automating manual work.

Why it matters: Process improvements multiply everyone’s productivity. A 10 % efficiency gain across a 20‑person team is massive.

How to document it:

• Quantify time saved or problems eliminated.
• Show the multiplier effect across the team.

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Improved CI/CD pipeline”
  ✅ Clear: “Reduced CI build times from 25 minutes to 8 minutes by parallelizing test suites and optimizing Docker layer caching. This saves every engineer ~1 hour per day in context switching and enables faster iteration. Across a 15‑person team, this recovers ~300 engineering hours per month.”

• ❌ Vague: “Automated deployment process”
  ✅ Clear: “Built automated deployment tooling that replaced a 30‑minute manual process with a one‑click deploy. This eliminated deployment errors that were causing 1–2 production incidents per month and freed up ~10 hours of engineering time per week.”

Pro tip: Before/after metrics are gold. Measure time saved, error rates reduced, or manual steps eliminated. BragDoc can help you track these automatically.

5. Reliability, On‑Call, and Incident Management

What it is: Debugging production issues, on‑call rotations, monitoring and alerting, postmortems, proactive reliability improvements.

Why it matters: Keeping systems running is often invisible until something breaks. Reliability work prevents future fires.

How to document it:

• Focus on severity, speed of resolution, and preventative measures you implemented.

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Fixed production issues”
  ✅ Clear: “Diagnosed and resolved a critical database deadlock that was causing 15‑minute outages every few days. Root cause was a race condition under high load; I identified it within 2 hours using query logs and APM traces. Implemented connection‑pooling changes that eliminated the issue entirely. No recurrence in 3 months.”

• ❌ Vague: “Participated in on‑call rotation”
  ✅ Clear: “Covered on‑call rotation for 6 weeks, responding to 12 incidents with an average resolution time of 45 minutes (team average is 90 minutes). After noticing repeated alerts for the same issue, I proactively fixed the underlying problem, reducing alerts by 40 % for the entire team.”

Pro tip: Keep a log of significant incidents you resolved. Note the business impact (users affected, downtime, revenue impact) and how you prevented future occurrences.

6. Cross‑Functional Collaboration

What it is: Working with product, design, sales, customer success, or leadership to solve problems, unblock projects, or improve processes.

Why it matters: Senior developers bridge technical and business contexts. Your ability to collaborate across functions becomes increasingly important as you grow.

How to document it:

• Explain the business problem, how you contributed, and the outcome.
• Make your role clear without taking sole credit.

Examples

• ❌ Vague: “Worked with product team”
  ✅ Clear: “Partnered with product and design to redesign our notification system after customer feedback showed users were missing critical updates. Led technical feasibility discussions, prototyped three different approaches, and implemented the solution. User engagement with notifications increased 45 %, and support tickets about missed notifications dropped 60 %.”

• ❌ Vague: “Helped sales team with technical questions”
  ✅ Clear: “Supported eight enterprise sales deals by joining discovery calls, answering technical feasibility questions, and providing proof‑of‑concept demos. My contributions helped close $2.3 M in new ARR and reduced the sales cycle by two weeks per deal.”