How Engineering Leaders Get Recognized (Without Self-Promoting)
“Chasing visibility doesn’t get engineering leaders promoted. Tying your work to business impact does. Here’s how to make that shift.”
Last week I got featured in Forbes. I didn’t pitch for it and had no idea it was coming. And the way it happened is basically a case study in how engineering leaders actually get recognized — which is almost never the way they think it works.
Here’s what happened. For six years, I’ve been a guest speaker in a Women in Tech course at Lehigh University. I do it because I care about retaining women in this industry. Not for content. Not for networking. Because it matters.
This year, during Q&A, a student asked about the challenges new grads face breaking into tech. AI came up, and I found myself talking about the human skills AI still can’t replicate — seeing emerging problems, connecting dots across functions, asking “what’s the second-order impact of this?” I wasn’t listing tools. I was making the case for why these skills matter to the business.
What I didn’t know: the professor who invited me is also a Forbes contributor. Friday night she texted me a link to an article where she’d quoted me.
The visibility trap most engineering leaders fall into
I see this pattern constantly with the engineering leaders I coach. They’re doing incredible work — leading AI initiatives, shipping complex products, holding teams together through chaos — and they’re frustrated that nobody seems to notice.
So they try to “increase visibility.” They volunteer for more work. They send more status updates. They try to get in front of the right people. And most of it doesn’t land, because it’s focused too much on execution.
Here’s what I’ve seen work instead: stop chasing visibility and start tying your work back to business impact.
That’s actually what happened with the Forbes feature. I wasn’t trying to be impressive in that classroom. I was connecting the topic I care about — human skills in an AI world — to why it matters at a business level. That’s what made my perspective worth quoting. Not polish. Not self-promotion. Relevance.
What tying work to business impact actually looks like
This skill is the difference between how most engineering leaders communicate and how the ones who get recognized communicate.
Most engineering leaders talk about what they shipped. The feature, the migration, the system redesign. That’s execution, and it’s necessary. But it’s table stakes. Any senior leader can talk about what they delivered.
The shift is learning to articulate why it mattered. Not “we migrated to the new architecture” but “we reduced deployment time by 40%, which means the team can respond to market changes in days instead of weeks.” Not “I’m leading our AI implementation” but “I’m leading the AI work that’s projected to save 2,000 engineering hours this quarter.”
Same work. Completely different framing. And the second version is what makes executives lean in, because it sounds like someone who thinks about the business — not just the code.
I tell my coaching clients to ask themselves one question at the end of every week: Can I explain why the work I did this week matters to the business in one sentence? If you can’t, you’re probably still talking about execution when you should be talking about impact.
Why this compounds over time
The Forbes feature didn’t come from one guest lecture. It came from six years of showing up and consistently connecting what I care about to why it matters beyond my own world. That compounding is real.
When you start framing your work in terms of business impact — in one-on-ones, in skip-levels, in stakeholder updates, even in casual hallway conversations — something shifts. People start seeing you differently. Not as the person who delivers, but as the person who understands why delivery matters. That’s the leap from execution to strategic influence. And it’s exactly what gets engineering leaders recognized, promoted, and pulled into the rooms where decisions happen.
You never know which rooms matter. You never know who’s listening. But when you consistently tie your work back to the business, you’re ready for every one of them.
If you’re an engineering leader who’s tired of doing incredible work and feeling invisible, I work with leaders on exactly this shift — from execution to strategic influence. Book a free strategy call at jossiehaines.com/meet.
