Precision vs Impact

Often your work isn’t judged by how correct it is, but by its impact.

When I was in big tech, I worked closely with our Sales team. Before that, I had been an investment banking analyst. In banking, I would spent hours in SEC filings, building financial models, and then formatting everything and adding it to a PowerPoint deck. Once the deck was printed we did what bankers call “tieing out”: pen in hand, checking every page to make sure all numbers matched across pages. If an enterprise value was mentioned on slide 7, 14, and 19 it better be the same on every page, down to the decimal.

“Measure twice, cut once” was drilled into my impressionable mind.

I carried that mentality to Snap in the strategy org. Some projects supported the executive team and others helped Sellers with pitches, QBRs, and general story telling with data. When I worked with sellers I obsessed about getting them the exact data because I had learned that exactness gives confidence.

One day I received a last minute request from one of our top sellers. We had a good working rhythm and she usually gave me plenty of runway. This time there was almost none and she presented without my final data. A few days later I saw the deck saved on the company drive.

I was shocked and my stomach dropped. The entire analysis I had built was now half of one slide and the overall figures were rounded to the nearest ten million. The growth rate had also been axed. The story was the same but the precision I was so used to was gone.

My first reaction was actually to fix it. I wanted to get a new version out with the exact data to tell the full story.

The more I sat with it the more I realized it didn’t matter. She wasn’t presenting my analysis she was trying to tell a story and change hearts and minds. We wanted a larger share of marketing dollars due to our better performance with what we had been given.

What was hard for me to stomach was that my missing details did not change the story. The detail mattered to me because it represented my craft. To her, it was a lever in her story. Her story was her craft. She didn’t ignore the details she just didn’t let the lack of certainty derail the message.

The experience taught me the difference between precision and impact. Accuracy matters but it’s not the same thing as impact. The best story tellers know when to zoom in and zoom out. They use precision to build trust and then zoom out to drive action. If you stay too zoomed in you can be perfectly right and completely miss the point.