Requiring ICs to demonstrate business impact for promotion is, at best, imprecise, and, at worst, disingenuous. Instead, two more valuable and precise measures are:
- measuring project management & technical skills (can the engineer effectively/efficiently complete large, unscoped projects?), and
- evaluating the engineer's contribution to the team's roadmap (can the engineer identify high-value projects within the team's responsibilities? do they push their team to evaluate the prioritization of their work?)
Engineering ICs cannot plan to affect business impact in a foolproof way -- even if an IC had the means to evaluate the impact of their project, it's rare that they are empowered to select projects. Impactful projects are driven partly by luck: whether the project was timely/actually important, whether you get assigned that project, and whether you are given the resources to make the project successful. The influence of luck on impact often pushes engineers to do short-term/unrisky work, when long-te