When you're building something new, there's a strong pull to put every available hour into the work itself and treat reporting as overhead, a tax on the real thing. Stay heads-down, build momentum, let the outcomes do the talking. It feels disciplined. It feels like focus. And it quietly sets you up to lose.
Here's why. The people who decide whether your function survives, gets resourced, or gets paused are not in the work with you. They don't see the system you're building. They see what you show them. If you aren't translating the work into something legible (numbers, a clear narrative, proof tied to outcomes the business already cares about), then in the absence of evidence, your function starts to look optional. And the most strategic initiative in the building is also the easiest one to pause, precisely because it isn't the thing on fire today.
So I had to step back and correct an assumption I'd been carrying: that visibility is busy work. It isn't. Visibility is part of the work. Reporting is how strategic work defends itself. A function that can't demonstrate its value in terms leadership cares about is operating on borrowed time, no matter how strong the underlying work actually is.
I started treating visibility as a deliverable instead of an afterthought. Quantifying what we produce. Tying it back to results the business was already trying to achieve. Making the value readable to people who will never open a single SOP and shouldn't have to. None of that takes away from the real work. It's what makes the real work durable.
If you've read anything else I've written, you'll recognize the pattern: this is the same discipline as everything else in technical alignment. You don't ultimately get credit for the system you built. You get credit for the system people can see working. Governing the work has to include governing the story of the work: not spin, not self-promotion, just an honest, visible account of what's happening and why it matters.
And to be clear, this isn't about politics. It's about respect for a simple fact: decisions get made on the information that's available at the moment they're made. If you want good decisions made about your work, your job is to make sure the right information is in the room. Doing excellent work and hoping someone notices isn't humility. It's a quiet form of negligence toward the thing you care about.
Momentum feels like progress, and most of the time it genuinely is. But momentum that nobody can measure is fragile: it can be stopped by people who never knew it was there. Build the work. Then build the case for the work. The second one isn't a distraction from the first. It's what keeps the first one alive.