I’ve recently changed roles. Before I took this job, someone asked me what impact I wanted to have in it. Not what my title would be. Not what I’d be responsible for on paper. What I wanted to be true, because I’d been there.

I didn’t have a clean answer ready. That told me something. I’d spent plenty of time thinking about scope and outcomes, and not nearly enough time defining, on purpose, what impact was even supposed to mean.

That question matters more here than most places. I work for a state agency that serves the public directly. Whatever I do is going to land on real people with real needs, for better or worse, whether I plan for it or not. That was never the question. The question was what I was going to do.

I’m also following someone whose work here I respect, someone who moved things forward before I walked in. What he built is worthy of building on. But I’m not him. I have different specialties, different instincts, different blind spots. Continuing exactly what he built isn’t defining my own impact. It’s borrowing his. Being intentional means naming what I specifically bring, not just protecting what’s already standing.

Impact Isn’t a Feeling

It’s easy to let “impact” stay vague, a warm sense that the work mattered, without ever pinning down what it was supposed to change. Vague impact can’t be checked. You can feel like you had it and be wrong, or have it and never notice, because you never defined what having it would actually look like. Defining your impact means finishing the sentence: because of this work, what is different, for whom, and how would I know.

Impact for Whom

That “for whom” question does more work than people give it credit for. Impact on the org looks different from impact on the individuals in it, which looks different again from impact on the people the org ultimately serves. I’ve written before about client experience being a defining characteristic of everything I do, whether that client is the colleague in the next office or a member of the public. Defining your impact means picking, honestly, which of those you’re actually optimizing for in a given decision, instead of assuming they’re always the same thing.

What I’m Putting in the Ground

I didn’t answer the opening question on day one. I spent months here first, watching what was already working before I decided what to add to it. Two things were already strong enough to keep running exactly as they were: the drive to innovate, and the org’s own culture work. Carrying those forward isn’t a failure of intentionality. It’s choosing not to break something that wasn’t broken.

My predecessor and I are both well-rounded, but our strengths sit in different places. He knows software development and innovation. I know technology operations, technical architecture, and customer experience. That difference is where my own stakes come from, not from trying to be a better version of him.

So here’s what I’m naming now, knowing more will get added as I go. A crystal clear focus on client experience, internal and external both, from the products we deliver to how we communicate about them. Accessibility isn’t a separate initiative inside that. It’s part of it. And underneath both of those: the technology foundations, closing technical debt, getting to audit-ready, staying aligned with the state around us. None of that is visible to a client directly. All of it decides whether anything else holds.

There’s one more piece, and it’s a needle-mover for us as an org: bringing projects and initiatives, budgets, procurement, and contracts together into something we can plan, prioritize, and deliver against cleanly, instead of each one running on its own track. There’s already movement on it. Most of the work is still ahead.

Where I’ve Gotten This Wrong

I’ve optimized for impact on the org, a system running well, a process cleaned up, and told myself that counted as impact on people, without checking whether anyone downstream felt it. A well-run system that nobody notices getting easier to work with isn’t nothing, but it’s not the whole answer either. The gap between “I made something better” and “someone specific is better off because of it” is exactly the gap that vague impact lets you skip past.

Crux

Impact you haven’t defined isn’t impact. It’s a feeling you’re hoping is true. Naming who’s supposed to be different, and how, before you start the work is what turns a good intention into something you can actually check yourself against later.