The most high-visibility project of my corporate career was a tool called Meeting Mojo.

I led the design at DBS Bank. The bet was reducing the time the bank was spending in meetings. 25,000+ employees, many stacking back-to-back meetings, most of them generating limited follow-through.

The project ended up featured in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. Published in books. Presented to the CEO and the executive committee.

The headline number we used when presenting to senior leadership was "estimated $27M in annual productivity savings."

That number was not audited. It could not have been at that stage. What it was was defensible. We had a pilot group. We had meeting frequency data. We had salary benchmarks for the average employee. We did the math. We showed our assumptions. We labelled it as an estimate.

Nobody at the executive level dismissed the number because it was estimated. They engaged with it because the math was shown. They asked about the assumptions. We defended them. The conversation moved forward.

That is how business actually talks about impact.

The same way founders pitch investors. The same way consultants justify engagements. The same way M&A decks get built. None of those documents contain audited numbers before the work is done. They contain ranges, projections, and defensible inputs. That is decision math, not accounting math.

My Executive MBA at Quantic taught me the same thing from a different angle. Every strategy case we worked through was built on estimates. Market sizing. Customer acquisition cost. Lifetime value. Sensitivity analyses. Every single number had an input sheet behind it. What mattered was whether the reasoning held up under pressure.

Designers have been trained to think quantifying impact requires perfect data. It does not. It requires defensible data.

"Improved the user experience" is not more honest than "estimated $27M in annual productivity savings based on 25,000 employees and [inputs]." The first sentence is less risky because it says nothing. The second sentence requires the math to hold up. Good. Let it hold up.

This is what the workshop on Thursday is about. Seven steps, one worked example, and live rewrites using my Premium Portfolio Coach GPT.

Early bird is still open until tomorrow night.

Register here:

Thu Apr 23, 4pm SGT (9am BST / 10am CEST)

https://community.careercreators.com/events/7CB9E4

Thu Apr 23, 7pm PDT / 10pm EDT (Fri Apr 24 10am SGT)

https://community.careercreators.com/events/0C7638

Joseph