What to Say When Your Skip-Level Asks 'What Are You Working On?'

Your skip-level leans back in their chair and asks, "So, what are you working on?" You say something like "the auth migration" or "finishing up the Q2 roadmap items." They nod. The conversation moves on. And nothing happens.

You just blew a visibility moment. Not because your answer was wrong. It was accurate. But accuracy isn't what a skip-level is listening for.

Your skip-level doesn't need a status update. They have dashboards, standup notes, and your manager for that. When they ask what you're working on, they're evaluating something else entirely: can you explain your work in terms of why it matters? Do you think about your projects the way someone at the next level thinks about their projects? Are you someone they'd mention by name in a calibration meeting?

The answer to "what are you working on?" is a career test disguised as small talk.

Why most answers fail

Engineers default to the literal answer. It's the honest answer. It's also the answer that makes you sound like every other engineer on the team.

"I'm working on the auth migration." Your skip-level nods. In their head: okay, standard work, standard answer. They move on. Next week, when someone asks them about your team, they remember your manager's name and maybe the project name. Your name doesn't come up — which is exactly how promotion cases fall apart.

"I'm finishing up the API rate-limiting work." Same thing. Accurate, forgettable, zero signal about whether you're operating above your current level.

The problem is that literal answers describe activity, not impact. And your skip-level makes judgments about potential based on how people talk about their work, not what work they're doing. A senior engineer and a mid-level engineer might be on the same project. The difference shows up in how they describe it.

The three-sentence framework

When your skip-level asks what you're working on, answer with three sentences:

Sentence 1: The problem. What exists that shouldn't, or what doesn't exist that should. One sentence about the situation that created the work.

Sentence 2: Your work. What you're actually doing about it. This is the literal answer, but it comes second.

Sentence 3: Why it matters. The impact on the team, the org, or the company. Connect it to something your skip-level cares about.

Here's the difference:

Status update	Three-sentence answer
"I'm working on the auth migration."	"Our current auth system adds 2 seconds to every login and caused three incidents last quarter. I'm leading the migration to the new identity provider. Once it ships, we'll cut login latency by 80% and take a major source of on-call pages off the table."
"I'm doing the API rate-limiting work."	"We've had two outages this quarter from partner integrations overwhelming our API. I'm building the rate-limiting layer. It'll protect our core services and let us onboard new partners without the manual capacity-planning step."

The left column describes a task. The right column describes judgment and awareness. Your skip-level walks away from the right column thinking: this person gets it.

How to figure out your third sentence

The hardest part is sentence three. Most engineers know what they're working on and can describe the problem. But connecting it to something the skip-level cares about requires a small shift in perspective.

Ask yourself: what would break, slow down, or get worse if this work didn't happen? That's your impact.

If you're fixing flaky tests: "If we don't fix these, the team loses about 4 hours a week to false-positive CI failures, and every deploy carries risk that shouldn't be there."

If you're writing documentation: "The onboarding time for new engineers on this service is about 3 weeks. This runbook should cut that roughly in half based on what we saw with the last team that had similar docs."

If you're doing code reviews: "I'm reviewing most of the PRs for the payments service this quarter. Catching issues early here saves us from the kind of production incidents we had in Q1."

You don't need exact numbers. Rough estimates and directional claims work fine. The point is connecting your work to an outcome your skip-level already cares about.

What your skip-level is actually evaluating

When Joan C. Williams wrote in Harvard Business Review about calibration meetings, one finding stood out: employees whose names are already recognized by multiple people in the room get more discussion time. Recognition precedes advocacy. Your skip-level can't sponsor you if they don't know what you do. Understanding what your skip-level is actually evaluating across all of these interactions — not just the "what are you working on" question — makes the stakes of every answer clearer.

The "what are you working on" question is your chance to plant that seed. You're not pitching yourself. You're giving your skip-level data they can use later when your name comes up. "Oh, she's the one leading the auth migration that's going to fix our login latency issues." That sentence in a calibration room is worth more than a hundred lines in your self-review.

Two things to avoid

Don't trash your team or your manager. Some engineers use the skip-level as an opportunity to vent about problems. This almost always backfires. Your skip-level's first thought will be "why is this person going around their manager?" even if you're right about the problem. Save the feedback for your direct manager, or for the specific moment when your skip-level asks for it.

And don't rehearse a speech. The three-sentence framework is a structure, not a script. If you sound like you've been practicing in front of a mirror, it lands wrong. Know your three sentences loosely. Let the actual words come naturally.

Practice it once before your next skip-level

Pull up your current project. Write down: the problem it addresses, what you're building, and one sentence about why it matters beyond your immediate team. Read it out loud. If it sounds natural and takes less than 20 seconds to say, you're ready.

That's the whole exercise. Twenty seconds of preparation that changes how the most influential person in your promotion path thinks about your work. If you have a full skip-level meeting coming up — not just a hallway question — how to prepare for a skip-level meeting covers the broader framework for turning the whole conversation into a visibility moment.

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