Building Your Brand as a BA: Getting Known For the Work You Already Do Well
DAY 4 | Writing About Real Work Without Breaking Trust
The single richest source of content you will ever have is the work sitting in front of you right now. It is also the source most likely to get you in trouble if you are careless with it. Every analyst who builds a real body of work eventually faces this tension. The most specific, most useful lessons come directly from real client engagements. And real client engagements come with obligations you signed up for, whether or not you remembered signing them.
Before anything goes live that is drawn from actual client work, I run it through one question. Could someone who was in the room read this and know exactly who and what I am describing? If the answer is yes, or even a hesitant maybe, it is not ready. Not because the lesson is not valuable, but because the specific packaging around it is still identifiable. The fix is rarely to abandon the story. It is to disguise it properly.
Four moves that keep you safe
Change the industry. If the lesson is about stakeholder alignment, it does not matter whether you say it happened in logistics or in healthcare. Move it somewhere it did not happen.
Change the numbers by a believable margin. Exact figures are often the most identifying detail in a story. A believable range tells the same lesson without pointing back at a specific project.
Combine two projects into one composite. If a lesson actually came from two different engagements, merge them into a single retelling. This protects both sources and often makes the story clearer.
Never name anyone or anything, including competitors. Not the company, not the stakeholder's role in a way that narrows it to one person, not a product name, not a tool that is unusual enough to identify the client.
Your obligations do not expire because it feels anonymous
This is the part people get wrong most often. An NDA or a standard confidentiality clause in your employment contract does not have an exception for 'but I didn't use their name.' If a reasonably informed reader inside the industry could work out who you mean, you have not protected the confidence; you have just made it deniable. When in doubt, generalise harder, not softer. It is always safer to strip out one more identifying detail than to leave in the one detail that makes the story land slightly better.
A quick test with real examples
Take a lesson like 'a client kept approving requirements in meetings and then rejecting them in writing.' As written, if there is only one client this happened with recently and people in your network know who you work for, this may already be identifiable. Disguised properly, it becomes: 'I have seen this pattern more than once across different industries, verbal approval in the room, quiet rejection once it is in writing.' Same lesson, no longer traceable to one engagement.
Or take a number. 'We cut processing time from six weeks to two' might be specific enough to a known project that colleagues could place it immediately. 'We cut processing time by roughly two thirds' carries the same weight for a reader and gives away far less to someone trying to reverse engineer which project you mean.
What is always safe to publish
In my writing experience, these are the safe bets to publish:
Patterns are always safe. The observation that stakeholders often say they want one thing and mean another. The lesson that a process map surfaces political tension a requirements document never would. The fact that a scope discussion that felt like conflict was actually a communication gap. None of that needs a client name attached to be true, and none of it becomes less useful when it is written as a general principle rather than a specific case.
Your own reactions are also always safe. What confused you, what you got wrong the first time, what changed your mind. That material belongs entirely to you, no disguising required.
The goal this week is not to write braver content. It is to write honest content you can defend if anyone ever asks where it came from, including the client themselves.
It is worth saying that this discipline gets easier with practice, not harder. The first few times you disguise a story properly, it can feel like you have sanded away everything that made it interesting. In practice, readers respond to the lesson far more than they respond to the specific company or number attached to it. A well-told pattern, honestly generalised, usually lands better than a barely disguised specific ever did, because the reader can see themselves in it rather than just observing your client's situation from the outside.
When to just ask
There is a simpler option that people forget exists. If a story is genuinely too good to disguise well, and you have a decent relationship with the client or your manager, ask directly whether you can share a version of it and let them see the draft first. Most people say yes to a respectful request, and a story shared with permission is worth more than the same story published carefully around the edges of a confidentiality line you are hoping holds.
And if the answer is no, that is useful information too. It tells you the story was closer to the line than you thought, and you were right to check before publishing rather than after.
The same discipline applies when you write about mentoring conversations rather than client work. I mentor several people into this field, and the lessons from those conversations are some of the most useful content I have. I never describe a specific person's situation in enough detail that they, or anyone who knows them, would recognise it. What I share instead is the pattern behind the question, stripped of the person entirely. Someone asking how to explain a career gap becomes a general post about how to frame a gap in an interview. The individual disappears from the story, and the lesson survives intact.
Go out and be successful.
Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights | www.flotogbainsights.com
TOMORROW
Why Consistency Beats Confidence - Closing the series: the compounding effect that actually builds a reputation, and what to do starting Monday.
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