How to Get Promoted Faster
Companies generally suck at promoting you at what feels to you as the right time. Either you're in a startup and promotions feel conservative, or you're in a FAANG company and they're overly political. /shrug
You get paid for the job that you already do, not the job that you want to do in the future. If you want to be promoted to the next level, you need to consistently perform at that level for a quarter or longer.
At junior levels, good companies expect that you will grow within a certain time period. That's because your true impact unleashes when you level up and stay at the company. Your promotions are expected and you have to show up and provide enough evidence to back them up.
Take ownership of your career
Your manager should generally ensure you have a growth plan, they should advocate for great things you made and make your impact visible, and then they would put together a promotion package, that is mostly a fancy word for a document describing why they think you're eligible for the next promotion.
But you can and should take ownership of your trajectory and growth. Here are a few useful tools and artefacts to help you think through leveling up.
The growth plan
A good growth plan is a document that describes the list of behaviors and skills that you need to master in order to grow to the next milestone or level. It's not a checklist. You don't get the promotion when you checked every item on the list of things to learn. Instead, the list is a guideline and a roadmap that should give you focus and direction, and inform your vision for your future promotion package (more on that below).
The easiest way to make a growth plan is to take the leveling guide your company has for your level and the level above, sit down with your manager, and write down all the things that are required of the next level that you don't currently do well.
Once you have the plan, you can use it to guide what type of problems or projects you work on next every month. The plan is only helpful if you actually use it, which means returning to it every few weeks to check your progress.
Here is an example growth plan that we've put together with Patrick Nilan at Airbyte.
For junior levels, a growh plan can cover the whole levels. At senior+, a growth plan usually covers one area of work in which you want to improve — leading cross-team projects, prioritizing, scoping complex projects, managing tech debt, managing expectations, etc etc.
The brag list
The “brag list” is a concise list of great things that you did at work that have outsized impact on the business and your team. Bullet points, no more than one item per month. Each item has no more than two sentences: what you did, and what outcome this achieved (link to internal Slack or public announcements).
Everyone needs this list, honestly. It's not just to get you promoted or track your growth — it's a great tool to give you focus, clarity, and explain what you're actually working on to yourself and others.
See, nobody gives a flying fuck about the code you've written a year ago, but what that code helped your company achieve might make a difference. Some examples:
| Good | Meh |
|---|---|
Implemented nested decoders (link) frontend in Connector Builder. This unblocked a %{$XYZ} deal with %{specific large enterprise customer}. | Shipped a feature in connector builder that required changes on the frontend, a new component that we didn't have yet, and an extensive CDK feature. This improved code styles and readability. |
Prioritized ACL / permissions metadata work to secure %{customer deal}, and to work closely with Airbridge and prepare for Semantic Layer work. | Managed product priorities with our enterprise, experimental product teams, and engineering requirements so the team were happy, productive, and shipped ACL and metadata support. |
Your brag list is the easiest correct answer to “tell me about yourself” on an intro conversation with a recruiter from a company that makes your heart skip a beat.
The promotion package
At some point, your manager decides that it's time to promote you. To get a promotion confirmed, they would need to put together a “promotion package” and get that approved. Each company has a slightly different process (promotion cycles with calibrations, ad-hoc promotions, etc).
The manager will have to convince their boss and their peers that you already perform at the next level, you're as good as other folks on that level, and your performance is sustainable. Promotion document usually provides evidence of your next-level performance, calibrates it against your peers at that level, and has some additional evidence and references from other folks at your company.
Here's the twist: you can envision your own promotion package as it will look 6-12 months from where you are. You might not know a specific format that your manager would use, but you can write down a vision of what will be true in a year so that your manager would be able to get your promotion approved.
The vision for your promotion is a living document. If you have enough trust with your manager, work on it with them, if not yet — it's your responsibility. But, it's a document that you update every month and clarify both your assumptions of what is worth a promotion, and how much closer to that did you get.
This exercise helps bridge the gap between working through your growth plan, and pushing for the next level promotion. You should absolutely show that to your manager — and they would likely disagree with your version. That's valuable! That way you can understand where the gap is, and improve your plans to bridge it sooner.
All three of the artefacts above are basically doing your managers job for them. It's great to be ambitious, if you put the effort and walk the walk! Working on the plan, the brag list, and the promotion vision and showing them to your manager will force a conversation about the divide in how you and your manager see your performance and impact, which in turn will help you improve your trajectory further.
Always lift others as you go.
Special thank you to Parick Nilan for helping with this post! He kindly agreed to review and edit it, and provide the example growth plan linked above.