Name: This Is What A Good Promotion Plan Looks Like
Uploaded: 2023-11-02T04:09:35+00:00
Duration: 4 min 3 s
Description: One of the most crucial ingredients for a successful promotion is a clear plan

This Is What A Good Promotion Plan Looks Like

One of the most crucial ingredients for a successful promotion is a clear plan. However, the engineering career matrix that most big companies have isn't nearly enough. This video covers what a quality promotion plan looks like.

Here are the core points from the video:

- **Show the delta** - Just giving someone a concept isn't enough. Growth comes when you progress from a lower state to a higher one. To best facilitate that, you must outline exactly what that lower state and higher state are so people can understand the difference and work towards bridging the gap.
- Here's an example showing what it means to outline the delta when growing a mid-level engineer on their code review axis:
  - **Bad promotion plan:** *"Have a bigger influence in code review"*
  - **Good promotion plan:**
    - E4 (mid-level): *"You are extremely thorough catching issues within your own domain, finding architectural issues (sometimes challenging the entire diff/diff stack), performance problems, and several edge case misses."*
    - E5 (senior): *"Instead of mainly reviewing stack-specific diffs within product domains you have worked on, you review diffs across the entire stack for your org (M2+ scope). You are able to review diffs for areas that you have never worked with before, quickly absorbing the context of the diff and its surrounding ecosystem to leave genuinely insightful feedback in a relatively short period of time.”*

Related resources:

- [\[Taro Top 10\] Software Engineer To Engineering Manager (IC -&gt; M Track)](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/oz0mnJvHHgM8NfVF7rgp/)
- [\[Masterclass\] What Software Engineers Should Look For In Their Engineering Manager](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/oeY7ncZhzJ5NO6dij5e7/masterclass-what-software-engineers-should-look-for-in-their-engineering-manager/)
- [\[Taro Top 10\] Getting Promoted Faster In Tech](https://www.jointaro.com/playlist/eZOEUatYEe7BBAZByuha/)

One of the most crucial ingredients for a successful promotion is a clear plan

The clearest way a company can acknowledge your growth. At the end of the day, you can't solely interview your way to a principal engineer; promotion is the true foundation of your pay and career.

Doing this properly is a hard requirement for professional success. As a software engineer in particular, this relationship needs to be carefully navigated to achieve maximum impact.

[Masterclass] How To Work Better With Your Engineering Manager

Your engineering manager (EM) is easily the most important figure in your professional life, and how you manage your engineer &lt;-&gt; EM relationships across your various teams and companies will largely dictate how much career growth you have. The tricky part is that all of this is very hard, and if you don't do it properly, you can end up working against your manager instead of with them.

As always, the masterclass covers a *ton* of ground, so here's the Top 5 points:

- **Engineering management is a very hard job** - EMs are completely slammed with meetings and are constantly making hard decisions (e.g. *"Who do I hire and fire?"*). The first step towards fostering a healthy relationship here is having empathy for the natural difficulty behind their role.
- **It's up to YOU to leverage your manager** - Don't expect your manager to solo-carry you by proactively identifying all your issues and handing you the perfect growth plan on a silver platter. Nobody can read minds, and nobody cares about your personal growth more than you. Treat your manager as a resource, similar to how a front-end application treats an API. The API will never come to you - It's up to you to call it with the proper parameters to achieve the result you want.
- **Be extremely visible** - Be default, assume that your EM has 0 clue what you're doing, not out of malice but because they're swamped most of the time. cc your manager on important communications to keep them up-to-date with your biggest accomplishments and blockers. Add them as optional on meetings. Use your 1 on 1 to share crucial wins and status updates.
- **Maintain an ongoing dialog about performance** - Your performance review rating should never be a (negative) surprise. Ask every couple months for your manager to give you a hypothetical rating (make it clear that you will take it with a massive grain of salt). Don't let your fear of these awkward, transparent conversations lead to you getting put on an unexpected PIP.
- **Frame promotion as a mutual benefit** - It is not the manager's job to grow their engineers and get them all promoted; this is actually literally impossible in the current economy. It's the manager's job to make sure that their engineers are consistently shipping impact. This means that you must be extremely careful framing your promotion in a way where it's clear that your goal is to expand your impact and further empower the team, not to get more money and a higher title (it's totally fine to want these, they just have to be very far away from front and center).

Related resources:

- [Having The Proper Mentality For Manager 1 on 1s](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/sIm7s54ILdBQmpCtKFtb/having-the-proper-mentality-for-manager-1-on-1s/)
- [1 on 1s Are The Time To Be Awkward](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/xjeFRpp5YHxG9TTK8wjn/1-on-1s-are-the-time-to-be-awkward/)
- ["How do I create a growth plan with my manager/mentor and what should it include?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/BG4rWlnWQamBFI9ujCni/how-do-i-create-a-growth-plan-with-my-managermentor-and-what-should-it-include/)
- ["How do I give critical feedback to my manager?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/VeGFF3JbpstS3Av5jpHB/how-do-i-give-critical-feedback-to-my-manager/)
- [\[Masterclass\] What Software Engineers Should Look For In Their Engineering Manager](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/oeY7ncZhzJ5NO6dij5e7/masterclass-what-software-engineers-should-look-for-in-their-engineering-manager/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zS7GJQmpZRS-fo-ZiiV5cHjdat9gHStPFVnA0awlFM0/edit?usp=sharing)