Promotion Doc best practices?

Question

Hi Team,

tldr: My skip suggested that I come back with Promotion Doc ready by this Tuesday.

Context: My manager was let go in the reduction of force couple of months back and all 7 of us now report to skip. This is the first 1:1 I had with Skip .
She asked me if there is anything she can do as we are overburdened with work and stress is on the rise. In reply , I asked her suggestion on promotion conversations which stopped with my manager's departure. I am SWE L3 working in the team since Jan'22.

Question: I copied the ladder doc for L4 , but I am unable to make a solid doc out of it. Skip said I will have 5 minutes to present and if she likes my doc then she will put my name at the Promotion Board. Any best practices that I should follow?

I have covered the below in my promotion doc:

Mapped the work in my 3 projects to various sub categories of ladder in L4.
Got the peer feedbacks from my 1 coworkers, 2 Seniors and 2 XFN teammates.
Pasted the list of awards that I received - Two Top contributor awards in Q3.

My previous manager never formally agreed to work on any promotion doc. He did agree that I am working at next level and was always happy with my work. I have watched [Masterclass] How To Get Promoted Faster In Tech multiple times, it is awesome!! Except for getting Manager work on a shared doc I have done some of the suggested items already.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

I'm unsure what L3 maps to in your company (e.g. L3 is senior at Stripe but junior at Google), so you might want to clarify to get more level-specific advice.

That being said, I think your list more or less has everything:

Concrete data points showing that your behaviors and impact of the next level
Feedback from your peers, particular those who are more senior than you (XFN is very important for senior and above packets)
Other cool accomplishments like those you would find in a brag journal

5 minutes isn't a ton of time, so I recommend rehearsing it in front of a mirror or with a peer once or twice before presenting it to your skip. A lot of performance packets tend to follow a power law where there's 1-2 big projects acting as your "crown jewel" - Make sure to start with those first to draw them in and lead with the high-level impact description (hopefully you have metrics to back things up).

For more advice on how to best document your impact, I recommend going through my comments in this discussion too: "How to navigate the difficult SDE 2 to SDE 3 promotion?"

Promotion Doc best practices?

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