How to Promote an Engineer
If you are a manager, chances are you have someone on your team that wants to be promoted. If you are a good manager, you’ll already be working on that. If you’re an ideal manager, you are systematically developing everyone on your team, in a manner that is appropriate for their long term goals, and that acknowledges promotion as a step along the way.
This guide is naturally based on my experience promoting people at Toast. Although your experience at different companies will naturally differ, I suspect that many mid-sized and up tech companies will have similar processes. Consider this a dual to Gergely Orzosz’s guide for software engineers who wish to get promoted.
When done well, the individual’s promotion should feel inevitable to you and the promotion committee. To achieve this, you will have been managing carefully to create opportunities and guidance for each individual over a long period (possibly years). Promotions at companies with formal review processes will have set expectations through a career ladder and other supplemental guidance. This means that you can use these expectations to map a roadmap for a person’s promotion.
When you feel that the individual is close to promotion, you should budget up to 3 months to prepare for and complete the promotion process itself. Through this last quarter of work, you will identify any gaps that you may need to work with the individual to resolve. In this quarter you will:
- Craft a story that that will resonate emotionally and rationally with the audience
- Collect and summarize evidence of an individual’s performance at the next level
- Align key stakeholders to support the individual and the story
- Write the promotion packet and circulate it for feedback
- Prepare and deliver the pitch at the promo committee meeting
Doing the ground work
Successfully promoting someone represents the culmination of consistent investment that you (and that person’s prior managers) have made. These investments will have included:
- Understanding their desired career path
- Identifying technical and non-technical skills or behaviors that they need to demonstrate at the next level
- Providing tasks and projects with opportunities to produce concrete artifacts or impact that require those skills or behaviors
- Coaching them to successfully complete those opportunities
- Connecting them to a network of individuals that can attest to their impact
- Establishing an environment that is conducive to growth including a low-firedrill environment and strong collaborators.
The preparation work is your “normal” job, and will usually take at least a year. By amortizing the prep work over a longer period, you greatly reduce the risk of finding yourself unable to promote someone due to an unforeseen gap.
Part of that amortization is to document all of the above in some sort of running document that you can update periodically (weekly, monthly, or at least quarterly).
Preparing the Packet
The Story
The Story will carry you through the entire process of the promotion.
You will be expected to be able to speak to a person’s impact. Their Story should directly answer the question of how the individual has demonstrated the behaviors and impact expected of someone at their (new) level.
The core of the Story can be as simple as a sentence. “Sam led the implementation of feature X from design to deployment.” “Taylor’s architecture work has allowed us to scale our teams and systems as our customer base and company has doubled.”
The Story may highlight that the individual has driven some specific impact. “Alex’s work on Feature Y led to a 10% increase in customer conversion.”
The Story of their accomplishment should be understood to be “appropriately” challenging. For example, we expect an Software Engineer II to be able to consistently deliver on tasks without significant need for intervention from other engineers. We expect a Principal Engineer to be operating to deliver impactful projects that span multiple teams. We expect an Software Engineer II to primarily interact with peers on their team; a Principal Engineer should be interacting with senior technical leaders across much of the organization.
If you plan deliberately and have some luck, the individual will complete a significant and recognizable deliverable in the 2-3 months prior to the promotion committee meeting. This work can help seed a compelling story, supported by an analysis of the impact of that work.
Peer feedback
Often promotion packets require some degree of input from others, ranging from engineers to product managers to executives. Here you will benefit from having helped the individual cultivate a network.
Broadly, the promotion committee is looking for evidence of this person’s:
- impact on others
- demonstration of company values
- areas of growth We capture peer / 360 feedback in a freeform manner in the packet, so long as it provides this evidence.
Collect this feedback in the 4 to 8 weeks prior to the promotion committee meeting. This will give you the most relevant and timely testimonials. It will allow you to use recency bias to your advantage.
Here are three times that you can “clandestinely” obtain 360 feedback for someone, by pairing it with a good “cover” reason to collect feedback:
- The easiest time to solicit 360 feedback is as part of the regular people review process. Since HR typically sends broad emails announcing upcoming review cycles, that is a great reminder to send out 360 feedback.
- Another great time for feedback is after the completion of a notable effort led by the individual. As you celebrate that person’s success, a 360 review can help you and that person reflect on what they did well and where they can improve, while serving double duty to collect promo packet material.
- A month into a new project or adjustment in role can also be a natural time to collect feedback. The “cover” for this survey is to help assess the person’s performance in the new project/role.
The packet template documents certain classes of individuals from which to get feedback. This will be a set of cross-functional stakeholders/collaborators (e.g., QA, UX, PM, Eng), of appropriate breadth, and including some people above the proposed new level. For example, an SE5 to SE6 promo packet will need solid support from cross functional technical and non-technical leaders, including other SE6s and Chief Architect or CTO. An SE1 to SE2 promo packet should include local team members, including PM and any QA. A manager promo packet will include the individual’s direct reports, their peers, and more senior leaders with whom that individual interacts.
The Ladder
Review key resources:
- The relevant career ladder that describes expected behaviors and impact at the target level
- Toast Talent Experience competencies of the target level
- Prior successful packets (for other people promoted to that level), notably the story, key examples, and supporting evidence. Your Director should be able to obtain such samples for your review.
As part of your regular 1:1s, you have been updating this to collect examples of their behavior, and coaching them to develop examples as well.
Quantitative Measures
Prior Reviews. Collect the past 2 or 3 reviews (minimum) from Workday. For more senior levels, a longer track record of strong performance may be required.
For engineers, look to Jellyfish (JIRA and GitHub) to highlight ther general productivity. It is good practice to be collecting and reviewing this data regularly so you do not have any surprises.
Summarize this information in the appropriate sections of the packet.
Growth Areas
No one is perfect, nor can they do everything. You will need to be able to identify areas of continued growth for this individual, should they be promoted.
You should be aware if there are any “negative” concerns about an individual that people may bring to the table. For example, did this person have a poor interaction that members of the promo committee may be aware of? Is there some technical or people problem that people attribute to this individual? Acknowledge the need for growth to avoid such issues in the future, and be prepared to speak on how it was or will be addressed.
Preparing for the Promo Committee Meeting
Find pre-prereaders
As you write your packet, look to start circulating drafts a few weeks before the packet is formally due. At the very least, you will want your manager to have reviewed the packet and given you feedback and support.
Ensure that key individuals have an opportunity to consider the promotion ahead of time. For SE2 / SE3 promos, this may be your LOB Director or VP. For promotions to SE4+, this will be TDLs, Directors and other leaders across the organization, including the Chief Architect or CTO.
Submit and respond to comments
A week prior to the promo meeting (or before), submit your packet. In the days leading up to the meeting, you will get a few comments on the packet with questions on things you have written. Respond to those comments promptly.
Invite supporters
Consider ensuring that one or more supporters will be present at the meeting. Particularly for more senior roles, it is helpful have someone in the meeting who can speak generally in support, as well as specifically to address any questions or concerns.
For example:
- A Technical Design Lead or other senior engineer can lend credence to the technical complexity of the problem solved and the quality of the individual’s solution.
- A Product Manager or other business stakeholder can speak to collaboration and business impact.
- An Engineering Manager or Director (especially in a neighboring LOB or group) may be able to comment on a mixture of technical complexity, collaboration, and impact.
This is definitely not required, but may be helpful if there are specific strengths you wish to highlight or concerns that you wish to be able to deflect.
Coordinate with the organizers of the meeting to identify an approximate time window where your individual will be presented that can be coordinated with the supporters.
Practice the pitch
You will have a few minutes to verbally make your case during the promo committee meeting. You should probably aim for ~5m of speaking. Take some notes and do a run through of your case so that you know what you will say and roughly how long it takes.
Here is an example pitch structure that you can use as a basis for your opening statement:
Good morning! Thank you all for the opportunity to present X for promotion to SE{n}. The key things we think about for SE{n} are A, B and C. I'll highlight out of the packet for you some examples of A, B and C and then conclude with some areas for growth. I've also invited Y and Z who can offer some brief words of color to support their written feedback.
The main reason for us considering X today is {insert story here}.
{A} {B} {C}
{Areas of Growth}
I'll let Y and Z add some more context about X's {technical contributions} and {scope of impact}.Aftermath
Thanks to all this work, your team member was promoted! Congratulations! Later that day you should receive information about any comp changes or equity grants the person may receive. Once you have that, you can let the person know!
Once all people in the promo cohort have been informed, you can also let the person’s team know, and send an email to your team and celebrate.
Congratulations!
References
Plays to consider
- Have a Career Conversations
- Review the Ladder / Competency Matrix
- Collect 360 Feedback