10 Tips to Get Promoted in Tech — Why Doing a Great Job is Not Enough.
I moved from a junior manager position to vice president within 5 years. It was through a lot of luck and good timing, but it was also through some thoughtful best practices. I have also served on countless promotion committees, seeing people get promoted hundreds of times. In this article, I will distill the best practices for getting promoted. These are things other than doing a great job, which is, of course, the prerequisite for a promotion.
1. Own your promotion
This sounds trivial, but I’ve met so many people who think their manager owes them a growth plan, and that if they do a good job, their manager will take care of them. Managers, like every other human, have limited bandwidth, and believe it or not, you are not the center of their universe.
You need to own your growth plan. You need to tell your manager that you want to grow in the company, understand what it takes to be successful and impactful. You need to own the process, help your manager advocate for you, and arm them with everything they need to make your promotion a no-brainer.
Example:
One of my top stars at Twitter got promoted several times within a few years. She created a project document for her promotion, wrote big parts of her promotion document for me as her manager, and collected all the crucial evidence for me to be able to show how amazing she was.
2. Communicate and document your work
This is probably the most common pitfall I see people falling into — “I will focus on doing a good job, and my manager will notice that”. In most cases, this is a delusional way of thinking about your career growth.
As you grow in any role, you will find that communication is the key strength you need to develop. Technical leaders in big companies need to go on stage and charismatically communicate the amazing work their team has done and the path ahead. But even if you aim to get promoted from an intern to a junior engineer, you need to clearly and effectively communicate your work.
A well-written promotion document of an average employee can lead to promotion more often than a poorly written promotion document of a good employee. As time passes, you will learn that communication is not separate from doing a good job; it is part of doing a good job.
Examples:
Many of my reports at Slack had this pattern of reporting their work — each week they would meet with me, tell me what they have done, tell me what they are planning to do, and ask for my feedback on prioritization. This gave me, as their manager, both visibility and the ability to help them be most effective.
Another example is note-taking. At Google, many of my peers used to write daily notes about the work they had achieved that day. You could go into a dedicated system and see what everyone was working on and their progress.
3. Foster relationships
In all companies, relationships matter. At Amazon, it is called “earn trust,” and at Google, it is called “Googliness”. Relationships become more and more critical as you move up in your career ladder.
Managers and promotion committees are always looking for strong references and peer evidence of a great job done. Relationships not only help you get the job done, but they are also important when the time comes to ask peers to write a recommendation for your promotion.
Examples:
I have a friend who is amazing at building relationships. When he was a junior program manager, he got two VPs to say he was the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, he got the promotion following that recommendation.
I have also seen the opposite — I have seen great performers miss this critical part and not be able to source good recommendations or references for their work. This is a source of big frustration for roles such as engineers, where you do not get a lot of opportunities to collaborate.
4. Choose a winning project and company
If you can, try to choose projects that are front and center for the company. Being a great engineer on a failing project usually leads to nowhere, but being an OK engineer on a super successful project will usually lead to a promotion.
This might sound cynical, but this article is not about fairness; it’s about getting you promoted. Choosing the right project is like choosing the right wave to surf — picking a bad wave will lead you nowhere.
The same goes for choosing a company — being a director of product at Meta is much better than being a director of product at Wells Fargo. While both roles sound the same, one is a fantastic tech career trajectory and the other is working in a mediocre bank.
Example:
When I joined Slack, it was a small and promising new startup in San Francisco. I had another offer from a big Korean company, which was much more lucrative from a salary point of view. Declining that big check and deciding to go to Slack was the best career move I’ve ever made.
5. Choose an Impactful Role
Picking a winning project is great, but if you want to supercharge your career, try to be as impactful as possible in the projects or company. This does not suit everyone, because being in a critical role is stressful, a lot of work, and somewhat risky. But if you nail an impactful role and do it well, your promotion is golden.
Picking an impactful role is also about taking initiatives and seeing what is broken and what can be fixed or improved in a meaningful way. At Google, we used to call it “If it is broken, fix it”. As a VP of product, I loved hearing about engineers in my team who took initiatives and created impactful customer value. I remembered them when it came the time for promotions.
Example:
When I joined Google, I noticed there was a missing developer program for top experts in Google technologies. I told my manager that I wished we had this type of technical ambassador program that would help developers all around the world work with Google’s APIs. My manager gave the “If it is broken, fix it” response, which led me to create the Google Developer Expert program. It still runs and has had a great impact more than ten years later. Creating this project helped drive my career trajectory at Google.
6. Help others be successful
I love this advice and practice it on a weekly basis. Making others become successful in their role is one of the best things that you can do for your career. It’s true, sometimes people will take credit for things that you have helped with, without giving you any credit. But most people will reciprocate if you help them out.
Helping others also extends to finding new job opportunities. Helping a friend with their startup is a great way to learn about the ins and outs of entrepreneurship, for example. I helped a startup that later offered me a position as Chief Product Officer and a founder.
An important subset of this advice is to make your manager successful. I had a director reporting to me who was fantastic at telling me, “Amir, let me take this problem you have and solve it.” All I wanted to do was promote him.
Example:
When I was at Slack, I used to ask the support engineers what their number one most common ticket was that they needed to deal with from customers. My team would then write tutorials to help solve these issues. This not only helped the support team but created something called “cross-group collaboration” which my manager loved and used to advocate for my promotion.
7. Avoid stagnation
This is a hard pill to swallow, but if you have not been promoted or changed jobs for more than two years, you are not optimizing your career. It does not mean that staying in a role you love is bad. I have friends who stayed in the same role for more than ten years and were very happy. But remember, this article is not about happiness; it is about getting promoted.
At the time of this article, an average term in a job or a role is 18 months. If you are ambitious, impactful, and determined, you can definitely get promoted every two years. If your company does not want to promote you, find a new company. If your manager does not appreciate your work, it’s time to find a new team. It is not being self-centered; this is how the game is played.
Always be on the lookout for better options. See what is out there in the company, or outside the company. Even if you are happy, being aware is not a bad thing. I was super happy at Slack and still entertained other options. I was doing a good job and loved the company, but I had no illusion that they would fire me if they ran out of money. This is not personal, despite how many people think.
Example:
I had two major career jumps — moving from Google as a senior manager to a director at Slack, and moving from a senior director at Slack to a VP at Twitch. My estimation is that I saved about 2–4 years of grinding in the role to get promoted with these two jumps.
8. Be positive, avoid toxicity
Remember the guy that complains on and on? Don’t be that guy! People who get promoted are positive and surround themselves with positive people. It’s fun to share camaraderie by complaining about the boss, but it does not help your career. This is especially true if you are doing the complaining.
This does not mean not to pass feedback about a negative thing that is happening. It means providing that feedback to the right person at the right time in a constructive way. Every negative feedback could be positioned in a positive way, resulting in better acceptance of that feedback.
Definitely avoid toxicity — being negative to the point of making others negative as well. Negative people rarely get promoted; toxic people get fired.
Example:
Someone in my team at Twitter wanted to get promoted. Feedback on him was that he was a complainer and made other people feel negative about our team. He did not get promoted and was removed from my team.
9. Develop subject matter expertise
Having a unique skill set is a great way to secure your position in the company, get promoted, and ensure you have great compensation. Companies always look for people with unique skills because they are rare and super valuable.
Having a special skill will reverse the power dynamics between you and the company. I’ve seen companies compete for employees with unique skills such as being the best at scaling SaaS services or being the best at growth hacking.
Example:
I built my expertise around the domain of Developer tools and platforms. I wrote a book on APIs and often lectured about how to build developer ecosystems. This made my career progression a lot easier because companies that were looking for my specific skills were highly eager to retain and promote me.
10. Have a public persona
Being out there makes you a hot commodity. Companies continuously look to retain and hire talent from that pool. Having a public persona does not mean you need to go on a tour across Europe. It means being out there and showing your skills.
You do not need to be an extrovert to have a public persona. I have good friends who are introverts and continuously contribute to technical standards and code projects.
Example:
For me, it started as contributing code to open-source projects, then moving to releasing my own open-source projects and writing articles about how to use them. I continued to write about technical topics with O’Reilly Media, and finally wrote two books with them. I spoke at more than a hundred events and ended up touring across Europe as part of my role at Slack and at Twitch.
Conclusion
Getting promoted in tech requires more than just doing a great job. By following these ten tips — owning your promotion, communicating effectively, fostering relationships, choosing winning projects and companies, taking on impactful roles, helping others succeed, avoiding stagnation, maintaining a positive attitude, developing expertise, and building a public persona — you can significantly increase your chances of advancement. Remember, your career is in your hands, and with the right approach, you can climb the ladder of success in the tech industry.
