This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.
Where I work, I’m the Head of Data Engineering who signs off the 3%, which means I know how little time a case gets. Your manager has about 10 minutes, somewhere between everybody else’s cases, to present you to people who decide your pay and will never open one of your pull requests.
Somebody like me decides your promotion, in a meeting you’re not in.
Finance sizes the pool months before anybody reads a case, so when the 3% arrives looking like a verdict on your worth, that’s bullshit, and I say it as the person who signs it.
If your plan is to ask at your review, you’re preparing for the one-to-one where your manager tells you the decision, because by then the committee has already made it.
The committee checks the names on your case
We call it a promotion committee where I work, although at a smaller company it’s just your manager and whoever controls the budget. Everywhere I’ve seen it, the meeting works the same way, with one budget, everybody’s cases and a fixed amount of patience to share between them.
The committee reads your case next to the second one, the fourth and the ninth, while your manager defends lines he didn’t write. Sooner or later somebody picks one of those lines, messages the person it names and asks whether it’s true (I’ve done it myself).
Your manager has 10 minutes to turn a year of your work into two sentences. You decide what he builds them from.
Every line he says out loud puts his own credibility at risk, so he argues hardest for the cases he can explain afterwards, and so do I.
Your case is the only thing of yours in that meeting, and somebody checks the names on it.
Hamza got 2% against a 3% norm, in a year when he delivered more than most people deliver in two. His manager liked him a lot and had nothing in writing to take into that meeting, where liking somebody doesn’t count for a damn thing once the budget is fixed. Hamza has had a much bigger increase since, and he’s no better at his job than he was.
I’ve watched people on my own team rebuild 12 months of work from memory in the 3 days before a review, badly, under stress and missing half of it.
At a scale-up with no formal reviews, the conversation that sets your pay can include you, and Walt’s did. He got the promotion and 17% more in total compensation. Everything he used existed before he asked, the requirements he’d agreed with his manager 6 months earlier, a brag list and some benchmark data.
This is my course for the meeting you’re not in
I built it with one lesson for each thing that meeting needs from you, and you start every one of them months before anybody asks.
You also have to be great at your job, because anybody on the committee can message the names in your case and the first reply exposes any work you didn’t do. The course teaches you to show a good year properly, in a form your manager can repeat in that meeting without you.
Every lesson is a recorded video plus a write-up with the examples. The templates are in the Promotion OS, the same ones I use with my coaching clients.
The worked version is the Design Your Promotion course, and the recordings come with a paid subscription for as long as you keep it.
And before we dive into the course, I recommend getting yourself a paid subscription and duplicating the Promotion OS, I use with my coaching clients. (the link appears instead of this message)
Lesson 1. Collect your wins before they go cold
Whoever signs off your raise never sees you do the work. More than 70% of data people report to somebody who can’t read their code, so the version of your year you wrote down is the only one that meeting ever gets.
“Helped with a dbt migration“ covers anything from 2 calls to the whole project, so nobody reading it can tell which. The person I coached who wrote it turned it into 2 lines anybody can check, “Migrated 40 dbt models to dbt Cloud“ and “Cut CI test time from 22 minutes to 6“.
Sometimes “helped” means you stopped another team from doing some stupid shit, which is a real win, as long as the line says what you stopped.
Write down what shipped, who saw it and what changed on the day it happens, even if it’s only a message to yourself. Once a week, spend 10 minutes turning those messages into lines.
Lesson 2. Pick your outcome and your number
Your manager has to forward your number to finance, which he can’t do with a figure he can’t attribute. Say “somewhere between 80 and 90“ and he hears 80, so research the range yourself and bring one figure.
Ask for the title and the number together, because with the title alone somebody else sets the number later, in the meeting you’re not in. A number with no title buys you a raise for the job you already have.
Kalina went from a 3% nobody asked her about to the senior title and £75,000 in 9 months, 24% up on where she started. She did it with the same work she’d been doing all along, by sourcing what her year was worth and saying so.
I ask my own team for their number 3 to 6 months before the cycle, because I can’t argue for a figure nobody gives me.
Sometimes the data says your employer already pays you right for the scope you have, which is worth knowing before you spend a cycle arguing for more.
Lesson 3. Translate your wins into business language
“Pipeline failures down 80%“ is half a line, the half you can prove alone, from the logs, in an afternoon.
The other half has to come from somebody in a different job. In my own version of that line, it’s the board report going out on time, so finance stops keeping a parallel spreadsheet just in case.
Your logs give you the left column, and only people in other jobs can give you the right one.
I failed this myself in a final-round interview, answering a head of marketing’s question about customer acquisition cost with dbt and reverse ETL, because I’d never cared about anything past loading and modelling the data.
Put this question at the top of your ledger and run every entry past it, since it’s the one that finds the wins nobody gave you a ticket for.
What would be harder right now if I hadn’t done that?
My rule is 2 weeks, so ship, wait and then ask whose week changed.
I filed one of my own wins as “clustered some tables” and only found out what it did when I heard people talking about that morning report before a call. Before the change, 4 people opened it every morning and passed the numbers on to everybody else, and now the whole team of 15 opens it themselves.
Lesson 4. Send your promotion case
I’m one of the people ranking those cases, and a strong year in a weak document loses to a decent year in a strong one. It sucks for whoever had the strong year, and I still rank them that way, because in that meeting the document is all I have to go on.
An engineer on my team wrote her own case and got nearly 18% in the same kind of cycle that gave Hamza 2%. She earns lead-level pay now without running a team, because she already does that job.
Send the case before the meeting and never present it live, because whoever decides needs time alone with it, to write in the margin and go back to the line they didn’t follow.
Your manager sends it back with notes on what his committee will ask, and the version with his notes beats yours. I’m doing the same right now with a business case for a project I’m taking to our board, which my manager has already sent back more than once.
Nobody I’ve coached or worked with has ever lost a case over the file type. Use whatever format your committee finds easiest to read.
Lesson 5. How Erfan got over 20%
A reorg can put a new manager between you and the one who promised you the next step, 3 months before your review.
In Erfan Hesami’s case the old manager raised the promotion first, then moved a level up in a reorg 3 months before the review. The company opened at 12% and Erfan finished with the lead title and 22%, after 4 meetings over 3 weeks.
I credit his written case with getting the promotion through the reorg, although his old manager’s word might have done it alone, and I wouldn’t bet a year on finding out.
A promise from a one-to-one belongs to whoever made it.
Put the ask on the record at your mid-year review, 6 months out, and send a recap within 24 hours of every meeting after that.
Erfan also left the number out of his case and let the company go first, which lessons 2 and 4 both tell you not to do. He’d finished his research before their offer arrived, so he never built his number while looking at theirs. I still put the number in, even though his 22% is the strongest case against me I know of.
If a post or a search brought you here, subscribe and I’ll send you the next one. Two a week, all of them on the part of the job nobody taught you.
Take the lessons in order
Lesson 4 builds the case from the lines you write in the first 3, so if you skip the ledger you end up with a page of adjectives.
If you do one thing today, start the ledger. Every week you wait, somebody forgets a win you’ll need them to confirm.
I built the Promotion OS in the same order as the lessons.
Step 1 has the ledger template and both AI prompts.
Step 2 has the 4 salary sources, my own dated search and the Musts Card.
Step 3 has the three-column framework, the message that gets the answer in writing, and the 3 ways it goes wrong.
Step 4 has the 4 opening lines, the cut to 5 to 8 lines, and how to write up the promises you broke.
Step 5 has the recap template and the self-audit.
Erfan’s case runs all 5 steps, start to finish.
Final thoughts
I got my own 40% raise and the Head of Data Engineering title without writing a case and without asking, which still means other people decided it, in conversations I wasn’t part of.
Some of the people whose requests I kept pushing back on asked leadership to back me, because I sent my priorities out in writing every week and they could see what I was building.
I can’t tell you how much of that was the weekly updates and how much was luck. My own team writes their own cases.
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Until next time,
Yordan from Data Gibberish
PS: You will receive one more with an announcement email today.