This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.
Hamza got 2% in January.
The norm is 3%. He’d delivered more in a year than most people deliver in two, and he’s the kind of engineer who wakes up at 2am to fix a pipeline and never makes it anybody else’s problem, which I don’t recommend and which he did anyway.
An engineer on my team got nearly 18% in the same kind of cycle. She’s paid at lead level now without running a team, because she was already doing that job.
Hamza did everything right technically and nothing at all strategically. He had no record of what he’d shipped, so he walked into an empty review. His manager liked him a lot and had nothing to carry upward.
He’s since secured a much bigger increase. He didn’t get better at his job in between.
Your case competes against other people’s cases
Where I work we call them promotion committees. Other companies call them something else. The shape is the same everywhere I’ve seen it. A set of documents, one budget, and a fixed amount of patience.
You already know your manager doesn’t set your number alone. What people miss is the second document in that meeting, and the fourth, and the ninth. The ones that get prioritised are the strongest documents. A strong year in a weak document loses to a decent year in a strong one, every time, and that’s a shit deal.
It’s also the real one. I’ve checked it against my own behaviour and it holds up. The case I can repeat afterwards is the case I fight for.
So I train my team to write their own. Partly that’s selfish. I’m too busy to remember everything they did, I keep a ledger, and my ledger is still worse than theirs. The other reason is that writing it teaches them more about how the business works than anything I could put in a development plan.
A year of your work gets compressed into two sentences by somebody with 10 minutes. What those two sentences get made out of is the only part you control.
The order that loses it
Most first drafts come out in investigation order. I joined, I learned the stack, I found the problem, I tried three things, the third worked, and here’s what it was worth. From the inside that reads like thoroughness. From my side of the desk it’s a postmortem with the ask hidden at the bottom.
By the time your reader reaches the decision they’re bored, they’ve stopped reading, and they’re already doing something else.
So you invert it, and that’s what I mean by decision order. The ask first, the evidence underneath, and the reader picks how far down to go.
The rule underneath that has a name and I’ve been writing about it since 2023. BLUF, bottom line up front. The whole playbook is in Boost Productivity with BLUF, written about Slack messages, and it holds on any document somebody has to act on. Go and read that one instead of me teaching it twice.
What’s different on a promotion case is what goes in the four lines.
What you’re asking for. The title and the number, both, flat.
Why it matters.
Why it needs to happen now.
What happens next, and by when. Your commitment.
Then one sentence sitting over all four, naming the pattern across your wins. Across these, I have consistently unblocked the business from waiting on data. Write your own version, because that’s the line your manager repeats when somebody asks what you’re about.
Here’s the top of a real one, from an engineer on my team.
I’m asking to move to senior data engineer at £68,000. I’ve been doing that job for about a year. I own all our integrations end to end, and I took over finance reporting.
There was no comfortable way to tell her no.
Leading with the ask will feel like you haven’t earned it yet. You have. The evidence is sitting on the page, which is what it’s there for.
Then run the test, which takes 30 seconds. Read only the top.
If your manager can repeat the ask and the reason in one sentence, with none of the evidence under it, you have a case. If they can’t, the order is wrong, and more evidence won’t fix an order problem.
And when you can’t write that top confidently yourself, the document isn’t where the problem is. You don’t have the reason yet, so there’s nothing underneath to expand.
And before everything else, here’s the link to my Promotion OS, the one I use with all my coaching clients. Step 4 is the one that goes with this lesson.
