 Thank you. Hi, everyone. It's great to see so many folks here in person. I'm told we're joined by thousands online, so hello to everyone online. I'm excited to be here today and present about a topic that always gets me excited, getting promoted. I thought this topic would be helpful in several ways. Most of you were here for Carlos's talk earlier, and there are a lot of folks in tech being laid off right now, and there's no sugarcoating that. Most of the time, layoffs are not personal, and individual performance is not central to the decision. If you were laid off, it's easy to go to a negative place and think that you have some self-doubt and things like that. I wanted to focus on something more positive and more constructive and help everyone feel like they have a bit more control. I know a lot of folks are also in this economic climate and knowing that layoffs are happening maybe in your organization or out there in the job market, thinking about sticking around in their roles longer, even though Carlos cited that number of 60% are looking to leave within two years. That means 40% aren't, and that number of folks doesn't tell you who's staying around longer than they may have wanted to, and that can feel like prison sometimes. And so I wanted to help those folks find new opportunities within their same organizations to continue to grow and learn and develop, even if you're not moving organizations to do so. So regardless of layoffs and all that sad stuff, I hope that everyone, even those who aren't product managers yet, will find something constructive here and give you a little bit more control over your work life. All right, so a little bit about me. I'm the former vice president of Product and Match Group, where I led vision, strategy, and execution for the namesake dating brand match. I'm also a product coach and advisor. I've held leadership roles at Meta, ZipCard, a number of startups. In these roles, I've promoted people, been promoted, and advised others who've been promoted. I've also worked in organizations with very deliberate and structured performance cultures, as well as those without them. And I'm excited to be here to share insights from my personal experience and from the thought leadership I've learned over the years. In addition, in preparation for this presentation, I talked to, I went through my entire LinkedIn network and reached out to basically everyone who I knew who had been promoted sometime recently, like the last two years, in some sort of product leadership position. And so this presentation, I tried to not forget as much as I could about the things that have led to those people's success, as well as what I've directly observed. So this presentation is focused around delivering best practices that are grouped by when they're most relevant in the life cycle of a promotion. I will wrap up at the end with suggestions for managers who are in the unique position of managing their own careers, as well as those of others in the associated promotions. All right, so first of all, what is a promotion? To be promoted at a job means to be elevated to a higher position within the organization, typically accompanied by some sort of increased responsibilities, authority, and often a higher salary or benefits package. There's often clout or social capital associated with it. Promotion is a recognition of someone's individual performance, skills, talent, contributions, and importantly, potential. And the organization's confidence and their ability to take on a more significant role and to compensate them for it. So the organization confidence is a huge element of promotion and wildly subject to influence. And that's where you can have some control in that influence, so I'll be coming back to it. How you earn a promotion is often a mystery. I found myself doing this trigonometry lady meme many times in the past. And it was through lots of conversations, trial and error, and then obviously watching other people do it successfully that I kind of learned how to figure it out. So I hope to demystify it and make it something that you're going after very directly rather than just waiting to happen to you, which I know a lot of folks end up doing, even if they don't want to be doing that. All right, so this is the first kind of general section. This is focused on when you start your role. Now, you can go begin going after a promotion at any time. You don't necessarily have to be new. Now, if you are able to, it can help to lay the groundwork before you start a new role or have a new manager. If you are deep into your current role, it often helps to go back to the basics and ensure that you've laid the proper foundation for the promotion. Now, in any case, it depends a lot on your relationship with your direct manager. And how they view you and how they represent you to others. So when it comes to promotion, perception is reality. And optics do matter. That is not always the case in product management. Impact is often given outsize importance and all that other stuff. And how many internal articles you've written in docs and all that doesn't matter as much. But with promotion, it does matter more. So I'm going to cover that. All right, so this first section is within when you start a role or if you're kind of going back and laying that foundation, it's never too early to let your manager know that you're an ambitious person who cares about performing excellently. Let them know that you aspire to excellence and would like to be promoted at some point and to be seen as doing a good enough job to be able to be promoted. You could say something like, I would love to understand what it would take to be promoted, even if it's not for a year or six months to 18 months, whatever. If they tell you you're too new, tell them that you're an ambitious person who likes to move fast and prove others wrong and that you want to set yourself up for success now, even if the promotion doesn't happen right away. If they tell you it will take time, a lot of companies are like, oh, you have to be in the role for at least a year. You have to be in the role for six months. It's an arbitrary time limit. Dig into the specifics, understand what the demonstrable skills are, what projects need to be delivered, what impacts need to be delivered, who needs to see you as successful and check off OK, your promotion. And basically anything else that is required to get to the next level, putting yourself and your managers should, getting yourself your manager's perspective and eliciting that from them is going to be incredibly important. You want to be able to understand what your manager sees as the story they need to be able to tell to others to advocate on your behalf confidently without any sort of doubt being coming up for them or the other person. Now, one thing that's really important is making a regular cadence with your manager to reflect on performance. I'm still surprised when I meet product folks who don't have regular one-on-ones with their manager. If you don't have one right now, don't going into a weekly one-on-one, which is a common practice, it would be probably a lot. So maybe doing something bi-weekly or monthly. Being really deliberate when you have your one-on-ones, don't just slide into it or wake up and do it first thing in the morning and not without any prep. Create an agenda and make sure that on your agenda, at least once in a while, it doesn't need to be every single meeting that can get very tedious for your manager, but that you're making it a priority to talk about things like performance, how you're currently performing versus your level, gaps, whatever the path, if you're already having a promotion conversation, what steps you need to be following, how you're following through on those, and making that a central priority before all the other tactical updates and other things that inundate those conversations. Now, when it comes to these conversations with your manager, you also need to understand what success looks like and have a shared definition of success with your manager. You don't want them to be thinking success means one thing, you thinking it means another thing and being wildly divergent there. And this can start before you're hired. If you're in a hiring process now or expect to be soon, you can ask questions such as, how is what you're looking for different than what you have now? Or how is what the organization needs in this role different than what you already have? Another great question that elicits performance standards is why aren't you promoting internally? What skills are you looking for on the outside that you don't have today? These are really great questions. I wasn't able to get into this presentation, but if anyone's interested, I have a whole set of documents that are job seeker related. So if anyone wants that kind of stuff, hit me up on LinkedIn and I can send it to you in a DM. Or I'll post it on my website too. Now, if you're already in a role, you can ask these questions slightly differently and more directly. You could say something like, what does success look like in my role? I know I've been doing this for a while, but I'd love to learn. I only hear it from your point of view. And write that stuff down. Now, another great question that came from one of the folks that had been promoted was saying something like, these words to your manager. Things are going great a year from now. I'm positively excellent and you agree. What's going on that's leading you to feel this way? So what's really fun about this one is that it leverages the power of positive envisioning, except it forces the manager to do that about you. So they're thinking about you, however crappy you might be doing, however many gaps you might have in their mind, and you're asking them to imagine your future success and then tell you what you're doing right to have earned that place in their mind as a successful person. And so just like taking advantage of the power of mindset and using that to your advantage to get these conversations going about shared success criteria. Now it should go without saying, I mentioned this once, that you should write all of this down. You should be taking detailed notes and these aren't just like ordinary meeting notes you're not gonna go look at again or maybe you'll go look at like three months from now. These should be like in a separate category of notes. So like in a separate hierarchy, these are like the important types of notes you're looking at daily, weekly, like we're coming back to. There's a person who I always think about, Brian Halligan at HubSpot, who I crossed paths with over the years in the Boston startup scene. He's recently stepped down as a CEO, but he used to say to people that he would carry with him all of his performance reviews, all the things that, all the feedback he was getting in his pocket like folded up and he would pull it out and look at it every single day and see what can I be doing better and also what are people saying about me and how can I learn from that? So all this feedback, all these answers to these questions from your manager, these are really great things to be looking back at periodically and constantly ask yourself, how can I be doing better? And what I did personally was I had texted it, which I didn't use for basically like anything. I just had texted it always open with like a text file that had a running list of success criteria achievements and other things I'll talk about later. So keeping it separate and visible is really important. Okay, so the next thing that can happen early on or is more foundational is understanding who influences, influences your manager's view of you. You need to identify who they are. They may not necessarily be the most senior people in the organization. Who does your, but you really need to understand who does your manager seem to be listening to or looking to? Whose words or ideas are they like uttering in their own words? Could they be your peers, stakeholders, direct reports if you have them? Additionally, like your manager may have a sense of in their head who they're, who the top performers are on their team or the top performers in their ecosystem and you need to identify who those people are and start paying attention to what they're doing. Now one thing you can do that's really helpful that's if you're not sure yet is to have one-on-ones with everyone and get to know them as people and develop relationships with them. This is something I saw the most successful people do at a large organization like Metta, there was nearly 100,000 people when I was there. The most successful people were those who go kind of socially spelunking and figuring out who are all the kind of key people, who are the, who's the cast of characters in my world and they create, do something very deliberate like this creating spreadsheet with one row per person and then map out all this stuff like goals, interests, hobbies, what does success look like to them and then once you have that information you can start brainstorming tactics that for how to help you be successful. I like to say this metaphor of the Germanus personae from the theater but there's, you know, whatever you want to call it just people tracker. Now again, it's worth mentioning these may be your managers, these may not be the typical folks like your manager or your manager, they might be like, you know, any sort of high-performing organization that your manager sees as worth paying attention to you need to understand who they are and build a relationship with them. Oh yeah, one other thing to mention here is that if there's anyone who's interested in learning about how to approach these early conversations, I wasn't able to cover this here but Andrew Bosworth from Metta who now runs the Reality Labs and gets a lot of flak there. But anyway, he's written some really good articles over the years about this career cold start algorithm as the one that I'm referring to. It's about how to go into an unknown space and learn about it really quickly and build relationships therein. So check that out if you're interested. Okay, so another thing you can do is to ask your, you need to understand what gets promoted. And so some of this is gonna be through your direct observation. Some of this is gonna be directly asking your manager about people who've been promoted recently and what they did to earn it. Identify others, especially those who are in strategic roles, not operational roles where they're kind of like keeping the business running but those who are really trying to improve the business or move it forward. Ask your manager or others what those people did to be promoted. Ask those people directly. Ask others what they did. Pay attention in those company and org and team meetings when changes such as promotions are being discussed. Promotions are one of the best ways that organizations reward the culture that they are trying to create and the people who are moving that culture forward. So examining past promotions and those who've been promoted helps you understand what you need to do for your own promotion and make yourself more credible when the time comes. Oh, and if anyone doesn't know the abbreviation XFN, it means cross-functional. It's just something I've picked up at Meta. Okay, so in addition to understanding what success looks like, you need to understand what the overall performance track looks like, whether this is very concrete, like what's on the slide here, or much more fuzzy. If your company or org has a standard definition of what each level of product management means and mostly sticks to it, get access to this ladder document and read every single part of it, even the parts that are below you or above you, whatever, and ask lots of questions of it to your peers and your manager. Most people are gonna be happy to talk about something as generic as this, and if not obvious, but if you don't understand any part of it or you're trying to figure out how to adapt what you've been doing to it, those are great questions to ask others, and these are great opportunities to drive feedback. Now, if your organization does not have one of these, there's a lot of great resources for creating them. There are published career ladders out there. I link in the end of this to a presentation or a set of articles by Ravi Mehta, who's the former Chief Product Officer at Tinder, and Ravi created a framework called the, I think the main article is called Know Your Shape, and it's kind of 12 competencies that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive that kind of define the role of PM, and many organizations have since used those to adapt, create ladders as these, so if your organization doesn't have a ladder, working through resources like Ravi Mehta's framework to create one for your organization is an excellent way to show impact and help your product organization to scale, and at my time at Mehta, I've seen very large-scaled product organizations, and some of the best-performing folks were those who nerded out about what product excellence means at each level and what's the real difference between a top performer at L5, L6, L7, whatever. No matter what, you should be focused on understanding how to perform excellently at your current level and then one immediately above it, and then developing context about the overall picture. You need to figure out also how much these kind of ladders actually matter and if they're adhered to, if this exists, but no one's following it. You need to focus on what really matters, not what people are claiming matters, and I'll get to that in a minute. There's also things that have certain significance in some companies, like, for instance, the term senior or director or manager, product, whatever. The levels have meanings, especially when it starts to get to the higher levels like director, and you might find that there are things that constitute a director that aren't documented as part of the product career ladder, and you wanna make sure you understand what those things are as well. For instance, some organizations don't clear you for media, don't clear you to speak to the media until you become a director, so they wanna make sure that you have some sort of readiness for that before then. That's just an example of something that may not be under what a director of product is doing at your organization. So again, use a combination of speaking to your manager and directly speaking to others. Okay, another thing is you need to understand the performance rituals of your organization. There's a lot to dig into here. Are there, you could ask things like, are there performance cycles? What's expected of everyone? What's expected of the managers during this process? Do the managers compare their ratings with each other in some sort of calibration process? Are managers sharing their performance versus potential ratings, or what might be called a nine box with each other, or discussing it among leadership? How does the bonus pool work? Is everyone getting a shared bonus, or is it only going to the very top performers, the upper quadrant in that nine box? Who needs to sign off on promotions? And are promotions part of the performance cycle? These are really great questions to ask, understand the structure that you're working within, and any sort of maneuvering around that structure that may need to happen to get you promoted when you wanna be promoted. You need to generally understand what parts of the performance culture affect everyone, or are limited to just affecting certain roles. And you need to also understand what's expected of managers when it comes to performance and promotion. And specifically managers of product managers. Oh yeah, so I was mentioning this earlier. So the hidden culture of a company is what really is where decisions are often truly made. Things like the upper part of this iceberg, this is a terrible iceberg, it's really much should be much bigger at the bottom. But it's important to immerse yourself in this hidden culture as much as possible. You need to know how decisions are actually made and what is truly valued. For instance, if company leaders are saying in company meetings that user outcomes are by and far the only thing that matters, but the culture is really output driven and your boss is trying to have, just get the CEO's special pet project shipped on time, you must have some story around the CEO's pet project. While this may feel like a compromise of some sort of product management principles and the things like that product school would probably teach you to do, having pragmatism around this will get you ahead. And it is important to stay focused on what truly matters for the organization. And if the CEO's pet project, even if it doesn't matter as much as you think it does, like the fact that the CEO thinks there's enough to bet the organization on is a meaningful piece of signal and you do need to be pragmatic around it. Now, in medium and larger sized companies, blind or teamblind.com, which is that that B icon is there, is very helpful for that. It can be a cesspool of awful internet hate, but it is also a place for, it's an excellent place to learn what's going on below the surface and even to ask direct anonymous questions. And you can reset your username on there, I think like 10 times a month or something. So you can ask questions that you're embarrassed to ask anyone else. And all these things that I've mentioned so far where I said ask your manager, ask someone, just go on there and be like, what do I need to do to deal with this challenge that I've had as an L7 at Google or whatever? You know, you can go ask that kind of stuff. Okay, so that covers all the very foundational things about understanding what you're working within. Now we're gonna talk about product execution and what to do as you're actually doing your day job. So now, first and foremost, you need to actually do the job of product management well. And that's definitely outside of this scope of this presentation. I mean, without you, several other presenters pointed out like what would happen if you weren't there in the role of product. There would be likely another overworked PM not giving the area sufficient attention or designers and tech leads working to cover the area. You were hired for a reason and you do need to show up and do the job. How to be an excellent PM is outside of the scope of this but others did touch upon it. Now, a few quick words here. When I think about, you'll hear this term like execution and I think I did it a little bit of injustice by saying it's like do the job. When I think of what excellent execution means like in the most concise way, it's to surface and package the most concise, surface and package insights that enable definitive decisions on the most important items. So frameworks like this Opportunity Solution Tree from Teresa Torres, that's used within a continuous discovery process, constantly surfacing insights to enable important decisive decisions on which path of the tree to explore are really helpful at managing that and helping you to figure out where to go next. So this is helpful. If you haven't seen this, you can check out producttalk.com all of the resources in Teresa Torres' book Continuous Discovery Habits. Now you also need to make sure you're spinning up the right experiments to test the right hypotheses. Michelle Parsons talked about this earlier in her talk that you need to use small experiments and small bets to generate data and not everything needs to be functioning software. You can do tests on prototypes and practically napkin drawings in some cases but doing the user research, running the experiments to shed light on the most risky assumptions and then guiding future research efforts towards the biggest decisions. You need to pursue the right opportunities. So yeah, execute excellently. I should go without saying, but I needed to mention it. So you also need to, as you execute, define really great goals for yourself and your team. Now these of course need to be aligned with and advance organizational goals. You need to tie your responsibilities to revenue or the bigger picture of the organization somehow if it's not a financial goal. You need to put your shoes in. I consistently hear this from product leaders like how do you become a CPO or like a head of a, how do you move from a CPO role into a CEO role? There's several things like P&L impact and board presence and speaking directly with the executives regularly on top of all that other product stuff you have to do and understanding how the head of your organization thinks and what they see as success and tying your personal or team goals into that is going to be incredibly important. They don't need to be talking to them directly to do that. You can understand that context from your manager and a good manager will communicate that context. But no matter what your goals and eventual achievement of those goals is going to give your manager the talking points they need to convince others that you're ready for promotion. So you may need to include other items that aren't just impact-oriented such as those around skill development, cross-functional relationship building, evangelizing the role of product management or other things that might constitute success in your organization. So back to that slide of the dramatic persona and mapping all the characters out. In some cases you might find that there's political obstacles internally that if you help someone overcome those you'll be seen as as successful as if you delivered some company impact because they're holding back a large chunk of other kind of impact. And so you need to be able to, you need to make sure you're considering all those and setting goals around them when it's important to do so. These are some frameworks that I find helpful. There's the smart, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. They're really helpful for setting OKRs or any other type of goal. And then this other pyramid of aligning yourself with the top of the pyramid. What else? Track your, okay, so you need to track your own achievements. Track your progress towards these goals and document your achievements as you accomplish them. Create a dedicated document or some sort of spreadsheet. It should include project names, your role, key responsibilities, goals, challenge face, challenges face, outcomes, or any results achieved. If there's metrics involved, write those things down. It's gonna be way harder later to pull those metrics when you're not deep in the thick of it. Put links to any experimentation or measurement systems or screenshots of the data into your own files. Document how many people were involved in the scope of your leadership. If you're talking to like 15 people to get something done, you should not note that. Maybe even write their names down. By the way, defining, refining, and socializing a product, vision, or strategy is a worthwhile goal in itself. And it's what leaders and organizations are tasked with. It is literally often what their goals are. So how many people were involved in defining that vision or strategy? How many people was it socialized with? How many people did it influence? Those are the things that are rewarded in leadership. And if you're doing them as an IC, those are very valuable. Now, if you're a manager, you also wanna keep track of the successes of your organization and use regular check-ins or review cycles to gather that information from your team members. Now, you also wanna keep a record of all the positive feedback, commendations, or recognition you've received from your peers, cross-functional partners, stakeholders, superiors, customers, or whoever. This includes emails, chat messages. And if you have chat messages, like in Slack or something, literally include a copy-paste link to the public channel in which that message was seen. The manager's not taking your word for it that you didn't change the text. Like, I just could have put anything up here, even though these are verbatim copy-paste. Putting a link to Slack is really powerful. It just shows that you're backing everything up with sources, thank you notes, performance reviews, and basically any other acknowledgement of your work, these testimonials can serve as valuable supporting evidence for your achievements. You will know you did this well, all of this gathering of achievements and documentation, if writing your own performance review or self-assessment or pitch to be promoted feels really easy. You're essentially working backwards from that story that needs to be told and keeping track of all the details that might be hard to remember or look up later. Now, you also need to be soliciting critical feedback, and this can come from many places, and it can be solicited or unsolicited. When you receive feedback about how you could improve, rather than dismissing it or arguing with it, see it as this amazing gift. Listen to it, accept it, understand it, document it, and develop a response to it. If someone is giving you feedback, you aren't sure about what to do with it, you can ask for input from them on how to act on that feedback. Do they have any ideas about what to do about that? Or say, I'll get back to you, but doing nothing or being defensive is a losing proposition for receiving feedback and certainly not a way to learn from it. Coaching is also a really great way that I personally benefited from and I've helped others to make sense of feedback that you receive if you're regularly unsure of what to do or how to act. Now, asking feedback from others can be a vulnerable experience, but it can also open you up to an opportunity to give them feedback. So asking for feedback and making a habit of doing so is really great to both give feedback to others and also show others you're committed to continuously improving. Now, no matter what, when you ask for feedback, just be prepared for it to be harsh. And this framework here is something that's helpful. You can do on your own or with help from your manager. And if your manager isn't making a point of getting feedback on your behalf, if it's been like six months in your role and you haven't gotten any feedback or it's been a year since the last touch point, bring this up. I want to know how I'm doing. Can we use a framework like Start, Stop, Continue? I need some feedback. I need to know how to improve. It's critical for my success. Okay. Now, this is something that some folks might feel uncomfortable with, but it's really important as well. In order, you need to be able to get public recognition and it helps to be in the habit of giving it because if you are publicly practicing gratitude for the presence, support and contributions of other people, they're going to be more likely to see you and that you've recognized them and then want to help you and recognize your contribution. When you help someone else to be successful, help someone else look good or go above and beyond to help someone be successful and they know it, ask them to publicly thank you somehow. You need to do this in this cringy, awkward way. Something like what's on here is really helpful. If there's a company meeting or some sort of open shout-out system or you saw those hashtag thanks we used at Meta, there's a thing called a thanks bot. You can do that and then just ask them to mention you directly. Even a more direct and more helpful at times is getting them to directly send a message to your manager saying, hey, I had a really great conversation with Matt and he helped me so much with these things. I just wanted you to know he's really great and don't lose him. Now, this might feel unnatural, but this is part of creating the atmosphere for your manager that you're competent and well-liked and that your promotion would be seen as socially uncontroversial within the broader organization. Okay, so you need to also make a point of regularly influencing your manager. Now, how did the tactics of influence and all that and like what is it, they're outside of the scope of this presentation, but you do need to understand, you need to be able to understand your manager's perspective on what are the gaps between current state and you being promoted. And so a question like the one up here is really helpful. You need to ask them what are the gaps, them being able to tell the story they need to be able to tell. Use those regular one-on-ones to keep your manager informed of your goals, your goal progress, all the problems that you're facing along the way, all the failures and all the learnings. And in all of these conversations that are ongoing with your manager, you need to have empathy for them as well. They're trying to, every good manager is gonna wanna be rooting for you and have no reason to not promote you. And understanding that this is not, like there's a social navigation that they have to go through to get someone promoted. And so having a little bit of empathy for them is can be helpful as well. Okay, and then another key player here is your manager's manager or your skip level. You wanna set up some sort of like bi-weekly or monthly, maybe monthly is good, and treat them just like a stakeholder, albeit one who's probably better informed and more clued into product management than other stakeholders might be. Ask them how your team is perceived. Ask them those same questions from earlier that you'd ask your own manager about promotion. And so the same question of like things are going great and you agree, what's going on? Again, this forces them to visualize you as successful and gives you critical information to optimize on how you deliver that success. Now again, don't walk into these meetings unprepared. It's like, I've seen folks do this with skip levels all the time and it's embarrassing to everyone involved. Have a list of the topics you wanna cover, the points you wanna make, the things that you want them to walk away having perceived about you or know about you. And also ask any asks for help. Like skip levels are often feeling detached from the work on the ground. And if you have a direct ask or things where, maybe your manager isn't doing as much for you for some reason, you can raise that then and also use it as another way to reiterate that ask for help that maybe your manager is not communicating or choosing not to communicate. You have the airtime, use it. Okay, so now beyond your own manager and skip level, you need to influence the other kind of key, dramatic persona, those cast of characters. Meet regularly with stakeholders and anyone who influences your manager. Ensure that their goals are not being impeded by your plans and if your plans aren't directly advancing them, that this is even better. Keep these stakeholders or these other folks informed of the impactful work that your team is doing. If there are things that you need them to evangelize or talk to your manager about and you have that kind of relationship, make sure that those things are on your agenda. Most stakeholders, if you're doing this well, will see you as a valuable source of information and they will want to talk to you and they're gonna want to be aware of your achievements and amplify them because you're helping them. You're giving them this insider view and this insider influence into the product process and what decisions are being made in the organization. Now, you can use that same kind of get in their head line of thinking from earlier and say something like, this is a great way to ask for feedback. If my manager came to you right now and asked you how I was performing in my role, what would you say to them? That question has been so helpful at opening doors to feedback I would have never otherwise heard. And it's also a great opportunity to show them that you can be vulnerable and then they might ask you the same question, well, what could I be doing better? And what if my manager asked you the same question and then you tell them the truth and wow, okay, now we feel a little bit closer. I'm glad we could do that and then feel that scary. And I just want to put this image up here because I love this and how messy this all is. I don't know, I just thought this was a good one. It's just not the typical people who you might think sometimes who are influencing your manager. Here, I'll go back if anyone want to take a photo of that. I saw this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. Yeah, just messy human relationships are surrounded with that work. No matter how much people pretend, no matter what pretenses exist, like that's the world we're working within. Okay, yeah, and then so it may be easy to hear this presentation and think that getting promoted is all perception and optics, but no, you need to have a substantial impact to justify our promotion in almost every case, even when nepotism, privilege and all other biases are working in your favor. A promotion is ultimately a business case and the business needs to be willing to spend more money on you and take more of a risk on you because you're producing results. It's just a black box of money in results out. Okay, so the last few chunks here are kind of be around, oops, that not work, that slide? Oh yeah, during feedback cycles. Okay, so you see, you've done all this work up to this point to lay the groundwork and now, and you've done the regular prayer and the good works and the correct mindset and now we're just preparing for the ritual. You need to be able to gather all the achievements and feedback you've been tracking and been writing. You need to link to those sources, quotes, results, strategy documents and all that output as much as possible. And you want the reader of this is usually your manager or other folks in your manager's world, their manager, peers, CEO of the organization to read what you say and remember how great you are and that all of it is backed up by tons of evidence and that social support within the organization so that the case is fairly uncontroversial. Now, sorry, I didn't put an image here. If you have a peer review system, you wanna game the hell out of this. You often in peer review systems have the ability to ask for feedback from people who, from a small number like three to five people who you've selected, you want to avoid that your manager thinks they need to hear feedback about you from. And so you need to select those people very carefully and make sure that they are your promoters and that they're gonna amplify all of these achievements that you already have. And you need to be super prepared in advance of asking for this feedback. Literally have for each person a personalized list of what you want them to say to your manager. I think everyone here has probably been through the dance of asking for recommendations to get into college or get a job and you're gonna talk to those people on the phone and be like, okay, they're gonna ask you, what do you want me to say if they like you? And you're gonna tell them, here's the things I want you to say. So be really deliberate and do the same thing here. You know your manager's gonna be reading all this, so use them to tell your story in their own words. And this process will also give your manager a ton of quotes that will act as evidence that you're amazing, well-liked, and that your promotion will be seen as socially uncontroversial and actively encouraged within the broader organization. Okay, so that's what happens when you do like the feedback company feedback ritual. So now when you finally get promoted, I think the most important thing to do is to actually show gratitude to your manager for putting themselves out on a limb and to your team who executed with you and contributed to your success. It's a really small point, but often overlooked. Now in your new role, you're gonna have new expectations of performance that have likely increased and you're someone who values excellence, so make sure to start off the new role with a new 90-day plan as if you had just started at the company. Treat this as a brand new role. And there's a great book, The First 90 Days, that I mentioned in the next slide. And also another thing, one of the promoted folks mentioned to me was that it's really helpful when you get promoted to look back on the last cycle that you just went through, all the work that you did to get promoted and what could you do better next time to get promoted faster? And what could you do better to have more impact sooner? And using this not as a time to just look forward but look backwards and continuously improve. Okay, so now if people here are managers and you may have to consider promoting people at some point, here's a few things you may additionally wanna do. Don't wait for your directs to communicate their desire for promotion to you. Lay out a path for them and proactively communicate it to them. Tell them what you expect them to be doing and what the work is to get to the next level and what the organization requires of them. Don't wait for them to come to you on that. Clearly communicate expectations for performance at the current level and the next level. If you have a decent career ladder, use it to facilitate performance conversations. If you don't have one, create one and work with your team members who are the most motivated, like your principal level folks or those who are super passionate to create one. I have created and seen many ladders over the years and if your organization needs help creating one or modifying one, I'm happy to help. Just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Show your team members how they are on track or not. Tell them how you would describe or pitch them to others. Like, hey, I really need to be able to say that you improved retention. That's like by far the most important thing. But the retention's only up. All these other metrics are way up. You still haven't improved retention. You know, like say things as direct as that. If you are anticipating eventual objections or pushback to the promotion, bring that directly into the conversation with your direct report. Just be an awesome manager and collaborate with your directs on building a plan to develop the gaps while leveraging their strengths. And then finally, the last point here is follow through and actually promote them if they do the work. Even if it's not, this is like 90% or something, you have to at some point risk your own social capital to promote someone. It's gonna feel a little uneasy. But high performers like managers who advocate for them despite resistance and despite those uneasy feelings. And in larger organizations, it's easy to develop a reputation as a manager who does not do that and who gets pushed over by other managers and calibrations, you know, those inter-manager meetings about talent. And that makes it really hard to attract top talent. So don't be one of those managers. All right, so if you'd like to learn more about these topics on your own, here's some resources that you might find helpful. In terms of executing well, which I mentioned in two points, I think the first two books inspired and empowered by Marty Kagan, Chris Jones, Silicon Valley Product Group are incredible. I also mentioned, I didn't put it up here, Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits is really good. This book, Workplace Poker, I hesitated to include it, but it was the book that really like cracked me, like it helped me to really understand the perception optics piece of work. And I hadn't really found any other books like this, like maybe like Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. But this book was like really direct, even though at some times it veers a little bit like individualistic and like, if you don't get promoted, you must suck and it's your fault. And it's a little bit like kind of in cell energy, but whatever, it has good enough good points to justify it on this slide. The first 90 days, I mentioned that, that's the classic. There's the Ravi Metta shape framework and the article name. And then of course there's Product School who offers a wide range of classroom trainings and videos and recorded lectures and stuff like this. Yeah, so after this presentation, I'll be out in the lobby in the back, like back two pillars over there. If anyone wants to chat for a bit while this is fresh on your mind, we can also connect at the happy hour afterwards and get, if you don't have a drink ticket, I think you can get those. If you're interested in going deep on any of these topics or working out a personalized plan for your own promotion or tackling other challenges while you're, that you're navigating in your role or preparing for a new role with executive level mock interviews, connect with me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash in slash MacRay product. You can also find me on my website at productcooperative.com. So thank you everyone. And I think next up, we're gonna be hearing from Jonathan at LinkedIn.