I recently had the opportunity to promote someone on my team. This person identified their ideal career path early on when they started working at the company. From that point on they worked very hard to develop their skills, took advantage of every opportunity offered, and consistently knocked it out of the park to get to their goals.

I’m going to walk you through my process for getting someone ready for a promotion, building the appetite, and finally executing on the promotion.

Career conversations

When new employees have passed their probationary period, I like to go through the 3 career conversations from Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor. I’ve already covered this in a previous post, but the quick summary is

1. Tell me your life story
   • This first conversation involves pretty much their entire life story. They can tell it however they want, and focus on whatever parts are most important to them. The idea is to get a sense of what their values are, to set you up for the next conversation. I consider this conversation private. I wouldn’t share it with anyone unless I had to.
2. At the peak of your career, what does that look like?
   • The employee defines 3 ideal futures. Maybe they’re head of product at a large company, maybe they’re an advisor for startups, maybe they’re an expert individual contributor at a small company, maybe they raise sheep. Whatever the goals, now you know what they want. You can work together to create a list of skills a person in each of these roles would need to succeed.
   • In the case of the person I promoted, they knew they were interested in product management, and 2 other goals. As time went on, and we kept coming back to the career conversations, the other goals fell away, and product management became the main focus.
3. How can we make changes in your current role to set you up for that future?
   • In the final conversation, you can start to put together a list of small tweaks to their daily tasks that might help them build up the skills they want to get to the place in their career they want to be at.
   • In this person’s case, we defined different types of meetings they could learn to lead, books to read, courses to take, and eventual responsibilities they could own. Just like product roadmapping, you can start with specifics in the near future, and get more nebulous as you go out further. Keep coming back to these conversations and update the plan as things are completed or as plans change.

1:1s

With the individual

In 1:1s with the individual, you go over your regular 1:1 topics, but periodically, you should revisit career conversations 2 and 3. It doesn’t need to be as lengthy as the original conversations. For conversation 2 I usually ask “are these still the dreams, or has anything changed?” Generally they’ve been pretty consistent in my team, but every now and then we might cut one from the list. For conversation 3, we keep roadmapping their professional development activities.

With your boss

In 1:1s with your boss, this is where you advocate for your team memebers. Explain who’s progressing quickly through their professional development and rapidly heading for their goals.

In my 1:1s with my boss, I try to highlight people’s professional development as much as time will allow, so that senior leadership is aware of who is working towards a promotion. Through my 1:1s with my boss, we were able to define additional responsibilities for this individual, as well as additional meetings for them to attend to gain better perspective on how the product management function in the company works.

The promotion trifecta

I always say “We can get you ready for the opportunity, but the opportunity still has to come up.” Getting promoted is a matter of 3 things: professional development, budget, and organizational need.

Professional Development

Professional development is the part the employee has the most control over. Through the career conversations and 1:1s, we can define a plan for what skills they can learn, how they learn it, how they demonstrate those skills to stakeholders, and what order to develop those skills. As they develop skills, we can start to assign them additional responsibilities that are an appropriate challenge for the level they’re at.

For newer employees, this is usually a mix of books, articles, and courses. I personally don’t care about certifications, as long as someone can demonstrate that they have learned a new skill through their professional development work. Certificates are there to show to external people. I feel that they matter more for hiring decisions than promotions.

As an employee develops skills, we can start to assign new responsibilities so that they can demonstrate their new skills. In the case of our new product manager, we gave responsibilities like attending product leadership meetings, managing a POD’s backlog, attending certain customer calls, etc.

Typically we would consider someone ready for a promotion when they’re already doing half of what is expected for their new title.

Budget

As a manager, depending on the size of your organization or domain, this may be outside your control. Obviously every business is constantly putting out fires and has resource constraints. So you may have promoting someone as your top priority, but the senior leadership team may have more pressing priorities.

Just because the organization may have additional priorities, don’t think you’re powerless in this situation. This is where a solid one-pager or pitch document can help advocate for your priorities to the senior leadership team. I’ll write a separate post about how to write a good one-pager, but the short version is that you’ll need to explain the need for change, who the stakeholders are and whether they will support the change or not, the vision, the strategy, risks, and considerations. A well written one-pager will allow you to pitch the promotion as high as the CEO efficiently, so that you can build organizational appetite to prioritize the work, without taking up a huge amount of time making everyone read 20 pages of context.

Organizational Need

Again, depending on your organization, this may be outside your control. You may have 5 people on your team ready to become managers, but if there are no other employees to manage, the opportunity could take a long time to present itself. This is especially true for larger companies with slow growth and long-tenured employees.

A one-pager can help explain the need if you’re in a situation where the role doesn’t exist in the company yet, but to promote someone into an existing position, you need to explain how this will alleviate a business problem or improve outcomes for the company.

Giving the promotion

When the professional development, budget, and organizational need are all aligned, the promotion can finally happen. Work with your HR team to define what the new title will be, salary change, any changes to equity, or other benefits. It’s also important to discuss with the leadership team if the new role requires a change in management.

In the case of the person I promoted recently, we determined that with their move from subject matter expert to product manager, it would make sense for them to report to someone in the organization who has developed a lot of product managers in the past. Handling the hand off between managers is a delicate process, but we’ll get into that next week.

As their manager and advocate, when the details of the promotion are finalized, you get to be the one to break the news. You can let them know the new title, and any changes in reporting structure. The rest of the details will come in the offer letter.

If you manage a product POD, you can then announce the change to the rest of the POD right after. Remember to check in with other POD members over the next little while. We want to be sure everyone is comfortable with the change, address any questions that may come up, and smooth out any friction that may occur.

Every week we have a working session where the whole product development team gets together. We also announced the change to the product development team at the start of the working session. Because we had all been working on this promotion for a long time, nobody was surprised. This person had worked closely with everyone in our POD, across PODs, with current and former product managers, as well as the design team. Everyone was very excited by the announcement.

The new manager presented the formal offer letter to the employee and once it was all signed and returned to the HR team, we finally made the announcement to the whole company.

Wrapping Up

So we’ve identified and explained all the steps that lead someone to a promotion. Next week, we’ll talk about how to effectively hand an employee over to another manager.