Recent promotion cycle
Five promotions in one cycle
Engineering Manager
Wrote, defended, and shepherded five promotion packets across Principal, Senior, and Member-engineer levels in the same cycle — with broad stakeholder endorsement on every packet.
- 5 promotions across Principal, Senior, and Member-engineer levels — 1 Principal Engineer, 3 Senior Engineers, 1 Member Engineer
- Broad stakeholder endorsement across all five packets
- Zero packet contested at calibration
What was at stake
Five engineers, very different stories: a quiet senior who shipped twice the work but undersold every demo, a principal candidate carrying a multi-team bet, three rising engineers each trying to clear a different bar.
The cycle is a single window — miss it and the next chance is six months out.
How I worked the problem
- Started six months early. The packet is a backwards-engineered evidence trail. You cannot manufacture evidence in week two.
- Coached each engineer on their own narrative. Their story, in their voice. I edited; I did not author.
- Pre-aligned with cross-team stakeholders. Not asking for endorsements — asking for honest signal. The endorsements followed.
- Played defence, not offence. I anticipated the toughest question on each packet and built the evidence specifically to answer it.
What it produced
Five engineers stepped up a level. More importantly, all five came out of the cycle with a sharper sense of what they had actually built — independent of the title bump. That is the lasting part.
What it taught me
The packet is the artefact. The work is the relationship. If the relationship has been honest for two years, the packet is just paperwork.