How a Senior Product Designer got promoted with a 37% increase in total compensation

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Promotions don’t just happen. Your boss just doesn’t wake up on the month that performance reviews happen and just randomly decide that you’re gonna get a promotion. Right? That’s ridiculous. Promotions happen when you advocate for yourself, when you communicate your skills and experience and present compelling evidence to your boss. Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the career strategy podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy.

Sarah Doody [00:00:42]: I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Today, I wanna talk about getting promoted. And whether you are in a full time job right now or not, you’re going to wanna save this episode because, you know, those annual reviews or twice a year reviews that you do with your boss. I know a lot of people kind of roll their eyes and think it’s a waste of time, etcetera. This is an opportunity for you to get promoted, and this is exactly what happened to Marco who got promoted with 37% increase in his total compensation. He got promoted from senior product designer to lead product designer at a large financial company.

Sarah Doody [00:01:46]: So let’s dive into Marco’s story so you can hear what he did, how he approached those annual reviews, and how joining career strategy labs, UX job search accelerator helped him. Okay. So like I said, Marco was working as a senior product designer, and something really interesting happened to Marco. He said his colleagues had told him that he was operating at about one to two levels above his job title. And in some companies, you know, job titles and salaries are associated with different levels. Maybe you’ve seen job descriptions that say senior product designer one, senior product designer two, etcetera. So that’s what we mean with levels. And, anyway, Marco said his colleagues has said to them essentially, like, hey, Marco.

Sarah Doody [00:02:44]: What you’re doing in your job, you’re actually doing stuff that people two levels higher than you are doing. And so Marco kinda was a little frustrated, and he ended up deciding that he was gonna look externally to get a new job because he felt like getting promoted internally wasn’t even a possibility. So he started off on his job search, didn’t get any traction, and joined career strategy lab. And then something wild happened. He ended up going through the case study and portfolio part of career strategy lab. And I’m just gonna read verbatim what he wrote in our community. He said, the content I put together in the case study Google Docs was an insanely valuable tool and helped me successfully land a promotion with a 37% increase in my total compensation. I’m not even finished with everything in career strategy lab, but I use the early exercises of writing out the case studies as a tool in my yearly review.

Sarah Doody [00:03:57]: That’s how Marco did it. He wasn’t even planning to stay at the company he was at, but once he joined career strategy lab, he realized he could leverage what he was doing for his portfolio to use it in his performance review, and it worked. And so a couple of things I really wanna point out here. Number one, what did Marco do in this lead up to the meeting with his boss, etcetera? The first thing that Marco did was that he had a conversation with his manager before the annual review. And he said and I’m just gonna quote. He said, it started with a conversation with my manager before the annual review. I told them that I felt my leveling was wrong. Remember, we talked about the levels earlier.

Sarah Doody [00:04:49]: So I felt like my leveling was wrong. I was operating at a level above where I would like to be, and I wanted to be considered for a promotion. So Marco kind of set the stage for that performance review, was upfront with his boss. He knew he was planning to apply to jobs externally, so the the act of alerting his boss that he felt like he was being, compensated and with a job title lower than what he was doing, he just decided to go for it, and he just let his boss know. And then before the actual annual review meeting, Marco essentially started to gather the receipts. Right? He was working on the case study for his portfolio, which he knew he could also use in the annual review. And he said this, again I’m gonna quote, he said when the annual review season started in November, I used the UX case studies exercise from career strategy lab to document evidence of my performance. The structure of how Sarah has it outlined was exactly the right method.

Sarah Doody [00:06:01]: The content in CSL was an insanely valuable tool that helped me successfully land a promotion with 37% increase in my total comp. And then during the actual annual review process, and for many of you who’ve been through this, you know, sometimes you identify colleagues that you want to evaluate you, etcetera. And so Marco really leveraged this part where he got to choose which colleagues would vouch for him and fill out his performance review. And again, I’m gonna quote, he said during our reviews we also do peer reviews, and I recommended people who I’ve worked with that would back up the statements I was making as further evidence, and it worked. So remember in the beginning how I told you that Marco’s colleagues had said to him, hey, Marco. You’re doing stuff that people like one and two levels above you are actually doing. He chose those people to be a part of his annual review process where they filled out, you know, the forms that you often have to fill out. And so how did this all come together? Well, all of those three things work together to help Marco get that 37% salary increase.

Sarah Doody [00:07:17]: Right? What his colleagues said, along with Marco putting together those UX case studies that served as further receipts for the fact that he was operating one or two levels above his current title and salary, and telling this to his boss in advance of the whole annual review. So his boss was already thinking about it and maybe had more time to reflect on this or ask other people what they thought about Marco, etcetera. And it totally worked like Marco said. Alright. The big lesson though that I want you to remember from this episode is that promotions don’t just happen. Your boss just doesn’t wake up on the month that performance reviews happen and just randomly decide that you’re gonna get a promotion. Right? That’s ridiculous. Promotions happen when you advocate for yourself, when you communicate your skills and experience and present compelling evidence to your boss.

Sarah Doody [00:08:22]: And, yes, I know this is not something that comes naturally to most people, and the people that get promoted do these things. So if you wanna be someone who gets promoted, you’re gonna have to do these things. Right? You just can’t sit back and hope and cross your fingers that your boss promotes you because that’s not how the world works. So you need to be always collecting the evidence and the receipts of what you do in your job, not just three weeks before performance reviews. And this is why it’s so important to get into the habit every week, every month, every, you know, June, taking time to reflect on what you’ve done, literally taking notes, gathering examples, whether that’s documents, screenshots, quotes from colleagues, etcetera, so that when the time does come where you wanna try and get promoted or go look for a job elsewhere. You have all of this at your fingertips, so you don’t need to spend three months trying to gather and remember all of this stuff. Right? And so I wanna just remind you that career strategy lab, sure, we call it a UX job search accelerator, but it definitely can help you get promoted because the same things that you need to do to get hired work if you wanna get promoted. Right? It’s no different.

Sarah Doody [00:09:53]: You need to clearly articulate what you do, the impact you’ve had, how you’ve added value to the team, to the company, etcetera. And you need to showcase that on your resume and in case studies, which can be tremendously helpful if you sit down in that interview with your boss and you’re able to pull up a presentation to not just show, but also tell them what you’ve done over the last year or six months or something like that. So performance review season may not be happening right now. If it is, you’re in luck. If it’s not, this is your sign to get ready to start getting into the habit of documenting what you’ve done, what you’ve worked on so you don’t need to rush when performance season does come up and so that you are ready if there is ever a discussion internally that comes up, you know, just unexpectedly about you getting promoted or if unexpected opportunities at other companies come into your inbox. Alright friend, that’s it for today. I hope this episode leaves you feeling more confident and clear about what you need to do now or in the future to get promoted. Do not wait until a couple of weeks or days before your performance review season to get ready.

Sarah Doody [00:11:22]: Now is the time to get ready because your story might be similar to what happened to Marco if you take the time to prepare now. Alright. That’s it for today. I’ll see you in another episode. Thanks for listening to the Career Strategy Podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM.

Sarah Doody [00:11:53]: And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.