Excel With Your Very Own BRAG Document - FREE Resource included!

because it's not really a good strategy to sit back and wait for a promotion for a lot of us in software engineering talking to our managers can feel well ineffective a lot of the time it's sitting down together periodically maybe every week 2 weeks maybe even longer than that and just giving updates about different projects that we're working on and you keep having these sessions where you sit down and you give your updates and as times going by you kind of feel like does my manager even really understand the impact that I'm having and that could be really challenging for a lot of us because we're motivated in our careers we want to be able to progress and go to the next level so in this video I'm going to talk about a tool that you can leverage in your career at any level that will help you have better conversations with your manager about this kind of stuff as well as frame up your own perspective on your own development a quick reminder to check that pin comment for a link to my free Weekly Newsletter this is actually where I first started talking about this topic with my audience all right so I think some background is important here before I get into some of the details and if you're not aware already I'm an engineering manager I'm a principal level engineering manager at Microsoft I've been managing engineering teams now for over a decade and a big part of how I manage is that I want to make sure I'm in tune with my employees and for me being in tune with my employees is a lot more than just about status updates and 101s like it's great if people sit down with me and they want to talk about different code they're working on or different projects and things like that but I don't need that in that meeting we have other types of rituals and meetings that allow status updates that kind of stuff to be collected and I can always reach out to that person for more information if I need it but if that's what they want to talk about in their one-onone I'm happy to spend time going over that for me one-on-one conversations are just this opportunity to give back to my employee to talk about the things that they want to talk about what areas do they want to focus on if that happens to be project updates for a few sessions and that's more of the the norm that we go through together that's okay but I still want to make sure that there's opportunities for career conversations I want to learn and understand about my employees the things that they're challenged by the things that get them excited to go to work the opposite side of that right what types of things make it so that work sucks I want to understand all of these things so that I can help them grow in their career but the reality is as much as I want to know all of this information all of the time I can't possibly have all of the details all at once I'm not in every conversation that all of my employees are in I can't see all of their interactions and it's not realistic either and I'm saying that because I am someone that really does care and wants to know so that I can leverage that information to help them in their careers is someone who wants to see all of that if I'm telling you that I can't possibly see all of it what I'm trying to get at is that I need to do my best to see as much as possible and can I do a better job of course we can all do better jobs at all this kind of stuff but my responsibilities go beyond just people as well and your manager it's likely that same situation so there's going to be periods where we have different things we're working on that are taking our attention but ultimately people are the priority so I want to stress that and I wanted to give you this framing because as a software engineering manager people are critical even though it's software engineering right people are critical and if I want to have more perspective and I want to have more visibility into the things that my teams are doing and I'm trying my best we don't just want to stop there there's something more that you can do to help a lot with that and that's going to bring us to our tool called the brag document or as I like to call it a highlight tracker and the reason that this tool is important is well because it's not really a good strategy to sit back and wait for a promotion brag documents and highlight trackers are this opportunity for you to take record of the different Milestones that you're making progress on now ideally you're having conversations with your manager about different things that are important for the progress in your career and if you're not having those already I highly recommend that instead of trying to focus specifically on this you want to make sure you're having those types of conversations first there's different strategies for trying to make sure that's happening please take the time to make sure that you are having those conversations and work on that type of interaction first but if you do have level set expectations with your manager I think that having a brag document or a highlight tracker is a great opportunity so the way that these work are that you're able to break down in a document or whatever other format you want I even suggested to people using a draft email and you just have it in your inbox to take notes it doesn't have to be anything fancy at all you have some type of document some paper whatever you want and you're leveraging that to take notes of the different mil stones that are important and well what does important mean in this context well like I said if you have level set expectations with your manager about the different things you want to be focused on for career progression you could be keeping track of these types of things and it's it's awesome right because if your manager has these expectations with you that are Level set about the things you should be focused on this is just a really great opportunity to make sure you have examples of those things and well what what are these things right like what types of things could this look like well well depending on the conversations that you've had with your manager it could be things like leading design sessions it could be you know mentoring peers it could be working with other teams it could be all sorts of things like that so you want to think about the different things the different areas or responsibilities that you're supposed to be growing into in your career and hopefully like I said you've had these conversations with your manager and then looking at examples of what you're doing to demonstrate that so for example you might have been talking with your manager and one of your goals was to deliver this big project that has a lot of business impact that could have been one of the things that you guys were talking about together in order to have some progression in your career so as you're delivering ing on milestones for that you could keep record of that if you were supposed to be branching out to other teams and helping them on different projects and making sure that you're growing your network of experts that you have at work that might be something that as you're talking with Joe from the other team and Susan from this other team that those interactions that are positive you keep record of that and make sure that you're able to say to your manager when you're going over your brag document these are the types of interactions I've had and this is proof that it's happening and as I just hinted at this is something that you're going to want to bring to one-on-one sessions and the Cadence that you have this this is kind of up for you to feel out so you might be bringing this let's say you have one-on-one sessions every two weeks right you don't necessarily have to bring your brag document every time but it might be a great opportunity to leverage it for different topics for conversation it might be something that you bring every time it might be something that you bring every fourth time try to figure out the right Cadence and it doesn't even have to be regular you can just leverage it as an opportunity to be able to have good conversations another approach is that you could leverage this at performance review time right if you're already having good conversations with your manager and those one-on-one sessions you don't really want to alter too much you could use a brag document and track longer term Milestones that you're interested in and that way when it's performance review time that might be something that you ask your manager for some additional time to be able to go through your document and talk about the different highlights so to give you an example of this at Microsoft we have something called connects and in my organization that I'm in we do connects as a mandatory process twice a year now you're able to do them more frequently but generally managers will do these twice a year and it's sort of around performance and rewards kind of seasons of the company the connects that we leverage are not brag documents but they're interesting in the way they're structured because it gives employees opportunities to talk about the different milest stones that they've hit what are the big impact areas that you've had what are the things that you maybe did not succeed at but you had some really good lessons learned it's structured kind of like a brag document and it's a great opportunity to share that kind of information with your manager and that's all good and well and you might understand now okay I want to be tracking some important things these different Milestones I want to bring those up in conversations so that my manager has more visibility into what I'm doing more understanding let's go check out what a brag document look looks like and keep in mind this can look like anything you want it's just note taking it's just note taking with some structure around it so what I've done is I've gone ahead and I've made a template and I'll put a link in the comments and the description so you can download this totally for free it's really simple I'm not going to charge people for it because it is so simple but I wanted to give you something just as a guide so that if you're not sure where to start you have something and it's not perfect I don't want to claim any such thing I just want it to be a starting point that you can adapt it might work for you totally out of the box and it might not work at all but you want to change up the different areas that you're focused on talking about let's go see what it looks like all right so this is available as you can see on Gum Road I called it a highlight tracker I've written up a little right up here so that you can check out a lot of the same things that I'm talking about in this video so a lot of that's included here um you can see the price is $0 right here you can go say I want this and check it out and then from there you'll get a link to notion as well as Word documents and you can pick and choose what you want to do here if there's other formats that you want this in and you think that would be helpful for me to make it available just let me know in the comments and I'll go add it to this totally for free and then it's included for everyone to have and go forward with now when you go to the notion you'll see the same information that I included on that gum Road page so you'll have all of this here just to see how it's used why I recommend using it how you can leverage it in your own conversations um I reference the pod that I put together uh because we talk about level setting expectations I've mentioned that in this video already you want to make sure that you and your manager are aligned in the first place because without that putting together a brag document might be you collecting things that aren't really sort of ammunition that your manager can use when it's time for promotion you might be saying hey look I've done all these things and they might be saying yeah but I was hoping you focused in these areas so if those aren't aligned work on that alignment first now to pull it up if we go to the very bottom we can see that I've included these templates here these ones are the notion templates so I'm going to pull up the periodic one and the example the long-term variation of this the only difference is that I added a section at the top for goals so if we look at the periodic tracker I'm going to zoom out a little bit here so it'll fit on the screen a little better but it's really just a table right and you can do this in any format you want but I have Pro Pro Milestones so this might be things that you're writing code for and you're making changes and some of the different things that you're working on that are more of a software development coding perspective so you can write information about that here we'll see in the example in just a moment uh design and architecture is another area that I like making sure I call out specifically for employees on my team and I call these out as separate things because I look at design and architecture a lot of the time separately from just writing code and delivering code design and architecture could be putting documents together it could be holding review sessions all sorts of different things about how you're going to build systems and less about going to implement them in practice it's different sets of skills that I think are important to exercise next up I have mentorship milestones and it's worth calling out these aren't in any particular order these are just different things that you could include so with mentorship Milestones as you're getting more senior in your software engineering career you know at the beginning you might be the person that everyone's mentoring and helping but as you're becoming more senior even in your Junior years it's still a great opportunity to be able to help and Mentor others that is a great leadership trade and it's something that I would expect as more senior software Engineers to build up so call out those opportunities here next team building I look at this one as something where it could be int or intra team so perhaps you're doing some team building within your team and that means that you might be doing like pair programming you might be introducing different processes and different ways that your team could be more effective try to call those out or perhaps as part of the conversation with your manager you needed to have more exposure working and developing software with other teams if you're doing that call that out talk about the people that you are working with there's a column here for who right like who were you working with as a manager if I'm getting information like this it's great for me to be able to go touch base with that person and say hey I heard that you were working with so and so like tell me more about that interaction because all of this information is stuff that I want to use as a manager when I'm making sure you're ready for promotion that I have enough confidence and enough examples to bring to my management my leadership my peers and we can make sure we're aligned on promoting and then I just have this other section here as well so this could be things that don't really fit into even things that are at work it could be stuff where you were saying look I wanted to learn about this other technology outside of work um so to give you an example we do a lot of backend stuff uh in the teams that I manage at Microsoft and it could be that some of those individuals wanted to learn a little bit more of front-end web development awesome like if that's a goal and a milestone if we don't have core projects like that currently at work I would encourage them to go learn about it outside of work as well I'm of course trying to find those opportunities when I can for them but if they're not there because of business requirements then they're not available but that shouldn't stop someone from wanting to progress in these areas and learn and skill up and is it related to work specifically not necessarily but I think it's great that people are going out to learn I would love to hear about that that comes back to me having a better understanding of my team where they're trying to grow and the challenges the strengths the weaknesses that they have so any of this type of information for me is super helpful I'm going to jump over to the example here and it's the same sheet I've just populated it with some example information um so the dates and stuff are made up and the details here are made up as well so please don't read into this I just wanted to have something that you could refer to so in the project Milestones I mentioned something about you know doing some performance improvements for meal coach uh um I mentioned here that there's like a a 35% faster experience for users and there's some monthly savings right so trying to have some impact called out if it's quantifiable awesome but not all Impact is very obviously quantifiable so just trying to explain what the thing is and why it's impactful that's great you'll see that I have just me mentioned for both of these here um I also have this column that I didn't call out before but the learning and relevancy part is something for you to reflect on like why should I be talking to my manager about this like what why is it important um so maybe it was something along the lines of you had business goals that you talked with your manager about and you wanted to be able to help deliver some business value right that was an expectation that you guys agreed on and you can see that I'm just calling out that's why this is here this one calls out maybe a team goal that existed and you're contributing to that so in this case it's Tech debt um to scroll down a little bit lower um I'm saying that I worked with someone in particular on a design spec so you know version 1.2 of meal coach we got some feedback from Jane um and this is because I talked with my manager about wanting to have some more design do uh writing experience like that is something we talked about for the next level in my software career I didn't include any mentorship Milestones um you can follow the same pattern right I called it an artificial team building one here so that worked with John and we were uh spending some time ramping him up on the code base right so put yourself in this position where you're on a team and you have a more Junior member and you're just getting them ramped up so they can learn the code base right helping answer questions for them giving them some guidance like that's a great mentorship opportunity and these other ones are just some vanity ones that I included here so I'm not going to go into the details on those but you can go check this out like I said I'm going to have a link in the description and the pin Comon and you can have this for yourself so leveraging brag documents or highlight trackers whatever you'd like to call them I think these are awesome tools that you can leverage to help have a little bit more control in your career it doesn't make a lot of sense to just sit back and hope that you're making progress in the right direction I think it's an awesome opportunity where it's not a lot of work and you get a lot of value even if it's just for you to reflect personally there's a lot of value and keeping track of the different accomplishments you have but like I said in the beginning of this I wanted to share with you as a software engineering manager as much information as I can have put in front of me about the different impacts you're having and contributing that is so helpful for me to help you so I want you to keep that in mind going forward please take advantage of something like this and again you don't have to use my free templates it can be something as simple as a draft email or a pad of paper on your desk that you take some notes and you can leverage that in conversations with your manager so thanks for watching I hope you found this helpful please go do this I recommend it take care