Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How One Employee Got Promoted by Writing a One-Page Strategy
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a moment in most people's careers where they realize just being busy isn't enough. You have to be strategically visible. And that usually means writing something your boss's boss actually wants to read. Luna: Which is harder than it sounds. Most internal documents are either too long or too tactical. Lucas: Right. So today I want to talk about a specific case — a product manager at a mid-sized SaaS company, let's call her Priya. She was a senior IC, had been in role about two years, solid performer. But she felt stuck. Her manager liked her work but wasn't advocating for her promotion. Luna: Classic scenario. Good at execution, invisible at the strategy level. Lucas: Exactly. So Priya did something pretty smart. She wrote a one-page strategic memo. Not a deck, not a lengthy report — one page. And she titled it something like 'Aligning Our Product Roadmap with the CEO's Three Priorities.' She sent it to her manager and Cc'd the VP of Product. Luna: She Cc'd the VP? That's a bold move. How did her manager react? Lucas: She'd flagged it with him first — 'Hey, I'm working on a one-pager I think would be useful for the VP, mind if I share?' So he was looped in. That's key. She didn't blindside anyone. Luna: Okay, so what was actually in this one-pager? Lucas: Three sections. First, a clear problem statement: 'Our team's current work is spread across four initiatives, but the CEO has publicly named customer retention and upmarket expansion as the company's top two bets. Only one of our four initiatives directly supports either.' That's the kind of clarity that gets attention. Luna: So she's framing her team's work in the context of what leadership cares about. Not just 'here's what we did.' Lucas: Right. Second section was 'strategic bets.' She proposed two specific shifts: reallocate engineering time from a low-impact feature to a retention-focused integration, and pilot a sales enablement tool for the enterprise segment. No fluff, just concrete moves with rough effort estimates. Luna: And the third section? Lucas: Trade-offs. She was honest: 'If we do these two things, we deprioritize the mobile redesign for one quarter and delay the analytics dashboard.' That's the part that makes a memo strategic — showing you understand opportunity cost. Luna: Most people would try to hide the trade-offs. They want everything to sound like a win. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why executives don't trust those documents. They know there's no free lunch. Priya's memo got her a thirty-minute meeting with the VP, and within six weeks her role was re-scoped to include strategic oversight. She got the promotion three months later. Luna: So the one-pager itself wasn't the promotion, but it was the catalyst. It changed how she was perceived. Lucas: That's the whole point. The memo forced her to think at the right level. And once she'd done that thinking, she could talk about her work differently in every meeting moving forward. Luna: I think a lot of people overestimate how much data executives want. They default to a twenty-slide deck when what's really valued is a tight argument. Lucas: Totally. And the bar for a one-pager is higher because every sentence has to earn its place. If you can't explain your strategic logic in a page, you probably haven't thought it through enough. Luna: What about timing? When do you send something like that? Lucas: Priya timed hers about six weeks before the annual planning cycle. That was deliberate — she knew executives were starting to think about resource allocation. So her memo landed when they were hungry for well-framed proposals. Luna: So the calendar matters. Don't send a strategic memo during a quarterly review crunch when everyone's buried in numbers. Lucas: Right. You want to catch the wave of strategic thinking. Another thing she did well: she referenced specific comments the CEO had made in the last all-hands. That showed she was paying attention to the same signals leadership was. Luna: That's a nice detail. It's not just 'I think this is important' — it's 'I know you think this is important, and here's how I can help.' Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of framing that builds executive presence. Not title, not tenure — just the ability to see the business the way senior leaders see it. Luna: I want to talk about the risks, though. What if your manager is threatened by you going over their head? Lucas: That's real. Priya handled it by making her manager a co-author in spirit. She shared the draft, incorporated his feedback, and when the VP responded, she looped her manager into the follow-up. The manager ended up looking good too — he had a team member doing strategic work. Luna: So it's not about bypassing your boss; it's about elevating the whole team's visibility. If you can frame it that way, most managers will support it. Lucas: Right. And if your manager genuinely doesn't want you seen by senior leaders? That's a different problem, and maybe a sign you need a new manager. But give them a chance to be part of it first. Luna: Fair. So the template here is: identify a strategic question your leadership is wrestling with, write a one-pager that frames it clearly, propose specific bets with trade-offs, and time it before a planning cycle. Lucas: That's it. And don't overthink the formatting. Plain text, bullet points, maybe one small table. The goal is clarity, not design awards. Luna: You know, it's funny — we talk about this kind of advice on the show, and it's genuinely useful. And it's also the reason we keep the show ad-free. We don't want to interrupt a practical conversation with a commercial break. Lucas: Totally. And if this kind of deep-dive is helpful to you, the way listeners have told us it is, there's a simple way to support the show. It's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's one word, no spaces. Luna: No pressure at all. Just if you find value and want to keep the show independent, that's the place. And we mean it — we're not going to start running ads or asking for more. Lucas: Alright. Back to Priya's story. The real test came six months after her promotion. Her VP asked her to write a similar one-pager for a new initiative — this time for the board. She'd graduated from writing for her boss to writing for the boardroom. Luna: That's a great arc. And it shows that the skill compounds. The first time you write a strategic memo, it's a bet. The second time, it's an expectation. Lucas: Exactly. So if you're feeling stuck in your current role, ask yourself: is there a strategic question I can answer in one page that would make my boss's boss think differently about my work? If you can do that, you've already started the promotion conversation. Luna: And if the answer is no, that's useful too. It tells you you need to understand the business better before you can write that memo. Lucas: Right. The memo is a forcing function. Until you can write it, you're not ready for the promotion. And once you can, you probably won't need to ask.