Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How One Employee Got Promoted by Building a Career Scorecard
Transcript
- Lucas: You know the phrase 'executive presence' — it's one of those things everyone says matters for promotion, but nobody can quite define. Today I want to talk about someone who decided to define it for herself. Luna: I'm guessing she didn't just wing it in the review meeting. Lucas: Not at all. She was a senior product manager at a mid-size SaaS company, and she wanted to make senior director in the next promotion cycle. She'd seen colleagues get passed over because they couldn't articulate their impact beyond their immediate project. So she built what she called a career scorecard. Luna: A scorecard — like a balanced scorecard for your career? Lucas: Exactly that. She took the concept from Kaplan and Norton, adapted it for individual performance. She tracked 12 metrics across four categories: project impact, stakeholder feedback, skill growth, and visibility events. And she updated it every week — 15 minutes, Friday afternoon. Luna: I'm curious about the visibility category. What counted as a visibility event? Lucas: Good question. She defined it as any instance where she presented work to an audience outside her immediate team. That could be a demo day, a cross-functional review, a lunch and learn she hosted, even a Slack thread where a VP replied to her analysis. She logged each one with a date, the audience, and a one-line outcome. Luna: So it's not just about doing the work — it's about making sure the right people see you doing it. Lucas: Right. And the scorecard gave her a way to see patterns. After three months, she noticed her visibility events were heavily clustered in the product org — lots of presentations to her own VP, almost nothing to engineering or sales leadership. That became a gap she deliberately closed over the next quarter. Luna: And the stakeholder feedback category — how did she measure that? It's not exactly quantifiable. Lucas: She used a simple 1-to-5 rating after every major project milestone. She'd ask her project sponsor: 'On a scale of one to five, how well did this phase meet your expectations?' She tracked the trend line. It's subjective, but over time, a rising average is a real signal. And she had the data to back it up in her promotion packet. Luna: That's smart — it turns a fuzzy 'my stakeholders are happy' into a chart that shows improvement. But I wonder, did her manager actually care about the scorecard, or was it just for her own confidence? Lucas: Her manager found it useful, but the real test came in the promotion committee. She presented the scorecard as a one-page appendix to her self-assessment. The committee could see at a glance: 18 months of data, 12 metrics, all trending positive. One of the directors on the panel told her later it was the clearest case he'd seen. Luna: So the scorecard became a persuasion tool, not just a tracking tool. Lucas: Exactly. And what I like most about this approach is that it forces you to be honest with yourself. If your numbers aren't moving, you know it before the review cycle starts. You have time to course-correct. Luna: That's a big point — it's proactive, not reactive. Most people only think about their career narrative when it's time to write the self-review. Lucas: Right. And speaking of the narrative — if this kind of framework has helped you think about your own career more clearly, we'd love to hear about it. And if you find value in the show, listener support is what keeps it ad-free and focused on practical strategies like this. You can find us at buymeacoffee dot com slash fexingo. Every bit helps us keep digging into stories like this one. Luna: Yeah, and it means we can keep the episodes to the point without commercial breaks. Lucas: So back to the scorecard — the PM I mentioned, she also added a sponsorship depth metric. She rated each of her sponsors on a simple scale: one was 'knows my name,' two was 'has seen my work,' three was 'has advocated for me in a meeting.' She tracked how many people moved from level one to level three over the year. Luna: That's a really concrete way to measure something that's usually invisible. Did she share that with her sponsors directly? Lucas: She didn't — that would be awkward. But she used it to decide where to invest her networking time. If someone was stuck at level one, she'd find a reason to loop them into a relevant update. By the time the promotion cycle came, she had five level-three sponsors across different functions. Luna: And we should say — this doesn't have to be a complicated spreadsheet. What was the minimum viable version? Lucas: She started with a Google Sheet, three columns: category, metric, and a weekly note. That's it. You can add formulas and charts later. The key is consistency — spending 15 minutes a week, not trying to reconstruct six months of work from memory. Luna: I think the hardest part is just starting. People hear 'scorecard' and imagine a whole system. Lucas: Totally. But you can start with one category. Pick project impact — list your top three deliverables each week and note the outcome. After a month, you'll see a pattern. Then add another category. The PM I mentioned didn't design the full 12-metric scorecard on day one. She iterated over four quarters. Luna: So the real takeaway is: build a system that makes your case for promotion before you need to make it. And the scorecard is one repeatable way to do that. Lucas: Exactly. And it doesn't have to be a scorecard — it could be a dashboard, a weekly log, whatever fits your style. The principle is the same: track the data that matters, so when someone asks 'what have you done,' you don't have to guess. Luna: Alright, I'm going to start a mini version of this today. Three metrics, one sheet. See you next time. Lucas: See you then.