Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How One Employee Got Promoted by Owning the Onboarding Process
Transcript
- Lucas: Priya was a mid-level operations associate at a SaaS company with about two thousand employees. She joined the company right out of grad school, and after about a year and a half, she noticed something frustrating. Luna: Let me guess: the onboarding process. Lucas: Exactly. New hires received a jumble of six different documents — a PDF from HR, a Google Doc from IT, a Confluence page from their team lead, a Slack channel with pinned messages, a Trello board that hadn't been updated in six months, and an email chain from someone who'd left the company. Each one had slightly conflicting instructions. Luna: Oh, I've been there. It's like you're expected to assemble Ikea furniture from a set of instructions written in four different languages. Lucas: Right. And the real cost wasn't just frustration. It was time to productivity. Priya started talking to people who'd been there two, three months and still didn't know who to ask for basic things like setting up a distribution list or requesting data from the analytics team. So she did something about it. Luna: She didn't wait for permission, did she? Lucas: No. She spent three weekends — not evenings, weekends — building a single, interactive onboarding hub using Notion. It had role-specific checklists, department contacts with headshots, a calendar of recurring team meetings, and a weekly thread where recent hires could post 'what I wish I'd known.' She launched it as a soft pilot with just her own department. Luna: And she didn't ask anyone first? That's bold. Lucas: That's the key tension in this story. She didn't ask for permission, but she also didn't step on toes. She framed it as an experiment: 'Here's a draft I put together for our team — would love your feedback.' She sent it to her manager and a couple of senior teammates. That's it. Luna: So it started small. But then it spread. Lucas: Within a month, the VP of People Operations heard about it from a new hire in Priya's department who raved about it during a skip-level meeting. The VP asked Priya to present it at the next all-hands for the ops team. From there, it got adopted by three other departments. By the end of the quarter, time to productivity for new hires dropped by twenty-three percent. Luna: Twenty-three percent — that's a measurable, company-wide impact from something she built on weekends. Lucas: And three months later, Priya was promoted to Senior Operations Manager. Her promotion wasn't based on her core job duties — it was based on a side project that solved a systemic problem. Luna: Okay, so let's reverse-engineer this. What made this particular move work where other people's side projects fizzle out? Lucas: I'd break it into three things. First, she identified a pain point everyone already felt but no one owned. Second, she built something that scaled beyond her own team — it wasn't just a personal productivity hack, it was an infrastructure play. And third, she got visibility with senior leaders without campaigning for it. Luna: That third one is huge. A lot of people go looking for visibility and it comes off as self-serving. Priya's visibility was a byproduct of the work being genuinely useful. Lucas: Exactly. One thing I want to highlight is how she handled the risk. When you take ownership of something that isn't your job, you can ruffle feathers. The HR manager who owned the old onboarding docs could have felt threatened. But Priya's approach — the soft launch, the framing as a draft — made it collaborative rather than competitive. Luna: So she essentially made her manager and the HR team look good by solving a problem they'd been too busy to tackle. Lucas: That's the art of it. And here's something specific: she also documented everything. She created a 'how we built this' note that she shared with anyone who asked. That transparency meant other teams could adapt it without reinventing the wheel. That's how you build a reputation as someone who multiplies impact. Luna: You know, it reminds me of something I read about a similar case at a much larger company. An analyst built a dashboard for tracking project milestones that got adopted by the entire PMO. She ended up getting a promotion and a spot on the CEO's strategic initiatives team. The pattern is the same. Lucas: Right. The common thread is solving a problem that's bigger than your job description. But let me add a note of caution. Not every side project should be a weekend obsession. Priya's worked because it was tightly scoped. She didn't try to redesign the entire employee experience. She focused on one process — onboarding — and made it dramatically better. Luna: Scope discipline. That's a good rule of thumb. If your project takes more than a few weekends to show a result, it might be too big to fly under the radar. Lucas: And you need to be realistic about your bandwidth. Priya was in her first year and a half, so she had the energy and the hunger. But if you're juggling a heavy workload or family commitments, carving out three weekends might not be feasible. The principle still applies — you just need to find a smaller problem. Luna: Okay, so for someone listening who wants to try something similar, what's the first step? Lucas: Look for a process that everyone complains about but nobody owns. It could be as small as how your team tracks vacation requests or how new hires get their laptop set up. The key is that it's a recurring pain point with a clear 'before and after.' Then build a prototype — not a perfect solution — and share it with a small group. Luna: And don't forget to document your impact. Priya had the data — twenty-three percent improvement — because she tracked it. That's what made her promotion case airtight. Lucas: Exactly. If you don't measure the before, you can't prove the after. Even a simple survey asking new hires 'how confident do you feel on day one' on a scale of one to ten gives you a baseline. Luna: I want to circle back to the visibility aspect. Priya's hub got seen by the VP because a new hire mentioned it. That's serendipitous. But can you deliberately engineer that kind of exposure? Lucas: To some extent. You can include a short feedback loop where users of your solution are prompted to share it. For example, Priya could have added a note in the hub saying 'Found this useful? Let your manager know.' But I think the best approach is to let the work speak for itself. If it's genuinely valuable, word will spread. Luna: That's what happened here. She didn't send a mass email. She didn't ask for a meeting with the VP. She just built something good, and it found its way. Lucas: And that's the most sustainable kind of visibility. It doesn't feel political because it's not. It's merit-based. And when the promotion conversation happens, your manager has concrete evidence that you operate at a higher level than your current role. Luna: So the takeaway: find a broken process, fix it, measure the improvement, and share it humbly. That's a promotion play anyone can run. Lucas: Alright, let's leave it there for this episode. Next time, we'll look at a case where someone used the exact opposite approach — saying no to extra work — and still got promoted. That's an interesting one. Luna: Looking forward to it.