Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How a Quiet Employee Got Promoted by Owning the Onboarding Process
Transcript
- Lucas: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, there's a small way you can return the favor. We deliberately keep this show ad-free — no sponsors, no interruptions. If that matters to you, the support link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a tiny gesture that makes a real difference for us. And it keeps the podcast exactly what it is. Lucas: Alright, let's get into today's story. You know how every company has that one process everyone complains about but nobody fixes? Luna: Oh, I can think of three right now. Onboarding has to be near the top of the list. Lucas: Exactly. And that's exactly the process Priya decided to own. Priya was a mid-level software engineer at a mid-size fintech company — think around 500 engineers. She was quiet, delivered solid code, but didn't exactly light up the room in meetings. Luna: The classic 'does good work but nobody notices' profile. Lucas: Right. And like many engineers, she had a new hire buddy assigned to her when she joined. But the buddy was overwhelmed, the documentation was scattered across three wikis and a shared drive, and her first week was basically her trying to piece together who to talk to and what to read. Luna: So she decided to fix it for the next person. Lucas: Exactly. She didn't ask for permission. She just started documenting. She mapped out the first-week journey: who the new hire should meet, what systems they need access to, what codebase tutorials actually exist. She created a single-page checklist and a companion FAQ. Luna: And she shared it with her manager. What did the manager say? Lucas: Her manager said 'This is great, but I don't have the bandwidth to review it. Go ahead and run it by the team leads.' So she did. She scheduled fifteen-minute calls with three senior engineers and the product manager, asked them what they wished they'd known on day one, and incorporated all of it. Luna: That's smart — she's building buy-in with the people who will become the new hire's stakeholders. Lucas: Exactly. She also created a feedback loop. After each new hire went through the new process, she scheduled a thirty-minute retro. She asked three questions: what was unclear, what took too long, and what was missing. Then she updated the documentation and sent a summary to the team. Luna: So she's making the process dynamic. It's not a static PDF that goes stale. Lucas: Right. Six months in, the data was compelling. Her team's new hire ramp-up time dropped from an average of eight weeks to four weeks. The number of Slack DMs to senior engineers from new hires asking basic setup questions dropped by about 60 percent. She measured all of it. Luna: And she presented that to her manager during the mid-year review. Lucas: She didn't just present it. She wrote a one-page memo titled 'Onboarding Efficiency: Current State, Impact, and Next Steps.' She framed it as a process improvement project with clear metrics. Her manager forwarded it to the VP of Engineering. Luna: And the VP noticed. That's the visibility piece. Lucas: Exactly. The VP was about to kick off a company-wide onboarding overhaul. He saw Priya's work and asked her to lead a cross-functional task force — engineering, people ops, IT, security. She went from being a quiet individual contributor to leading a project with stakeholders from four departments. Luna: And that project led to her promotion to Staff Engineer. What was the timeline? Lucas: She started the onboarding documentation in month one. By month four, she had the first version live. By month eight, she had data. By month twelve, she was leading the task force. She got promoted at month eighteen. Luna: That's fast. Usually staff-level promotions at mid-size tech companies take three to four years. Lucas: It is fast. And the key was she didn't just do the work — she made the work visible. She sent monthly one-paragraph updates to her manager and the VP. She presented at the engineering all-hands. She gave the new onboarding process a name: 'Launchpad.' That made it sticky. Luna: So the lesson is: find the broken process that affects everyone, fix it quietly, measure the impact, and then socialize it. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a second lesson here. Priya is an introvert. She didn't get promoted by talking more in meetings. She got promoted by creating a system that made everyone else more efficient. That's a different path to visibility — one that doesn't require you to be the loudest voice in the room. Luna: And she built a sponsorship relationship with the VP without ever directly asking for it. The work spoke for itself. Lucas: Right. So if you're listening and you're the quiet person on your team who's good at your job but feels invisible, ask yourself: what process is consistently broken that nobody has the time or energy to fix? That's your promotion project. Luna: And start small. You don't need to overhaul the entire company. Pick one slice, like Priya did with the first week of onboarding. Lucas: Exactly. And document everything. The numbers are what get you the promotion, not the effort. Luna: Good stuff. Next episode, we'll look at how someone got promoted by owning the offboarding process—turning a painful exit into a smoother transition.