A Practical Guide to Getting Promoted, Earning a Raise, or Taking Ownership at Work
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I have worked as a Software engineer for 2 years in India and 3 years in the US and during this time span I’ve realized that promotions, raises, and strong performance ratings are rarely about working the hardest. They’re about creating visible, meaningful IMPACT however small or big your organization is.
I have worked at a startUp in India and now I work at Walmart, and based on my experience I have compiled principles that have consistently worked for me. None of this is company-specific. These are patterns that apply almost everywhere.
1. Integrate AI Into Your Day-to-Day Work
Every company today is looking for employees who can use AI to save time, reduce manual effort, and increase team efficiency. These are also the people who tend to be most valuable and are safe during lay-offs.
As an employee, start by identifying where your team spends the most time:
Deployments
Production releases
Manual validations
Debugging
Documentation
Repetitive analysis
Then ask a simple question:
“What part of this can be automated or accelerated using AI?”
Start small. Even if the first solution only helps you, that’s fine. Over time, turn it into something that benefits the team. The moment your work starts saving other people time, you create leverage.
Eg: Initially, you can just create an agent.md file and integrate it with cursor or copilot, for it to work like a chatbot. You can integrate this chatbot to places where product can use it to make certain repetitive and simple changes, where engineering involvement is not necessary. This will help you save engineering bandwidth.
One honest truth: You will likely need to use your weekends or personal time early on to experiment and build these things. But believe me it will be WORTH IT.
2. Choose the Right Business Initiatives
During sprint planning or roadmap discussions, I stopped asking:
“What task should I pick up?”
And started asking: “Which initiative will make the biggest impact?”
Always evaluate work from an impact perspective, not an input perspective. Promotions and raises are not tied to how busy you were they’re tied to what changed because of your work.
If you’re early in your career, you may not be given ownership of major initiatives immediately. So initially you can:
Contribute beyond your assigned scope
Support high-impact projects
Just try to be involved in these projects in some way. The closer your work is to business priorities, the easier it becomes to justify your growth during reviews.
3. Become the Point of Contact (POC)
Growth in any company requires cross-functional visibility. This means interacting not just with other developers, but also with:
Product managers
Stakeholders
Sister teams and their leads
Data scientists
Support teams, etc.
When you become the POC for an application or system, people know:
What you’re responsible for
What problems you solve
Whom to reach out to
Year-end reviews often include feedback from these people, and if you are the POC for them, their feedback automatically will be in favor of your growth!
4. Communicate Your Impact Clearly
Early on in my career, I have made this mistake of assuming that my work will speak for itself. But it DOES NOT! Hence, in order to create visibility, I’ve made it a habit to track:
Problems I solved
Risks I prevented
Metrics I moved
Cross-team contributions
When I have 1-1 meetings with my managers or leads, I clearly state the impact: I focus less on what I did and more on what changed: Reduced failures, Improved performance, Saved time or cost, Increased adoption or reliability.
I also make it a point to write everything down well in advance of the meeting and discuss each point clearly. This helps keep the conversation focused and meaningful, rather than turning into a generic discussion without clear direction.
Your manager needs concrete examples to represent you well for promotions, and you explicitly repeating your impact, helps him/her remember it and use it to present your case.
5. Think Like an Owner, Not a Task Executor
Initially I only focused on completing tickets. However, now I
Ask why something is needed
Flag risks early
Think about long-term maintenance
Care about reliability, cost, and scale
When you start thinking about the overall system instead of just your assigned work, people naturally trust you with more responsibility.
6. Tech is a team sport
Leadership potential shows up when you:
Help unblock teammates
Mentor juniors
Write documentation others rely on
Improve onboarding or tooling
Leads aren’t promoted because they’re the smartest person in the room.
They’re promoted because they make everyone around them better. Don’t just focus on doing your own task, but focus on helping others and creating better leaders.
7. Take Accountability for Production Issues
Things will fail a lot of times in production. Initially in my career I used to get intimidated by these issues. But an issue in production gives you an opportunity to:
Stay visible
Focus on resolution
Take responsibility/accountability for prevention
Owning failures and fixing root causes builds trust faster, and that’s what people remember the most much more than what you spoke at meetings.
8. Weekly/Monthly Demos
One habit that will help you is coordinating with your lead to run weekly or monthly demos for work done outside the regular sprint scope. This could be an automation you built, a tooling improvement, or any enhancement that created real impact for the team.
You can invite not just my immediate team, but also relevant sister teams. This creates an opportunity to share your work beyond a one-on-one setting and make it visible to a broader audience.
These demos serve multiple purposes. They:
Make impact visible without self-promotion
Improve communication and storytelling skills
Build credibility and trust across teams
Help others reuse or build on the work
Over time, this practice turns your work into shared knowledge, your name into a familiar one, and your contributions into something people remember :)
9. Contribute towards sprint planning
Even if sprint planning isn’t officially part of your role, you can still add a lot of value by supporting your lead or product manager during these discussions.
Getting involved helps you develop a broader understanding of the entire project, not just your own tasks. You gain visibility into what everyone on the team is working on, understand dependencies and trade-offs, and start thinking in terms of priorities rather than individual tickets.
Over time, this also gives you opportunities to:
Suggest improvements or missing work that should be prioritized
Help break down large initiatives into actionable tasks
Contribute to better assignment and sequencing of work
This kind of involvement signals ownership and systems-level thinking: both of which are strong indicators of readiness for greater responsibility.
10. EQ alongside IQ
I’ve noticed that the best leaders are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but those with strong emotional intelligence (EQ).
As a leader, it’s important to put your point across clearly and, when needed, hold people accountable. But how you do this matters. Challenging someone’s work should never feel disrespectful, political, or biased.
EQ also shows up in the small, everyday actions:
Remembering birthdays or important milestones
Checking in on how people are doing outside of work
Building relationships that go beyond just tasks and deadlines
Equally important is giving credit where it’s due. Acknowledging and praising others not only builds trust, but also creates a healthier, more motivated team.
Final Thoughts
I’ve seen these principles work for many people across different organizations, and they’ve worked for me as well. I’m confident that following them can help you plan your next big move and create meaningful impact and visibility through your work.
I hope this helps :)