When you read the description of this session, you might have noticed the phrase that said good work speaks for itself.And that is the lie that most of us have been operating under for our entire careers because it doesn't, and it never has. And so by the time the promotion conversations or the salary review has come around, we've oftentimes just forgotten half of what we've accomplished, and the other half, we can't put an an impact on. And nobody else is carrying that into the room for us. So I'm not gonna touch anymore on the statistics today about how we undervalue our contributions and how much that costs us in lifetime earnings because you already know that because you're living it every day. But what we will do in our next forty minutes together is go through a practical system, a how to, as we mentioned, of three things, how to capture your achievements as they happen, how to translate them into business impact, and then how to negotiate from a point of proof rather than from persuasion.

So a couple of things before we dive in. First, as Polina mentioned, this is a workshop, so I wanna put the emphasis on the word work. So, grab a pen and paper or your laptop or your phone, whatever you wanna use today. We're gonna use that. And drop in the chat work if you're ready to work with me here today. And then second, there are a lot a lot of great sessions about why women need to advocate for themselves, and those things certainly matter. But I feel like you already know the why. So this is a session that we're gonna focus on the how, the mechanics, the system, and the script. So, a little less kind of rah rah and a little more playbook.

And by the end, I want you to have something to take with you and to start doing. And then finally, I'm gonna ask you to flex a couple muscles today. And I just wanna say it doesn't have to be perfect. You cannot get this wrong. Your goal today is just to start in this session and then keep working your muscles. So we've got three muscles we're gonna work on today. I'm gonna teach each one, show you what good looks like, and then you'll work it yourself. And we'll do that for three cycles. So when you walk out, you are gonna walk out stacked from our session today, and I mean that exactly how it sounds. You're gonna have your work stacked. Your script will be stacked. Everything that you need to be in place for your next conversation ready, easy to reach, ready to go.

That's what it means to be stacked. File, muscle, scripts, that's your system, and you'll start running that by the end of today, the day tomorrow. Okay. We're gonna get started. But before we do, I just wanna say one quick note. I am here today because my amazing employer, Splunk and Cisco, a Cisco company, is giving me this time, and they've been such an incredible place to work, particularly, the support of my direct leadership team. So I think the fact that I get to spend this session with you today really says something about that. So I wanna thank them. But this session isn't about Splunk. This session is about you, and that is capital you, y o u. Not your team, not your manager, not your company's mission, even though all of those things are important. But this is about you.

And if talking about yourself and your work makes you kind of flinch a little bit, then I can certainly relate to that. I wanna tell you a little story about how I flinched when someone made me sit with that a bit. A few years back, I was interviewing for a senior role at a company I really, really wanted to be at. And at that point in my career, I had led teams of hundreds and multinational and, you know, millions of dollars of projects kind of flowing through my org. So I was prepared for this interview the way that I had been for every big moment in my career. I knew our numbers. I knew the story arc of every major accomplishment we had had as an organization.

And so when my interview conversation started, I did what I knew how to do as a leader. I talked about my team and the great work that we had accomplished. We shipped this, and we recovered that account. We turned this region around. You know? I I had plenty to say about all the great work my team had done, and I was specific about our outcomes. And I thought I was killing it. We I really thought we were having a great chat. But about maybe forty minutes in, the woman that I was interviewing with, super sharp, and I have come to find out a really great advocate for women's careers. She just kinda, you know, leaned back a little, and I I took notice of it.

And she said, Misty, your team has clearly done great work, and I've enjoyed hearing about it. But what I don't hear much about today is you and your particular role in any of this. And I kind of felt my stomach drop and even felt myself getting a little defensive. And so I did what I think most of us would do, and I just started explaining. Well, you know, it's it's a team effort and the company. And she stopped me and said, I'm aware. Of course it was. But surely, you've played an integral role. So tell me about a project that wouldn't have happened if you wouldn't have been there.

And, of course, just like you, I'm sure I have 10 of those on the top of my head, 20 of those, projects that wouldn't have existed if I hadn't have had the vision or obstacles that I personally removed. I had all of that, but I had walked in prepared the way that I had always prepared up to that point. I had not written any of those down and not one. I was forty minutes into an interview conversation that was supposed to be about why they should hire me, asking them to take a bet on me, and I had not yet talked about me and my particular value. So here's what I realized that day sitting in that chair in that interview. The gap was my language. I didn't know how to talk about my work without folding it into the work.

And I did what I think most of us do in the stat that Polina read at the beginning. I downplayed myself in my own story in real time in a room where I was the candidate. And the fix for that are these three muscles, capture, translate, and negotiate. And that's what we're gonna work today. That's our system. And that system runs at that point whether you're in the room or not. When these muscles are running, that's when you've gotten stacked. So we're gonna take them one at a time and go through each of them. And as we do this, I want you to meet Lynn. I met Lynn when she was a senior product manager. She was working for a mid stage SaaS company. And twice, she was told she was tracking towards director.

And twice, they had given her stretch assignments. And twice, she crushed those. And then twice, she was passed over for it. So she came to me, I guess, about, six months ago, just ready to leave. And what you'll see today as we work through these for ourselves is the work that she did, and how she progressed and how she came out with different file, different language, and different communication. So we'll get to see what changes for her. Okay. Quick check, in the chat. Do you have anything that you use right now today where you're documenting your work, the work that you do for yourself, as it happens? Not something that you give to your manager, but some place that you're you're tracking it for yourself. Let's take a look in the chat. Anybody?

Kind of yes or no? Great. Keep it in OneNote. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. No. No. Yes. Yes. Great. And I see some coming in on a on a Kanban board. Do you have any place that you're keeping it just for yourself, somewhere that's not through your work? Okay. Great. Looks like we have some places going and some not. All good stuff. We're gonna work on that today. Oftentimes, we're not tracking our own work for ourselves. Right? And that's a gap that we're gonna address today. And here's what that looks like. Most of the time, we do something significant during the year. Of course, we're in May, so we've done a great project. We've, or contributed a significant piece to a project here in May. And then by October, when the review cycle comes around, we have either forgotten about it or we don't remember what a big role we played in it or we're not quantifying the impact of that at all.

And all that is is a documentation problem, and documentation problems are very solvable. So as many of you know, it looks like capture is not a habit. Capture is a system. So habits are the things that you do because you should, but systems are the things that you do because they're going to produce something that you need. So this capture muscle that we're gonna work today produces a file that is going to survive the conversations that you're not even in yet. So your future reviews, your future interviews, even reorbs or layoffs. So it's just asking you to physically capture your work. And when I say work, I wanna be clear. I stopped using the word win a while ago because I found that it was just stopping a lot of the women that I was working with because we hear the word win, capture your win, and we think it's gotta be something massive.

Right? But that's not what our real work feels like. We're chipping away at things every day. So instead, I use these categories. I use deliver, which means that you've delivered something. You've produced something. You've shipped something. You've closed something. Hit a number. I use save as in you prevented something. You prevented a loss or caught a bug or stopped churn or held a relationship or enable. You've enabled others. You've lifted others. And oftentimes, that's what we call the glue work that's kind of been invisible, but we wanna make that visible. So all three of these categories are impact categories and they all count. And we're going to use these categories as we develop some of those future muscles. So, quick thought. Oftentimes when you're making an entry, you're going to feel like the work spans several of these categories. They're gonna feel like more than one sometimes.

But just pick one category that you feel like is the closest related. Again, you can't get this wrong. This is just a tool, so it's not meant to be a constraint. In our format for capturing our work is just four fields, the date, the category that deliver, save, or enable, what you did in the form of an action verb. First person. I led, I built, I caught, I closed. And then what changed as a result of that? So this could be something that got unlocked because of what you did. What happened because of what I did. And this does not have to be formal language. It doesn't have to be perfectly thought out. And most importantly, this file lives somewhere that you control. So personal drive, Notion, paper notebook, but not your work laptop. Okay?

This file needs to live your outlive your your access. And, one more thing, because we're at a tech conference, you can certainly use AI to help you with this as well. You don't have to start from scratch. So whatever your AI of choice is, you can train it on your role. You can either link your calendar or feed your calendar every week and just ask it to surface these capture entries for you and and train it on the categories. And then it might help you surface sometimes things that you've forgotten. And oftentimes, it won't be perfect, but it just might help unlock something for you. And then you can decide what's real from that. So, the point in using AI is not to have, outsource it.

The point is just to lower the friction so that you you stay on top of doing this. Okay. So remember Lynn, the senior project product manager that we were taking a look at. Here's an example of what her capture file looked like within a couple of Fridays of starting. So she had I just pulled, one from each category. So she had a deliver where she led the redesign of an onboarding experience, and that meant that her customers were able to get up and running in nine days instead of twenty three. So what she did, what that unlocked. And then she saved. So she caught a critical issue in a partner integration. And then what that unlocked was, it saved the partner revenue. And then she also enabled.

She created a skill building session for a couple of the junior product managers, and what that unlocked was them being able to ship their first feature on their own in the in sixty days. So, actually, that that final one, that skill building, that was something that she almost didn't even write down because she wasn't sure that it counted. But this is the muscle that I want us to work. Invisible work doesn't get counted unless you counted counted. So notice that she chose enable for that one. We're gonna use that in the future. So, again, capture. It's just taking a quick record of the work that you've done throughout the week. This is something that I recommend doing on a Friday. Just block your calendar for ten, fifteen minutes and just take a quick capture of the work that you've done throughout the week.

Even if it seems insignificant at the moment, those things build up. So remember we talked about it's your turn to work. Now it's your turn to capture, your turn to practice capture. So, grab your notebook or your laptop, your phone, whatever you're working in. And I want you to think about could be something you worked on today, yesterday, something in the last ninety days. Just think of a real one and just go through these four fields. Okay? The date, the category that we talked about, what you did, and what that unlocked. And if you're thinking, well, I don't have anything to to fill in that that really counts. Trust me. You do. The it could be a meeting that you facilitated or a deck that you fixed or something that you jumped in and helped out with.

Don't try to pick the biggest thing. Just pick maybe a most recent one that you haven't written down yet, and just write as many as you can in the next minute or so. And, go ahead and get started working on that. Oh, I love this idea in the chat. If you keep a log, it could be interesting to put it through Claude and ask it to identify my strengths and growth areas. Excellent. Great suggestion. Great suggestion. And are you only supposed to capture one thing a week? Capture all the things that you're doing. Just take a quick couple minutes and write them down. Write them down. Give a few more seconds here. We're just practicing the muscle practicing the muscle. Okay. Well, we've gotten started. You just did it.

You just did something that actually most people don't do, and you activated your system and wrote down your work in a format that can survive, as I mentioned, those conversations that you're not even in yet. So that's capture. And now we're gonna work on translating it. This is where most documentation falls apart. So we write down the activity. I led the cross functional initiative on platform migration, for example, And that tells your manager what you spent your time on, but that doesn't tell her anything about why the business is better because you exist. That's an activity tracker. And promotion conversations don't pay for activity. They pay for impact. So here's where we want to get to. Here's our destination. This is the shape of the sentence that we're ultimately working towards. I did this thing. Here's what it unlocked. Here's the business problem that it solved, and here's how that impacted my business. Those four pieces. That's our impact sentence.

That's gonna carry you into things like promotion conversations, resumes, etcetera. The beautiful thing is most of those pieces you already have now because we just worked on them in capture. So capture gives you that the action, and it gives you some sense of what changed, what got unlocked. But now we have those two pieces that are missing. What's the business problem that this solved, and what's the impact? And that's the one that's big enough that you need to carry that into your promotion conversation. That's where the real work is, and I'm gonna show you how to find those. So first thing, what is the business problem? Remember those categories that we talked about? The answer is hiding in the categories that you already chose. So for example, the category is going to tell you the business the business problem to name.

That's how we bridge from capture to translate. So if you have deliver, your business problem could be an output problem, and you've made something faster or cheaper or more. We launched two weeks earlier or we cut ramp time in half. That's an output problem solved. And if you categorize it as save, then your business problem is risk. Maybe you prevented something from going wrong. You didn't lose the partner or you saved the ship from going out. We didn't have the breach. That's a risk problem solved. And if you categorize it enable, then maybe your business problem is capability or capacity. So you made others able to do something, excuse me, that they couldn't do on their own. People got time back. You have folks shipping independently. That's a capacity or capability problem solved. So the category that deliver, save, or enable is gonna tell you what type of business problem to name in your sentence.

That's the bridge from capture to translate. So let's take a look at that, by way of example. Our activity, I mentor junior engineers. We know that this was an enable category, so it's focused on capability or capacity. In the impact sentences, I built the junior senior pairing program, which cut the new hire ramp from six months to three, x which enabled us to accelerate two product launches. You see, so it's doing that extra step of work. Here's what I did, and here's why that matters. And this is where the real thinking work comes in. Here's what I did. And if I really think about why that was important and peel back the layers, Here's why that matters. It's the same work. It's just a different conversation. So, again, the activity sentence stops at what you did, but the impact sentence keeps going into what changed because of it.

So don't stop at the verb. Just keep walking it out until you can name the change. And the hardest, transition I find, the hardest one to do is that invisible work. It's that connective tissue. And here's how I think about unlocking that. Here's a sentence you can take with you into this exercise or question. What happened because I did this, or what wouldn't have happened if I didn't do this? So what happened because I did this, or what wouldn't have happened if I wouldn't have done that? K? And the way that we get there is what I call the impact ladder. This is how we get to impact. This is how we get to that the resulting in part. It's the actual impact. These are the things that you're gonna bring into your promotion and your raise conversations.

So, again, most frameworks stop at the first thing that changed and called it done, But that's not enough for us. We're gonna keep walking because you wanna progress your career. You're not getting promoted for what you did. You're getting promoted for the impact of what you did. And here's how to find that impact. Walk it up the impact ladder. Four rungs, and you just keep going. And look at the questions that are gonna unlock each rung. So the first one is that activities that we did back in capture. What did I do? That's the activity. Rung two is the same thing we started working on in capture. What changed? What did I cause? This is what I think of as first order impact. And then we take it another step.

Well, did that affect others, or did something else happen because of what I caused, because of what I unlocked? That's our second order impact. This is where senior level contributors start to think. And then rung four, we start to get into, well, how does that serve my company priorities? Right? How does that align to something that my business cares about? That's at every rung you're going to keep asking yourself what business problem did this solve and why does it matter? So the latter is just the tool that generates the impact that you're gonna put in that sentence. And you climb the rungs by asking those questions. And whatever altitude you reach on the rungs, that's what you're gonna put in your clause, in your resulting in clause.

Now keep in mind that, strategic alignment with your company, that obviously requires some homework. You have to know what your company's strategic vocabulary is. So if you work for a public company, those things are very public. They're talking about their strategic goals in investor presentations, earnings calls, letters from the CEO. Oftentimes, they're they have them write out on their website. These are their strategic organizational priorities. If it's a private company, they're out there as well. Sometimes it's going to be reflected in your OKRs or MBOs or KPIs. Pick an acronym. And other times, it's gonna be evidenced in your HR pillars or things that you see on your reviews. And I would invite you to find those and grab them. So if you're gonna work on, with paper and pen, print those out and tape them in your notebook, those strategic company priorities.

If you're working online, then screenshot them and make sure that they live right where you're doing your capture work because you wanna be able to make that connection between the work you're doing and the company priority that it serves because that's how senior promotions get evaluated.

So let's look at how that worked in practice for Lynn. So let's watch how she kind of tran traveled through this ladder. So she started with her capture entry, those four fields under the category of enable, and it was that she built and ran a weekly skill building session for those junior PMs. Because she had tagged it enable, remember our categories, she knew that the problem she solved was capacity, and that told her how to start thinking about this. What kind of impact was she looking for? And then she just started climbing the ladder. She didn't write the sentence out first. She climbed first, and that's what I'd love for you to do because each one of the rungs is gonna surface your content. So we're gonna start with what she did. She built and ran a weekly skill building session for junior product managers. What changed because of that?

Well, they shipped their first own features within the first sixty days. Again, that's where most of it stops, but we're gonna keep going. What did that matter? What did that enable? Well, they're operating on their own, which means that their directors, their managers got some time back to the order of each of them got about twelve hours a week back, which means that just unlocked 40 of collective senior product manager time, which means what are they gonna do with that time?

They're gonna create things that we can now ship out to customers that they wouldn't have been able to do if they would have been spending their time coaching and managing those junior leaders or those junior PMs in order to get them up to speed. See what I mean? So why does that matter that now these senior folks have their time availed? Well, by virtue of the fact that they were able to get that feature out a quarter early, I think they shipped in, q three instead of q four, that means that we've now accelerated one of their company priorities. I think they had an let's see. I've got it here. FY twenty six strategy to accelerate enterprise velocity. And so that time that she freed up by virtue of the work that she was doing, as she walked up the ladder, that time was able to be reinvested in service of that priority. And they shipped those features in q three instead of q four. So now she's built that sentence, putting it all together.

I built the skill building program that solved a senior bandwidth problem for our directors of product, giving them back roughly forty hours of capacity that they reinvested into this commitment to accelerate enterprise velocity, which means two features shipped a quarter early.

And if we keep walking that out, why does it matter? Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Why does that matter? When you ship features early, particularly customer facing features, that could have impacts to customer experience scores, revenue generation. So you see this just keeps piling on, and this is all from what the ladder surfaced. So that's our workflow. It's the same entry, just different altitudes. So if you look at her on that second rung, she sounds like a person that runs a great mentorship program, which is useful but entirely optional. But by the time you get to rung four, she sounds like someone who diagnosed a capacity constraint, built a scalable intervention, and drove measurable measurable strategic acceleration. Right? Operating above her current letter, level. So her work didn't change the way she used her language to describe the altitude did, and that's our move. Got it?

So now it's your turn to practice translate. So take that entry that you just captured and look at that category. Remember, that's gonna tell you the business problem, and I've given you the hints back up here of the type of business problem it unlocks. And so I just want you to walk these rungs. Okay? Start with your category with that entry and then climb the ladder. Why did this matter? What did this cause? What business problem was this solving? How did that impact my company? And just go as far as you can. Does not have to be perfect, and you don't have to get through all the rungs, or you might even go past some of these rungs. Just get as far as you can, and let's see where you go. And then let's work on building that sentence and putting it all together.

Go ahead and get started. Yes. In the chat. Exactly. Something being shipped early, huge from a user perspective. That's why it matters. Yes. Something being put on the road map is like a place where features go to die. That's right. That's why we wanna create, tout the fact that we created that capacity so that the road map could actually come to life. Take another few seconds here, and I know these muscles take time to develop. I just want you to get started today. Get started today, and you can see it's just a process. It's just a process, and you'll have the tools to do it. So keep working on that impact sentence or something even close to it.

And when you have a chance, just feel free to in the chat, just drop a resulting action in. Doesn't have to be the top of the ladder, but just, I did this thing, and here's something that came out of it. I'd love to see some of those. Yeah. That's right. Sometimes the actions that you don't even think have an impact when you really walk out that ladder and think about what they might have caused really has real impact. Really has real impact. Okay. So here's our last muscle that we're gonna work on. Here's how most of us walk into our negotiations. I'd like to maybe ask about a promotion, and, I've I I was wondering if we could maybe talk about this. I don't wanna make it a big thing.

And those types of positioning kind of reframes your negotiation as just a request where you're looking for permission. So the burden's on you in that case, and the skill that we're working on is reversing that. So you're not asking in this case, you're presenting. You're stating what you've delivered and you're naming what you want next. So the burden flips in this case. Two components we're gonna work on. Proof. Here's what I've delivered. That's those impact sentences from your file that you're gonna keep working on. Ideally, you've got a handful of those that you've walked up the ladder over time. And then the standard based on that work and the market, here's what I'm requesting. Could be a number, could be a title, and it's specific and it's stated and you're not hedging it.

And that second step is where most of us tend to soften. We say these things. I was hoping maybe we could consider, but our move is to name the number, name the title, name both, whatever it is you're going for, and make sure that you have that proof along with it. So, then we're gonna close that out. We've got our proof. We have our standard. So based on that work and the market, here's what I'm requesting. And then we have one question that is bounded to our specific ask, and that question is very specific. What's the path to getting that approved? What's the path to getting that approved? It's not what's the path from here because that's open ended. It invites a bunch of hoops. It's not what's the path from here. It's what's the path to getting that approved? And that ties them back to the specific thing that you've just asked for.

They can certainly still come back with conditions, but now those conditions have to defend themselves against the approval pathway for that specific ask. And that's different and that's harder. So here's what that looks like in practice. So when we have that proof in the last twelve months, I've cut time to value 64%. I lifted paid conversion rates Because of these things that I did downstream, those activities resulted in this proof. I caught this partner API failure the morning of the launch, so the launch went out clean instead of customer impact. I built three engineers into independent architecture review leads. Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Why does that matter? Well, it means that, ultimately, we accelerated delivery. Ultimately, maybe we saved some headcount. So based on that work and the market, here's what I'm seeking. What's the path to getting that approved? Now a quick note on the standard part.

The number that the market supports, obviously, that takes homework before the conversation. This is, again, genuinely something that AI and there are a number of other tools out there can help with. So you can throw a prompt in with your role, your level, your geography, throw in some of your capture and translate entries, and then validate that maybe against some of the recruiter sites. I think there's levels.fyi, comprehensive.io. There's a number of sites out there. That's required work going into these conversations. That's not optional. You wanna make sure that your standard is grounded in the market. The focus you really have is making sure that you come in with that proof. So here's what Lynn looked like when she originally went into her negotiations before any of that work that we looked at that she did. Boy. Hi.

Thanks for making time. I wanted to talk about my growth. I've been here almost three years. I was hoping maybe we could revisit that path to director we keep talking about. I know there's been a lot going on. I just wanted to bring it up again. We all know kind of what happened there. And then six months later, after we had built that file, translated the file, ladder was walked, standard research was done, here's how she went in. I wanted to walk you through what I've delivered over the last two cycles and where I see my contribution. For one, I led the redesign of the onboarding experience for our biggest customers.

Now they're getting up and running in nine days instead of twenty three, and we have more paying customers. Two, I caught this critical issue in one of our integrations before it broke. That ended up protecting $4,000,000 of partner revenue. And three, I built that skill building program that gave our directors time back so they shipped those features early, which means that we're meeting a company priority. So based on that work and what the market supports for this level, I'm asking for the director title, and I'm asking for a comp raising my compensation up to x y z by my next review cycle. So what's the path look like to getting that approved? So in her first version, she carried the entire burden. I just wanted to bring it up again. You know, that's an apology for bringing being in the room. But in the second version, her work was on the table. The ladder was walked.

That strategic alignment was named. The ask was specific, and now her manager had to engage with the specific approval pathway. Not a vague kind of closing the gap that can mean anything. So, again, same work, same person, just a different conversation. And I have to say that even though they kept telling her they didn't have the budget that cycle, didn't have the budget that cycle waiting for approval, she ultimately did get her promotion and got the raise six weeks, but six weeks after she had that second conversation. So it's not that she's unique in that way. It's just that she came in very prepared. So in this next section, I'm gonna ask you to work on our negotiation muscle. That is the simplest of the three, but it's also the hardest because as we talked about in the beginning, it asks you to put yourself at the start of the sentence.

I did this. I delivered that. And most of us have been trained out of that. So before we run this, I wanna do just a quick warm up, get us in the right mind space for it, and I would love for you to drop the word me into the chat. Just drop the word me, m e, hit send, and I just want you to notice as you're doing that how you feel. Do you have an impulse to not type it or an impulse to kind of make yourself a little smaller before you put it out there. That's the muscle I want us to train. I love seeing these mes come in. Look at that. That is the room with all of us saying, me, me, me at the same time with no apology attached. And that's the muscle, so now we're gonna work it.

Let's work your script.