What this step gets you: your case read properly before anyone talks about it, an answer ready for every way the conversation can go, and a written record after each round, so nothing agreed out loud goes missing between one meeting and the next.

Step 4 ended with a finished document. Most cases that go nowhere never get rejected. They sit unopened in an inbox, get skimmed in a meeting, or get agreed to out loud and then forgotten when somebody's calendar fills up. This step is how yours avoids all three.

Watch the companion video

👷 Design Your Promotion: How Erfan Got Over 20%

Find out who actually decides

Before it goes anywhere, answer three questions about your own company. They're from How to Ask for a Raise as a Data Engineer, and they're the ones almost everybody skips.

• Who ultimately approves compensation changes?
• Who influences that person?
• Who has budget authority and a seat at the table when your name comes up?

Most engineers answer the first one with "my manager" and stop. In most companies above a certain size, your manager is one voice in a room of several, making a recommendation to somebody with real budget authority.

The names don't change who gets your case. It goes to your manager, first, every time. Go over their head to the approver and the one person who has to argue for you is now the person you embarrassed.

What the names change is who your manager is writing for. If the person approving it runs finance, the cost position on your surface matters more than your fourth technical win. If it's a committee, somebody on it will message the names on your lines and ask whether they're true, so every one of those lines has to hold.

If you can't fill one of the three, that's your question for the next one-to-one. Ask your manager who else sees this before a decision, and what they usually respond to.

Yours. Approves: ______________. Influences them: ______________. Budget authority: ______________. Anyone in that chain who changed this year: ______________.

If your manager changed recently, the case goes to both the old one and the new one. Erfan's case, start to finish has what that looked like, from the reorg onward.

Flag it, then send it

Never walk somebody through your case live. Whoever decides needs time alone with it, to write in the margins and go back to the line they didn't follow. Narrating it at them takes all of that away and hands them a performance instead.

So it goes in this order.

1. Flag it. In your next one-to-one, say what you're asking for and that the document is coming. One sentence does it. "I've put together a case for moving to Senior Data Engineer, and I'll send it this week so you can read it before we talk."
2. Send it, with a three-sentence message. The message is below.