👋🏽 Hello :) This is Tebogo with this week's newsletter on why you need a brag document.

If you find this article insightful and helpful, feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues. Happy reading! 📖

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A brag document, or sometimes known as a hype sheet, is a document you keep for yourself to note all the wins you achieve in your career.

As a software engineer, you tend to work on a lot of different things in a bunch of areas. you might be excelling and doing a lot of awesome work, and it's easy to assume think that people will automatically recognise the work you are doing and reward you with promotions or pay raises.

In reality, the people around you might not be constantly watching you to see your wins, especially those who make the decisions on your promotions and pay raises. They might also not understand the important or significance of what you've been working on. This is where a brag document comes into play.

This blog post is not focused on promotions or pay raises but more on having your work recognised.

Serves As a Memory Bank

When performance season arrives, many of us spend hours thinking about what we did the past 3 or 6 months. It’s not that we haven’t accomplished anything; rather, we can't remember what we did.

A brag document is useful for reminding you of all the work that you did in the past. By taking note of all wins, big or small, we ensure that we never forget and can have it handy when performance review season arrives.

This is also beneficial for your manager because if you don't remember what you did in the past few months, your manager will certainly not remember and cannot advocate to you to the people who make the big decisions.

Here a few summarised points from my own brag document:

• Presented in the Logistics quarterly newbie session.

• Began mentoring XYZ.

• Assisted in finding a rare race condition that was causing operational issues.

Shows Patterns In Your Career

The brag document goes beyond just bragging about your accomplishments. It can be used as a tool to reflect on your past and give you a view of what your patterns are.

As time went by, I realised from my own brag document that I was doing less technical work other than my day-to-day sprint work. For me, this was an important realisation as I find it fun and fulfilling working on projects that provide value to people.

Your brag document can help answer these questions:

• What am I doing more or less of? What do I wish to be doing more or less of?

• Is there a bigger picture behind the things I have been doing?

• What made me happy and proud to have done?

Prompts Thoughts About Goals And Impact

Setting goals and ensuring that your work has impact gives you ammunition to add to your brag document. However, this same document can inform future goals. Here's how:

1. Reflection on Past Achievements: As mentioned earlier, maintaining a brag document forces you to reflect on your achievements. This reflection process will help you identify projects or work that had the most impact, which can inform your future goals.

2. Recognising Successful Patterns: As you recognise patterns through your brag document, you may begin to see the type of work you find fulfilling or impactful and setting goals around these will help guide your career by ensuring that your future objectives align with your areas of strength and interest.

3. Identify Skill Gaps: By documenting your achievements and the impact of your work, you may also identify areas where you could improve or new skills that you could acquire. This could help in setting learning goals.

4. Motivation: Seeing all your achievements can provide a significant motivational boost. You will be reminded of your capabilities and skills, which will inspire you to set higher goals and not shy away from challenges.

Helps With Management Transitions

Your brag document can come in handy during a management transition. If you get a new manager half-way towards your performance review, they may be coming in cold and not know about all the awesome work you have been doing. With your brag document, you can bring them up to speed on what you have been up to and also give them a glimpse into your capabilities and potential.

This can also be useful for aligning on goals and expectations with the new manager's vision and objectives for the team.

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I hope this blog post has motivated you to start a brag document and start documenting all the awesome work you do everyday. If you do, please let me know in the comments so I can add "motivated Johnny to start a brag document" to my own brag document 😉.

For more reading and a good template of a brag document my manager, Kenny, introduced me to, check out https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/.

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