A common topic arising during one-on-ones with my direct reports is maintaining a living document that details all their accomplishments. Within the industry, this is often referred to as a brag document.
What Value Does a Brag Document Provide?
There are numerous advantages to documenting your daily achievements:
Primarily, it’s easy to overlook many of the accomplishments in our daily work life, and your manager might miss them too.
These accomplishments can vary widely, from delivering a significant roadmap item to improving the onboarding documentation for your team or project.
Additionally, recording these achievements can be invaluable during quarterly conversations, goal-setting discussions, and annual performance reviews. It serves as a powerful resource for your professional development in discussions with your manager.
A brag document is an excellent resume builder.
When updating your resume, you must not overlook the accomplishments you've achieved throughout your career. Using your brag document as a reference ensures you include all relevant details.
A comprehensive brag document can form the basis of an engaging narrative about your professional journey. It can also help you and your manager identify areas for improvement, whether technical or soft skills abilities. These areas can then be pursued as future objectives or goals for your professional growth.
Don’t Forget the Small Wins
I cannot emphasize this enough: include the small wins! Some examples might include:
- Increasing code coverage for a specific system
- Making minor improvements to the CI/CD pipeline, enhancing the developer experience for everyone
- Leading my team through process improvements by providing valuable feedback during retrospective ceremonies
These small achievements can accumulate, significantly increasing your overall organizational impact.
Tie It to Metrics When Applicable
If you’re an individual contributor, provide data to support your accomplishments when possible. For example:
Spent two sprints adding automated Playwright tests to several edge cases of a feature, which increased automation coverage to 80% and reduced bugs by 50%.
If you’re a manager or leader, for instance:
Reduced development team lead time by 25% from Q1 to Q2 by properly addressing requirements and acceptance criteria for feature X.
How Do I Get Started?
There are no strict rules for documenting your achievements. The most important thing is simply to start! Use resources like links, images, charts, and so on to showcase your hard work. Don’t hesitate to share what you’ve created—I’m excited to see it!
Here’s to celebrating your successes with pride and joy!
Happy bragging!
Dan