There’s a lot of information about getting hired at places like AWS, but not a lot of the things you need to think about when going down a promotion path. As a people leader, one of the biggest sources of pride is watching people you work with get promoted. In many ways, the Amazon leadership principle “Hire and Develop the Best” is a good way to measure yourself and is one of my favorite leadership principles. In fact, when I came to AWS, one of the first things I wanted to understand was the Solutions Architect promotion process. Specifically, the Principal Solutions Architect role, which in most organizations is difficult to achieve, and most of that is primarily due to a failure to plan out the promotion path. My goal was to try and understand this process so I could help coach my team to achieve this goal. This is not exclusive to just Amazon or AWS, these sorts of “bones” of what it takes to get promoted can be translated to just about any place you might work.

Throughout this multi-part blog series, I’ll be covering key aspects and actions to consider when pursuing promotion, there is just too much nuance to cover in just one long post. To start, I’ll describe at a high level some of the steps you need to think about before starting your journey. The other topics will include:

Upcoming Topics:

• Leveraging Social Media for Advancing Organization Capabilities: How to extend your influence beyond your immediate team or customer group.
• Crafting the Perfect Artifact: Unraveling the elements of a standout work product in the AWS ecosystem.
• Being the Futurist: Spotting opportunities before they’re obvious — pretty crucial for Senior or Principal spots.
• Building Relationships with Technical Feedback Providers: Transitioning from ‘who you know’ to ‘how well your work is known and regarded’.
• Navigating the Technical Assessment and Peer Review Process: Essential tips for the final stages of your promotion journey.

Before we dive into details, there is a certain amount of baseline you need to have accomplished before even getting to a promotion discussion. In all reality, you will need to work on these baselines while also working towards your promotion goals simultaneously. Think of it like the Wayne Gretzky quote “Skate to where the puck is going”! The expectation of working at places like AWS is that you are required to join an AWS Technical Field Community (TFC). Think of these as communities of AWS subject matter experts organized into knowledge domains. Keep in mind, just being a member of a TFC is not enough, that is just “table stakes” for any level of Solutions Architect. Other things might be creating and influencing Product Feature Requests (PFR) as a key area of contribution. When moving to a higher-level Solutions Architect role your leadership will want to see you executing, thinking, and producing at that higher role. For example, if going from a Solutions Architect to a Senior Solutions Architect they’ll want examples of you executing at the Senior level role. If your company’s promotion process requires feedback providers (both business and technical), they will likely need to be at certain job levels. If you want to go from Senior to Principal, the requirement is all your feedback providers are at least at the Principal level. Other requirements include Service Team members and peers. So start making friends and bringing others into your projects. Most importantly, make sure these feedback providers get a front-row seat at everything you are OWNING and CREATING! They will want to see a body of work before they agree to be interviewed or provide feedback! Oh, and make sure you know exactly what they are going to say about your work. Don’t ASSuME, too often I see feedback providers giving mixed feedback.

Again, this can’t be a comprehensive list of things or this post would blast the 30 minutes we use as a north star. These are just a few things you need to start to map for your career development plan. Make sure you go over this with your manager as well as your mentor (you have a mentor right!?!)

With all that said, let’s have some real talk for a minute. We need to talk about something that is not discussed very often and that is the adage be careful what you wish for. Keep in mind it’s incredibly rare to get promoted and then demoted if you fail to meet up to the new bar. It’s an entirely complicated situation. So just because you are crushing it at your current level, doesn’t mean it’ll look the same at the next level. The further up the food chain you go, the smaller the fish bowl becomes and the ability to effectively differentiate yourself will be more difficult. This becomes even more difficult when you get to certain levels like Principal Solutions Architect. While that particular level has to do with having outstanding customer work there is an equal part around scaling your knowledge to the benefit of others. You will need to create repeatable mechanisms that others can utilize. It’ll be more about what sorts of reusable artifacts and what service roadmap improvements you are championing, driving, AND implementing. Another common situation is around what are you doing to “advance organizational capabilities” sometimes also referred to as having a “force multiplier” on the things you’ve created. Are you blogging, or presenting at events? Can you measure your impact from these things?

So if/when you decide it’s the right time for you professionally to start building your promotion document, just know that the bar moves up and the spotlight grows brighter. The flywheel keeps turning!

I think that’s more than enough for this first blog. We’ll explore more things to consider in future blog posts. I’d love to hear of some of the baseline items you think are important as well !

If you have any questions, comments, or even snide remarks, the comment section is open!

Tommyt aka vTexan

** I work for AWS but all of the opinions and ideas in my blogs are purely of my own.**