We all very well know about the flaky test everyone learned to live with, the performance regression that sneaks up, so we file a bug that always stays in the backlog. The onboarding doc that would have saved the intern two weeks if someone had kept updating it. This is the work that sits in the gap between everyone's roadmap, and it's almost invisible, which is why it always stays undone - but high impact which is exactly why picking it up gets noticed.

But doing the work is only half of it, and it's the half most of us are comfortable with. The other half is the part engineers hate. You have to make it visible., and you have to make yourself visible - Not loud, not self-congratulatory, just visible enough that the people making decisions about your growth actually know it happened. A good piece of work that nobody knows you did moves your career exactly as much as work you never did.

In this talk I'll walk through what has actually moved the needle for me, across Microsoft and now Slack, and I'll say it from an engineer's seat, not a manager's. How to pick the off-roadmap work that builds trust instead of just eating your evenings. How to have the direct conversation about promotion and growth without it feeling gross. How to ask for real feedback, including from managers you don't report to, and then actually do something with it. And how the least glamorous thing on this list, a cold message to a team whose work you admire, tends to compound in ways nothing on your ticket board ever will.

Bonus: A personal agentic framework that silently keeps track of my wins - and does the documentation for my promo packet, a system that helps me win everyday at work

Target audience: Individual-contributor engineers, mid-level through senior, doing strong work who want it to translate into growth and influence. No prerequisites, valuable to anyone on an IC track.

Preferred session duration: 30 minutes