Tomasz, your 30-Day Visibility Sprint
A four-week plan to make the engineer behind the 9-minute deploy impossible to overlook in the next promotion round.
“Our deploys took 45 minutes and failed maybe one in five. I spent a quarter rebuilding the pipeline - parallelised the test suite, added canary releases. We're at 9 minutes now and the team ships daily instead of dreading Friday.”
- Tomasz, on the work he's proudest of
What you're actually sitting on
That story is a promotion case, not a status update. It has everything a durable reputation is built from: a painful before, a measured after, and a change your whole team feels every day. Right now that reputation stops at your team's Slack channel. The sprint below doesn't ask you to become a content creator - it takes work you've already done and puts it where the people who decide Staff promotions can see it.
Your Visibility Ladder, measured
You have the raw material; the one-liner doesn't exist yet
A 45-to-9-minute story with real numbers - few people ever get one this clean
Lurker mode: reading everything, publishing nothing
You know who the platform-engineering voices are; they don't know you
Your positioning sentence, drafted
“I build the pipelines and delivery habits that let engineering teams ship daily - most recently taking deploys from 45 failing minutes to 9 boring ones.” That's it. No buzzwords, no aspiration - one sentence built entirely from what you've already shipped. It becomes your LinkedIn headline in Week 1, and every post below is evidence for it.
Three posts hiding inside your deploy story
The post-mortem: 45 minutes to 9
A “how we solved it” walkthrough: the failing-one-in-five baseline, the decision to spend a quarter on it, the parallelised test suite, the canary rollout. End on what daily shipping changed for the team. Insight post - lead with the numbers.
What I wish I knew before touching CI
A letter to the junior engineer about to inherit a slow pipeline: the two things you'd do first, the one thing you wasted weeks on. Story post - generous, specific, zero flexing required.
A small strong opinion on canary releases
One firm craft take: canary releases bought your team more confidence than any amount of extra test coverage. Short, defensible, and exactly the kind of post that starts conversations with senior engineers.
The 30-day sprint
Week 1
Positioning + profile
- Replace your headline with the drafted positioning sentence above
- Rewrite your about section around outcomes: 9-minute deploys, daily shipping, a team that stopped dreading Fridays
- No posting yet - this week is about making the profile worth landing on
Week 2
First proof posts
- Publish the 45-to-9 post-mortem early in the week
- Follow with “What I wish I knew before touching CI” a few days later
- Two posts this week, then hold that cadence - two a week beats daily burnout
Week 3
Warm outreach layer
- Three meaningful comments a day on the staff engineers and platform voices you already read
- Keep the two-post rhythm: one insight post, one story post
- DMs only after genuine interaction - a comment thread first, always
Week 4
Flagship + review
- Write the deeper flagship piece: the full pipeline rebuild, decisions and trade-offs included
- Publish the canary-release opinion as your second post
- Review what resonated - the topics that landed become next month's material
You never have to invent anything
Every idea above comes from work you've already shipped. The 45-to-9 number is the whole pitch - specific, verifiable, yours. If a post ever needs exaggerating to feel worth publishing, it's the wrong post; you have enough that's true.
Visibility gets you noticed. Positioning gets you promoted.
This sprint puts your work in front of the right people. Turning that attention into a Staff-level case - the timing, the narrative, the conversation with your manager - goes faster with a coach who has run it before.
You've already done the hard part: the pipeline works and the team ships daily. Ascent Careers' 1:1 coaching takes it from there - positioning, promotion strategy, and the conversations that turn quiet impact into the next title. Bring this plan to a session and we'll build the case together.