Highlight Tracker

Brag documents. It’s something that’s being talked about more and more lately — which is awesome.

But what is a brag document? What’s the purpose? Why should you care and how would you go about making one?

Before we jump in, I wanted to point out that I’ll be referring to “brag documents” as “highlight trackers”. This is because I don’t want anyone to carry negative connotation when thinking about their accomplishments.

Why You Should Use a Highlight Tracker

I’m a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, and I’ve been managing engineering teams for over a decade now. I tell you that not to boast, but because it’s the reality, and I want you to understand this from an engineering manager’s perspective:

I love helping lead teams. I enjoy getting to know my team members, their strengths, their areas to improve, their interests, and their dislikes. I want to help them grow in their career and break through plateaus in any area I can help with.

It’s important I know what they’re focused on to understand where they’re excelling, where they’re getting stuck, and where I can guide. But the reality is: I can’t see everything. And as much as I wish I could, I can’t know the status of everything.

That means I’m going to be missing things that are otherwise important and those could include things that are related to career progression. This is where your highlight tracker or brag document comes in.

What is a Brag Document?

A brag document — wait, remember, we said we’d call it a highlight tracker — is a document where you can record important milestones. The idea here is that you can keep this and build it up over a period of time so that when you sit down with your manager for a conversation, you have some content to go over together.

Remember when I said as a manager that I can’t possibly know all the details for my team? This will be the same for your manager — as much as we try and as much as we want to be fully connected to your work streams and progress. The brag document highlight tracker helps to fill some of those gaps.

In your highlight tracker, you can capture progression in ANY milestone that you’re proud of. If you’re using it to help with demonstrating progression to your manager, I’d recommend focusing on the key things you’ve aligned on.

You must have level-set expectations with your manager — something I talk about extensively with my co-host on the “Dude, Where’s My Code?” Podcast extensively. If you know what the focus areas are supposed to be for progression, you can try to ensure you’re highlighting things that align with that.

How to Create a Brag Document or Highlight Tracker

The easy way: Use the templates I’ve provided and tune them to your liking. Remember, any tool we use is supposed to help us, not hinder us. If my template doesn’t fit your style perfectly… adapt it! Use it as inspiration!

The longer way is to build a template from scratch. Some things that I think are important:

• Try to keep track of time. I don’t mean down to the minute or the hour, but I mean to think about events and when they happened/started/completed so you can have a chronology in mind. It helps tell a story.
• Try to include names of contacts/teammates/stakeholders. This is very helpful, especially from my perspective as a manager, because now there’s a circle of influence being described.
• Relate back to your aligned expectations with your manager. Why is this note important in the brag document? Does it tie back to some key deliverables?
• Discuss learnings. Keep in mind not everything needs to be perfect sunshine and rainbows… if you have a great learning (regardless of success or fail…) CALL IT OUT!
• Try to include variety. Personal growth and learning. Key deliverables. Mentoring. Teamwork and collaboration. It’s all valuable!