by Rachel Dowling, Founder & CEO of Equal Time

I went from being an individual contributor Product Manager to VP in just two years. People often assume it was luck, timing, or connections. It wasn’t.

It was strategy.

And not the kind you find in career books that say, “Work hard, be patient, and your time will come.” That advice is comforting, but it’s incomplete. In most organizations, hard work isn’t enough. Visibility, alignment, and communication drive promotions far more than effort alone.

This is the unconventional truth I learned through experience, and the same framework I now teach to rising leaders and women navigating corporate ceilings.

Here’s exactly how I accelerated my career, and how you can too.

Step 1: Understand the Rules of the Game

Every company has an invisible rulebook for advancement. If you don’t understand it, you’ll be playing the wrong game and wondering why others move up faster.

When I was a mid-level Product Manager, I assumed performance reviews were purely merit-based. I thought that if I hit my KPIs and shipped great features, I’d automatically be seen as promotion-ready.

Then I learned how decisions were actually made.

My VP once told me, “We promote people who make life easier for others, and who bring clarity and influence, not just deliverables.”

That was my wake-up call.

So, I started asking smarter questions:

• Who’s actually evaluating me? My manager, skip-level, or peers through 360 feedback?
• How do they gather data? Is it through metrics, reputation, or “gut feel”?
• What does leadership look for as signals of readiness?

Once I understood the answers, I adjusted my focus. Instead of doing more, I did differently.

Unconventional wisdom: Promotions aren’t earned by working harder; they’re earned by understanding how success is measured and aligning yourself to it.

Step 2: Learn your Career Path Expectations

There are very different expectations for each step in the career path.

For example:

• IC → Senior → Lead → Manager → Director → VP

Each jump represents a different way of thinking.

At TrustYou, where I led enterprise product strategy for 70+ engineers, I realized there were very different expectations placed on me than when I was an IC Product Manager

• As a Junior PM, I was judged on output (getting features delivered).
• As a Senior PM, it was about ownership and execution.
• As a Director, it became about influence and alignment.
• And as a VP, it was about long-term vision, culture, and outcomes.

If you’re trying to move up, start showing behaviors from the next bucket now. Lead a cross-functional project, mentor a teammate, or define strategy instead of waiting for permission.

That’s how leaders start to see you as one of them.

Unconventional wisdom: Don’t wait for your promotion. Start to exhibit the behaviors at the expectation level one step ahead of where you are.

Step 3: Make Your Boss’s Life Easier

This is one of the fastest shortcuts to getting promoted.

Your manager’s success is tied to your team’s performance. So, the best way to stand out is to anticipate what they need before they ask.

At Study.com, I noticed my Director spent hours every week writing product updates for the leadership team. I offered to take it on, first as an experiment. After a month, it became my routine, and he could focus on strategy instead of reporting.

A few months later, he left the company, and in the gap, I was able to help cover his scope. This raised my visibility and seniority in the eyes of my skip level.

Unconventional wisdom: Promotions often go to the person who’s already doing part of the next job. Step up and help your boss out. It is a clear win-win.

Step 4: Align Your Work with Business Goals

This is where many talented people lose momentum.

You can be incredible at your job, but if your work doesn’t connect to the company’s business metrics (revenue, retention, cost reduction, or strategic priorities), executives won’t see your impact.

When I joined TrustYou, I was focused on improving user experience for our hospitality clients. It was great for users, but leadership was talking about ARR growth and operational efficiency.

So I reframed my team’s work in business language:

“This new review analysis dashboard isn’t just a UX improvement. It reduces customer churn by helping hotels identify risk faster.”

That shift made my projects top-of-mind at every executive review because they saw how it was related to increasing ARR.

Unconventional wisdom: Speak the language of the business. Tie your work directly to outcomes leadership cares about.

If you can’t draw a straight line between your output and the company’s goals, your role might be misaligned. Fix that before it affects your growth.

Step 5: Communicate Clearly and Make Your Work Visible

Here’s the painful truth: if no one knows what you’re doing, it doesn’t exist.

Visibility isn’t self-promotion; it’s leadership communication.

Start by sending clear, concise updates to cross-functional partners. Share progress tied to business impact. Hold alignment meetings with peers from other departments.

When I worked on Study.com’s mobile app launch, we had dozens of moving parts: content, engineering, QA, marketing. I set up weekly “syncs” with all leads to ensure no one was blindsided. The result? We launched early, and I was seen as the glue that held the initiative together.

That’s what visibility looks like.

It’s not about shouting louder, it’s about helping others see how your work connects to the bigger picture.

Unconventional wisdom: Clarity and visibility are more promotable than effort and silence.

(Pro tip: I now use Equal Time to do this automatically. It records meetings, takes perfect notes, and summarizes key points so that nothing gets lost in translation. It even tracks speaking time, helping you communicate confidently without dominating the room.)

Step 6: Build Coalitions Across Functions

One of the most underrated leadership skills is cross-functional influence.

At every company I’ve worked in, from startups to global enterprises, the people who rose fastest weren’t just good at their job; they were good at helping others succeed too.

When I was VP of Product, the PMs who made the biggest impact were the ones who proactively built relationships outside their immediate team. They had standing syncs with Marketing, Sales, or Customer Success, not because their boss had asked them to, but because they needed cross functional alignment to be effective and they made it happen.

Those relationships pay off when you need buy-in for an idea, or when leadership asks, “Who collaborates well across the org?”

Unconventional wisdom: Promotions usually happen when you show you can bring people together and get things done. Build allies and bridges every day.

Step 7: Know When to Move, and When to Stay

Not every promotion will happen at your current company.
Sometimes, the structure of your company blocks your next step, and no amount of performance will change that.

I’ve had both experiences. At one company, I outgrew my role. The next level up was occupied by someone staying put for years. So, I moved strategically to a role with more scope.

Other times, I stayed and waited it out. When my manager left, I was next in line because I had already been operating at that level.

Unconventional wisdom: Move when opportunity opens in another org, or make yourself the obvious next choice when it does.

Step 8: Master Communication and Presence

You can be brilliant, but if you ramble on for a long time, hedge your ideas with “modesty”, or shrink into the corner and don’t speak up, you’ll struggle to be seen as a leader.

My advice is to use a tool to track your airtime (talk time) to ensure you are participating at a healthy level (not too much and not too little).
Now with AI, you can use a tool to track your “filler language” (ums, ahs) and reduce how much you use them. AI tools (like Equal Time) allow you to track how much you ue hedging language as well (“maybe”, “just”, “this is probably a bad idea but ….”) and that awareness is the first step to reducing them.

When I was coaching product managers at TrustYou, I’d often have them record themselves in meetings to review how they sounded. The results were eye-opening. Many realized they spoke less confidently than they thought, or deferred too often.

That’s why we built Equal Time. It gives you data-driven insight into their communication habits. It shows your speaking time, interruptions, and clarity, then coaches you to improve.

Unconventional wisdom: Master your communication to exude leadership in every meeting that you are in.

The Big Picture: Promotions Aren’t (All) Luck

Yes, getting promoted is sometimes about a little bit of luck, but more often it’s about alignment, communication, and visibility.

You can start positioning yourself for a promotion this week!

• Learn how you’re measured.
• Align your work to business goals.
• Make your boss’s job easier.
• Build allies across the org.
• Communicate like a leader.

If you do those things consistently for 3–6 months, you will feel the shift and so will everyone around you.

The truth is, you don’t have to wait for someone to “discover” you. You just have to make it impossible for them not to.

Want help building visibility and communication habits that get you noticed?

Try Equal Time: the AI meeting assistant that helps you sound confident, lead inclusive meetings, and keep your work visible automatically.

Because the path to promotion doesn’t start in your performance review.
It starts in your meetings.