Over the past couple of years at GitHub, I’ve learned that nothing in corporate is handed to you; you should always be your own biggest advocate. Promotions, good projects, and visibility are only unlocked when you have eyes on you. As they say, only the squeaky wheel gets grease.

Getting visibility is never easy, but it can be even more difficult at a remote-first company where it’s harder to physically network. However, by being tactical and intentional, you can still maximize your impact and visibility. Here are the five things I focus on to make that happen at GitHub.

1. Always Deliver

This is the golden rule; the rest of this advice is not applicable without this one. Everyone wants to work with the person who always delivers great work. If you have a reputation as someone who makes excuses, delivers subpar results, or isn’t fun to work with, no amount of self-advocacy can compensate for this. Make sure that everything you work on is completed to the highest standards.

2. Build Connections Outside Your Inner Circle

People within your team always know what you’re working on. However, to build clout, you need to go out of your way to interface with people outside your immediate circle. If you’re in Engineering, meet some people in Revenue or Product. If you’re in Security, meet people across Product and Engineering. Try to get virtual or in-person face time with your executive leadership team as well. Conferences are a great way to meet people completely outside your usual circle; this can help to build your brand outside your company.

Once you’ve built these connections, it’s also important to maintain them. Schedule routine 1:1s, and occasionally reach out via Slack or other channels to keep your relationship fresh.

If you’re working in a massive company, build your circle out slowly. At GitHub, I’ve focused on doing this by taking advantage of our internal Donut chat feature, trying to go to as many conferences as possible, and making time to go to happy hours to meet people outside my direct team.

3. Share Your Wins

Folks outside of your immediate team might never know what you’re working on. Make sure that your wins are clearly visible; work with your manager to ensure that your wins go up the leadership chain. If you have an internal discussion board, share any wins or learnings you had from your projects.

At GitHub, I try to post after every major project or conference with notes for the rest of the company to learn from. When posting about major projects, ensure that you write in a way that applies to everyone. Nobody cares about technical details; they want to hear insights that they can apply to their own work.

Here’s a template that I use for conferences:

# Title of Conference

I had a great time meeting with @foo at {name of conference}, where we {what we did}! Over the course of the conference, we met with {who we met with}, and did {fun things that we did}. Here were our key takeaways!

### Takeaways

* Key takeaways that should be insightful

And here’s one that I use for internal wins:

# Title of Project

Over the past few months, my team has been working on {whatever project}. We've learned a lot in building it!

### Summary of Project

{summary of project, including key dates/ events}

### Key Takeaways

* Insightful takeaways from the project that are broadly applicable, not "don't use a certain technology for this hyper-specific use case"


We had a lot of fun building this thing, and would love your feedback: {link to feedback issue}

4. Promote Thought Leadership

Sometimes you haven’t had a big win in a while. In this case, position yourself as a thought leader in whatever domain your company really needs. Posts on LinkedIn, within your internal message board, your blog, wherever people are reading, you should be writing.

Blog posts about what you’re currently interested in, working on, or have strong opinions about are a great way to build clout. Make sure your writing reflects well-thought-out opinions. Opinion pieces are always more engaging than simple exposition and are a better way to demonstrate your expertise in a given area.

Thought leadership is a very underutilized skill; it can help you get eyes from key leadership, hiring managers at other companies, or even conference organizers. I try to focus on writing for LinkedIn, my blog, and our internal GitHub Slack.

5. Share The Love

Always take the opportunity to highlight folks that you’ve worked with. It’s very easy for self-promotion to come off as boastful. The best way to counteract this is to bring others along for the ride. A rising tide raises all ships, so be generous with your compliments and visibility.

If you’ve enjoyed working with someone, send their manager a message about how great they’ve been. When sharing wins or conference summaries, always include an acknowledgments section.

Many other smaller things that are important for self-advocacy, such as selecting good projects to work on, identifying key personnel to network with, and career positioning. However, those are beyond the scope of this blog post, and are anyway a much smaller part of the self-advocacy game. Following these five principles has helped me get to where I’m at in my career, and should help anyone who’s interested in maximizing their own career progress.