It rarely arrives as a promotion. It arrives as a question. Can you own the migration. Can you take the new joiner for their first month. Can you be the person the vendor calls. Can you look after the on call rota, since you clearly have opinions about it.
That is scope, and it almost always turns up a level or two ahead of the title and the money. Which leaves you with a choice people tend to get wrong in one of two directions. Some refuse everything until it is paid for, and then wonder why the case for them looks thin. Others absorb every piece of it silently for three years and end up doing a senior job on a junior record.
There is a better middle, and it starts with telling scope apart from overflow.
Scope carries a decision. If you are running the migration, you are the one who settles the order, the cutover date and what gets dropped. Overflow is the same volume of work with all the decisions kept somewhere else. One of those grows you and one of them just fills your week, and on the day they land they look identical from the outside.
So ask out loud, kindly and without suspicion. Happy to take this on. To do it properly I need to be the one who decides the sequencing, and I will bring you anything that moves the date. If the answer is yes, you have real scope. If the answer is a long pause, you have learned something useful at no cost.
Then make it exist in writing. Not a campaign. One line in the place your team already looks. I am picking up the vendor relationship from this week. Unwritten responsibility has a habit of turning invisible at exactly the moment somebody is summarising your year, and it is very hard to reconstruct afterwards.
And put something down. Taking new responsibility while carrying all of the old work is not a promotion, it is a tax, and the first person who has to notice the arithmetic is you.
Titles follow a record, and a record is only ever the part somebody else can point at.
– Asael Shinder
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