How a 'Hype Doc' can get you hired and promoted?

For many people, an interview/performance review can stressful:

1. You can’t remember the things you’ve accomplished.
2. You have imposter syndrome and feel like you’ve underachieved.
3. It can determine whether you get a raise/promotion.

What’s “Career Hype Doc” and where should you start?

What’s all this hype about “Hype Documents?”

Hype Doc’s are a great framework that anyone can use at any stage in their career, from beginners to folks in managerial positions to reflect on your achievements and build a case for your next raise or promotion.

Q: What exactly is a hype document?

It is a live document designed to give you a confidence boost by acknowledging your successes. It’s also a way of keeping receipts for all your hard work and contributions that may not get recognized by other folks on your team, which is essential when you’re vying for a promotion or working on your annual performance review.

The formula to create a hype document is pretty easy: Start a running list and regularly update it with things that you’re proud of. Anything can count as an accomplishment, like:

1. Completing a creative project from start to finish
2. Mentoring an intern or someone from the community at ADPList
3. Doing a small-but-important security project
4. helping get an important migration over the line
5. Helping Y put together this design doc

Ready to start hyping yourself up more often? Here are a few ways that you can start, maintain, and take advantage of your own hype document.

How to create a hype doc? 

You can choose to set up your hype doc in any documentation format you’re most comfortable with. Some options include Google Sheets, Notion, Figma, or Dropbox Paper. Before proceeding, remember that a hype doc should include a few things:

• What did you achieve this past quarter? What are you most proud of?
• How did you contribute to the business objectives?
• What was the initiative / project? When did you work on it? How long did it last?
• Who did you work with? What was the business objective / goal?
• What was the outcome? How did you measure success?

Now after you’ve chosen your format, simply create a table with columns including:

• Title — A brief title about the project or initiative
• Date and duration — when did you work on this project and how long did it last?
• Stakeholders involved — who did you work with?
• Business objective — mention any OKRs or KPIs set by the business
• Outcomes — what were the user outcomes and how did you measure success?
• Links — to any relevant files or documentation

By organizing your hype doc this way, it’s easily scannable and includes the key details of each project that you would want to talk about during your performance review. Focus on your personal contribution to each project and how your work impacted the business and its users. Use these free templates to begin with:

Our Favourite Hype Doc Templates

1. Hype Doc Template by Soren Iverson

2. Hype Doc Template

3. Hype Doc Template by CheeChee Lin

What to do next once you create your Hype Doc?

1. Share it with your peer reviewers

If your company does peer feedback as part of the promotion/perf process – share your brag document with your peer reviewers. Sharing a hype doc with me your managers or peers can help them writing your review effectively by reminding them of all the amazing things you did, and the areas you need feedback on.

2. Explain the big picture

You can make a dedicated section for your focused areas and list all the work you’ve done:

• Have you been really focused on UX?
• On building your product skills & having really good relationships with your users?
• On building a strong culture of code review on the team?

This is especially good if you’re working on something fuzzy like “building a stronger culture of product review” where all the individual actions you do towards that might be relatively small and there isn’t a big shiny ship.

3. Use your brag document to notice patterns

You can also use hype doc to reflect on the work you’ve done and improvise. Some questions it’s helped me with:

• What work do you feel most proud of?
• Are there themes in these projects you should be thinking about? What’s the big picture of what you’re  working on?
• What do you wish you were doing more / less of?
• Which of your projects had the effect you wanted, and which didn’t? Why might that have been?
• What could have gone better with project X? What might you want to do differently next time?

You can write it all at once or update it every 2 weeks or you can also do a single marathon session every 6 months or every year where you look through everything and reflect on it all at once. Your best bet is to try out different approaches and see what works for you.

Get on a 1:1 mentorship session with our expert mentors today to understand more about career navigation, promotion and even salary negotiation.