The brag doc

Keeping track of your contributions over time

Most engineers overestimate how well their work is remembered by their managers, their teammates, and even themselves. They think the output speaks for itself.

The merged PR, the closed ticket, the green deployment. But weeks later, nobody remembers what went into that win. Metric retention has killed the graphs. There’s not much to show for it by the time you’re writing your self-assessment or prepping for a performance review. Half the context is gone.

This is why you need a brag doc. Let’s break it down.

More documentation?

You might think your work is already “documented enough”. You’ve got tickets in JIRA, commits in GitHub, messages in Slack. But none of those tools were built to highlight your impact. Nor to find it when the time is right.

JIRA tickets show what got done, not how or why it mattered. Most tickets are written vaguely, with just enough detail to unblock execution. “Fix auth redirect edge case” doesn’t explain that you stayed up late debugging a subtle race condition that had been haunting the team for weeks. The nuance of your contribution gets flattened. Flatten it too many times, and you become less promotable.

GitHub pull requests are great for code history, but they miss the details. The PR won’t capture that you paired with a junior engineer to write the test suite. Or that you handled a last-minute changes when product shifted direction. The human work behind the technical work gets lost.

Slack threads are embodiment of chaos. You might drop key ideas, advocate for healthy architectural changes, resolve outages, or clarify project direction in real time. But try finding that message a month later. It’s a memory hole. Unless you’re actively bookmarking every moment, it’s gone.

Why this doc works?

A brag doc is your personal log of contributions. Not just what you did, but what it meant and who made which decision. It’s a living document that helps you build a narrative.

It’s not meant to be formal. Use bullet points. Use fragments. Use links. Just write things down while they’re still fresh. It’s about documenting it in a single place and recording the depth of everything connecting you and the business impact you’re making.

Examples of what to include:

• Shipped a new onboarding flow that cut average setup time by 40%, coordinated across eng, product, and growth.

• Led an incident response that brought an API outage down from 3 hours to 30 minutes. Documented follow-ups and created new runbooks.

• Refactored legacy auth service, reducing flakiness and enabling new feature development. Reduced support tickets by ~20%.

• Mentored a new hire through their first two PRs, helped them get productive within their first week.

• Pushed back on an unrealistic deadline, got team buy-in for phased rollout instead, avoided late-stage rewrite.

And the best part is that you’ve saved the receipts for everything. You’ve got proof, here and now. These kinds of examples rarely show up in raw tickets or OKRs. But they’re exactly what make you valuable. And when it’s time to make a case for promotion, an increase, or a new opportunity, they’re what give your claims the weight they deserve.

Start light, today

It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just pick a format that’s easy for you. I can be a Notion page, a Google Doc, whatever floats your boat. Keep it open while you work.

Update it:

• when something is assigned and kicking off

• after a project ships

• after a major technical decision

• after a win in a meeting

• after helping a teammate

• after solving something ugly nobody else wanted to touch

Aim for once a week or twice a month. That’s enough to keep it current without becoming a burden.

Closing thoughts

If your org has a formal promo process, you’ll need this. If you decide to shoot for a new job, you’ll need this. If your manager changes, or your team splits, or your company goes through layoffs, you’ll really need this.

It’s not about self-promotion. Well, maybe a part of it is. But it’s also about self-preservation. Engineering careers are built on consistent, deep impact. But unless you capture that depth, all people see are snapshots.

Become fully responsible for your own career. Start today, thank yourself later.