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| Ritvika Nagula, a software engineer at Microsoft, said her resume helped her land four job offers after graduate school. Ritvika Nagula |
When Ritvika Nagula joined Microsoft in April 2019 as a fresh college graduate, she assumed that good work naturally led to career advancement. She focused on delivering high-quality results, believing that recognition — and promotions — would inevitably follow.
But after a year, she realized that simply doing great work wasn’t enough. Managers and leadership might see you as reliable, but not necessarily ambitious. Career progression, she learned, requires more than quiet excellence — it demands clear communication, self-awareness, and proactive goal-setting.
Since adopting a more strategic approach, Nagula has been promoted four times in just five years at Microsoft Azure. Here’s the playbook she followed — and how you can apply it to accelerate your own career.
1. Don’t Wait for Review Season — Ask for Feedback Regularly
At Microsoft, performance reviews happen every six months. That’s a long time to wait to find out whether you’re meeting expectations — and by then, it may be too late to make meaningful improvements before the next review cycle.
To stay on track, Nagula schedules biweekly one-on-one meetings with her manager. Once a month, she uses that time to discuss her career trajectory:
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“What do you think is going well?”
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“What could I improve on?”
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“Am I missing anything that would help me perform at a higher level?”
This ongoing dialogue ensures she can course-correct in real time rather than discovering gaps months later.
2. Set Clear Career Milestones
Nagula gives herself ambitious but realistic timelines — such as aiming to reach the next role level within 18 to 24 months. These milestones give her direction and make her professional growth measurable.
But setting goals is only step one. The next step is understanding exactly what it takes to reach them.
3. Learn What’s Expected — and Close the Gap
Whether you’re aiming for a senior engineering role or a leadership position, you need to know the difference between your current role’s expectations and the next one.
At Microsoft, Nagula uses the company’s internal role library, a detailed resource outlining skills, tasks, and responsibilities for every level.
She reviews these benchmarks and then asks her manager:
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“Where am I meeting expectations?”
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“Where am I falling short?”
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“What skills or experiences do I still need to build?”
Talking to peers, mentors, and leadership helps fill in blind spots and gives her a roadmap for skill-building.
4. Ask for High-Impact Opportunities
When aiming for her promotion to senior engineer, Nagula knew she’d need to lead a full end-to-end project — from design to implementation to monitoring — while ensuring minimal bugs and high reliability.
Instead of waiting for such a project to land in her lap, she told her manager directly:
“If we’re targeting my next promotion, I believe I need to take on an end-to-end project. How can we find opportunities like that?”
By stating her intentions clearly, she stayed on her manager’s radar. Whenever a high-profile project came up, she was one of the first considered.
5. Focus on Impact, Not Just Activity
Nagula emphasizes that promotion isn’t just about doing your assigned work well — it’s about delivering work that aligns with your team’s and company’s goals and has a measurable, positive impact.
Taking ownership, finding new opportunities, and choosing projects that matter to the business makes your contributions harder to overlook when promotion discussions happen.
Key Takeaways for Your Own Career Growth
If you want to move up quickly, here’s the condensed version of Nagula’s career growth strategy:
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Have regular feedback loops — Don’t wait for formal reviews to know where you stand.
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Set promotion timelines — Give yourself specific, measurable goals.
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Know the next level’s expectations — Use internal role descriptions or ask your manager.
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Ask for impactful projects — Volunteer for work that will stretch your skills and deliver visible results.
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Align with company priorities — Make sure your contributions are tied to your team’s success.
Nagula’s journey shows that career growth in competitive environments like Microsoft is rarely passive. You can’t assume your work speaks for itself — you have to speak up for your work, your goals, and your readiness to take on more.
