Why my manager said I wasn't getting promoted
The promotion conversation I'll never forget
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My first big strategy presentation did not go the way I hoped.
I sat down in a small conference room with the entire executive team sitting close to me. I skipped breakfast because I was too nervous. About a 3 minutes in, it was clear things were going badly.
I had my first-ever panic attack in that room.
I’d walked in thinking I had an effective strategy. In retrospect, I just had a list of cool ideas I’d always wanted to do, in the order I wanted to do them. There was no connective tissue. Unclear KPIs. And no clear picture of what “good” looked like.
Nobody said the words that day. But the message was loud and clear: I wasn’t ready for the next level.
I thought about that meeting a lot while interviewing Jenny Wanger on the podcast.
Because she had her own version of that moment.
She thought she was about to get the promotion.
Until her manager pulled her aside one afternoon and asked if she could stay after work. She’d been pushing for the director role for months. The work was there. The numbers were there. The strategy she’d written for the consumer side of the business was being used company-wide.
She walked into the conference room. He sat her down.
“You’re not getting the promotion.”
“Not yet?”
“No. You’re not getting it.”
She kicked him out of the room. Said she needed a minute. She didn’t want to get emotional in front of him.
Jenny was a senior PM at Spot Hero, the parking app when this happened. About 300 people worked there at the time. She was the most senior PM on the consumer side, gunning for director of consumer product. She had an MBA. A longer tenure than most. And her manager had previously told her exactly what she needed to do to get promoted.
One of those things: own the consumer strategy for the next fiscal year.
It was October. Annual planning was already underway. So she got moving fast.
She and her closest thought partner, the director of design, booked a meeting room at their local library, brought a giant stack of Post-it notes, and built the strategy over 2 days. They mapped the funnel. They found the leaks. They figured out where growth was going to come from.
But they missed something important…
There were 2 other PMs on the consumer team.
And when Jenny came back from her library offsite with the strategy already written, one said something Jenny couldn’t shake:
“I can’t believe you went and did this without me.”
Jenny told me she didn’t fully understand what she’d done wrong until months later. The thinking in the strategy was clear. What she missed was the bigger job.
In her words:
“I interpreted this as an audition of my strategic capabilities. Instead of an audition of my leadership capabilities.”
She thought she had to prove she could write a good strategy. She didn’t realize she had to prove she could rally the team behind one.
That mistake didn’t cost her a project. It cost her the promotion.
When her manager finally sat her down a few months later, he told her she wasn’t getting director because of her leadership style. She wasn’t viewed as inclusive. People felt she didn’t listen. She interrupted in meetings. Nothing was a single fireable offense. It was the accumulation.
(What she did next is the part I love.)
She didn’t leave. She was 6 months pregnant, which made job hunting tricky. So she had to figure out how to fix this in the seat she was already in.
She built what she called an advisory council. A few of her biggest supporters and, more importantly, a few of the people she suspected were her toughest critics. She sat them down and said: “Here’s the feedback I’ve been getting. If you see me doing any of this, kick me under the table. Don’t wait. I need to know in the moment.”
She made director eventually. And today she coaches product teams through transformations like the one she had to do on herself.
This story is unique to Jenny. But I see a version of her library-offsite mistake in almost every coaching engagement I run.
A senior growth leader has the right read on the business. They build a smart plan. They bring it to the exec team or their peers, and it stalls. Or worse, it gets approved on paper and nobody actually moves.
When that happens, the natural reaction is: “They don’t get it. They’re not as close to the work as I am.”
Sometimes that’s true.
More often, the work to get the idea adopted hasn’t happened yet. The listening tour, the small-group workshops, the 1:1 pre-wiring, the moments where the people who’ll be affected feel like they helped shape it. Calling that “soft skills” undersells it. At this level, that work is the job.
Jenny said one thing in our conversation that I keep coming back to:
“I needed to figure out how to get better at leadership without authority before getting given the authority.”
That’s the whole game.
One more thing.
The exact tension Jenny ran into, having the right idea and struggling to get it adopted, is what I’m hearing from senior growth leaders every single week. So I’m running a free 45-minute workshop on Thursday, June 4 called Right Ideas, No Buy-in: A growth leader’s guide to managing up.
We’ll cover the 5 mistakes I see senior growth leaders make every week (the biggest one comes up in almost every coaching call), and the 5 moves that actually get your ideas adopted, with real examples from clients running these plays right now.
If “good idea, but...” is the most common piece of executive feedback you’re getting, this one’s for you.