47 Performance Review Phrases That Actually Get You Promoted

Promotion committees do not promote people who "helped with" projects. They promote people who "led the migration that reduced latency by 40%."

That is not a stylistic preference. It is a filtering mechanism. When a committee reviews 30+ candidates in a single session, spending 3-5 minutes per case, the language in your self-assessment is the only thing standing between you and the next level. Vague phrasing gets skimmed. Specific, outcome-driven phrasing gets read, remembered, and rewarded.

According to SHRM research, companies that shifted from broad commentary like "good job this quarter" to nuanced, quantified phrasing saw a 40% drop in rating appeals and significantly higher confidence in promotion decisions. Competency-based phrase libraries increase perceived fairness by 19% and reduce turnover among high-potential employees by up to 18%.

The phrases in your self-review are not decoration. They are evidence. Here are 47 phrases organized by the five dimensions that promotion committees actually evaluate - with weak versions rewritten into strong versions so you can see exactly what to change.

Category 1: Impact and Business Results (10 Phrases)

Impact is the single most heavily weighted promotion criterion at Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. It answers one question: what changed because of you? Not what you did - what changed. If you learn nothing else from this post, learn this: every phrase in your review must connect your work to a measurable outcome.

Weak vs. Strong: Impact Rewrites

Weak #1:

"Improved the performance of our application."

Strong #1:

"Reduced P95 API latency from 820ms to 210ms (74% reduction), which improved checkout conversion rate by 3.2% - translating to an estimated $2.1M in incremental annual revenue."

Why this works: The weak version describes an activity. The strong version provides three things the committee needs: the specific metric, the magnitude of change, and the business outcome. Committees cannot evaluate "improved performance." They can evaluate a 74% latency reduction tied to $2.1M in revenue.

Weak #2:

"Delivered a project that had significant business impact."

Strong #2:

"Designed and shipped the automated pricing engine, which increased average deal size by 18% across 4,200 enterprise accounts in Q3, contributing $8.6M to the pipeline."

Why this works: "Significant business impact" is an opinion. $8.6M across 4,200 accounts is a fact. Committees trust facts.

Weak #3:

"Helped reduce costs for the team."

Strong #3:

"Architected the migration from on-prem batch processing to a serverless event pipeline, reducing monthly infrastructure costs from $47K to $12K (74% savings) while improving processing throughput by 3x."

Why this works: Dollar amounts and percentages are impossible to ignore. The committee sees the decision (serverless migration), the result ($35K/month saved), and the bonus outcome (3x throughput).

7 More Impact Phrases to Use

1. "Drove a 22% increase in user retention by redesigning the onboarding flow, impacting 340K monthly active users."
2. "Reduced customer-reported bugs by 61% (from 34/month to 13/month) by implementing end-to-end integration tests across the checkout pipeline."
3. "Grew the internal developer platform adoption from 2 teams to 14 teams in 6 months, reducing average feature deployment time from 3 days to 4 hours."
4. "Delivered the real-time fraud detection system handling 1.2M transactions/day with a 99.97% accuracy rate, preventing an estimated $3.4M in fraudulent charges per quarter."
5. "Increased search relevance by 31% (measured by NDCG@10), leading to a 7% improvement in ad click-through rate worth approximately $5.2M annually."
6. "Reduced the P0 incident rate from 4.3/month to 0.8/month by introducing automated canary deployments and progressive rollout policies."
7. "Led the data pipeline optimization that cut daily ETL processing time from 6 hours to 47 minutes, enabling the analytics team to deliver morning reports before the 9am standup instead of after lunch."

Category 2: Leadership and Multiplier Effect (10 Phrases)

Leadership at the IC track is not about managing people. It is about your multiplier effect. How did you make the team, the codebase, or the organization better? Committees look for evidence that you leveled up others, not just yourself. If you want a deeper look at this, read our guide on writing a self-assessment that gets you promoted.

Weak vs. Strong: Leadership Rewrites

Weak #1:

"Mentored junior team members and helped them grow."

Strong #1:

"Mentored 3 junior engineers through weekly 1:1s. Sarah shipped her first end-to-end feature (notification preferences, now live for 100% of users). Dev went from needing review on every design to independently owning the data pipeline refactor. Alex is now leading their first cross-team project."

Why this works: Names and specific outcomes prove this actually happened. "Helped them grow" is unfalsifiable. "Sarah shipped her first end-to-end feature" is verifiable in 10 seconds.

Weak #2:

"Contributed to improving our engineering processes."

Strong #2:

"Authored the team's API design guide and led its adoption across 3 teams. PR review cycles dropped from an average of 4.2 rounds to 1.8 (measured over 120 merged PRs), saving approximately 15 engineering hours per week."

Why this works: The committee sees the artifact (API design guide), the scope (3 teams), the measurable improvement (4.2 to 1.8 review rounds), and the business value (15 hours/week saved). That is a leadership story in two sentences.

Weak #3:

"Participated in the on-call rotation and incident response."

Strong #3:

"Led the incident response for the March 15 payment processing outage (P0, 42-minute duration, $180K revenue impact). Coordinated 4 teams in real-time, authored the postmortem, and drove 3 follow-up action items to completion. Since implementing those changes, payment system uptime has been 99.99% for 5 consecutive months."

7 More Leadership Phrases to Use

1. "Established the team's design review process. Now running weekly with 8 regular participants. Design quality issues caught in review (vs. in production) increased from 30% to 78%."
2. "Onboarded 4 new team members this half. Average time-to-first-commit dropped from 12 days to 5 days through the structured onboarding checklist I created and maintained."
3. "Created the shared component library now used by 6 frontend teams, reducing duplicate UI code by an estimated 40% and accelerating new feature development by 2-3 days per feature."
4. "Drove the decision to adopt OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing. Wrote the RFC, built the proof of concept, and led the rollout across 3 services. Mean time to diagnose production issues dropped from 45 minutes to 8 minutes."
5. "Organized and facilitated the quarterly tech debt prioritization session for the platform team. Resulted in the retirement of 2 legacy systems and the migration of 14 services to the new infrastructure."
6. "Led the hiring committee for 6 months. Conducted 28 technical interviews, calibrated rubrics with 4 other interviewers, and improved offer acceptance rate from 62% to 81% by restructuring the candidate experience."
7. "Coached 2 mid-level engineers through their promotion preparation. Both were promoted in the Q3 cycle - one to Senior, one to Staff."

Category 3: Technical Depth and Decision-Making (10 Phrases)

Technical depth is not about using the fanciest technology. It is about making sound decisions under constraints, solving genuinely hard problems, and demonstrating judgment that the committee trusts. This matters especially for the senior-to-staff promotion, where technical judgment outweighs raw output.

Weak vs. Strong: Technical Depth Rewrites

Weak #1:

"Built a scalable distributed system."

Strong #1:

"Designed the real-time event processing pipeline handling 900K events/second with a P99 latency target of 50ms. Evaluated Kafka Streams, Flink, and a custom solution. Chose Kafka Streams based on operational simplicity and the team's existing expertise. System has processed 2.4 trillion events over 8 months with zero data loss incidents."

Why this works: Committees care about the decision process, not just the outcome. Showing that you evaluated alternatives, chose based on clear criteria, and measured the result over time demonstrates engineering judgment - the core skill that separates senior from staff.

Weak #2:

"Resolved complex technical challenges in the codebase."

Strong #2:

"Identified and resolved a race condition in the distributed lock service that caused intermittent data corruption during high-traffic periods. Root cause analysis took 3 weeks due to non-deterministic reproduction. Fix involved redesigning the lock acquisition protocol with fencing tokens. Data corruption incidents dropped from 12/month to zero."

Weak #3:

"Made good architectural decisions for the team."

Strong #3:

"Authored 4 technical RFCs this half, 3 of which were adopted. The most impactful was the migration from monolith to domain-driven microservices, which unblocked 3 teams from shipping independently. Deploy frequency for those teams increased from weekly to multiple times per day."

7 More Technical Depth Phrases to Use

1. "Designed the database sharding strategy for the user profile service, enabling horizontal scaling from 10M to 500M rows while maintaining sub-5ms read latency at P99."
2. "Identified that our ML model serving infrastructure was over-provisioned by 60%. Redesigned the auto-scaling policy using custom metrics, reducing GPU costs from $89K/month to $34K/month without impacting inference latency."
3. "Led the evaluation and adoption of a new testing framework. Built the migration tooling that automatically converted 2,400 legacy tests. Test suite runtime dropped from 18 minutes to 6 minutes."
4. "Implemented exactly-once processing semantics for the payment reconciliation pipeline by combining idempotent consumers with a deduplication window, reducing duplicate transactions from 0.8% to 0.001%."
5. "Designed the circuit breaker and retry strategy for the third-party payment gateway integration. During the provider's 3-hour outage in April, our system gracefully degraded with zero customer-facing errors while competitors reported widespread failures."
6. "Refactored the authorization service from a monolithic RBAC model to attribute-based access control (ABAC). New permission policies can now be deployed in minutes instead of requiring code changes and a release cycle."
7. "Developed a custom load testing framework that simulates realistic user traffic patterns. Identified 3 critical bottlenecks before launch that would have caused cascading failures at 2x projected peak load."

Category 4: Cross-Team Influence and Collaboration (9 Phrases)

Cross-team influence separates mid-level from senior-level contributors. The committee wants to see that your work extended beyond your immediate team - that you drove alignment, resolved conflicts, and delivered outcomes that required coordination across organizational boundaries.

Weak vs. Strong: Cross-Team Rewrites

Weak #1:

"Worked with other teams on cross-functional initiatives."

Strong #1:

"Led the API standardization effort across the Payments, Search, and Platform teams. Facilitated 8 cross-team design reviews, resolved 3 conflicting technical approaches through a shared RFC process, and delivered the unified API gateway 2 weeks ahead of schedule."

Why this works: "Worked with other teams" tells the committee nothing about your role. Were you attending meetings, or were you driving them? The strong version shows you led the initiative, resolved conflicts, and delivered results.

Weak #2:

"Collaborated with product and design teams on feature work."

Strong #2:

"Partnered with the PM and UX teams to redefine the search experience. Proposed the hybrid ranking approach (combining ML relevance with business rules) after analyzing 3 months of user behavior data. The redesigned search increased task completion rate by 28% and reduced support tickets related to search by 45%."

7 More Cross-Team Phrases to Use

1. "Coordinated the platform migration across 5 teams (Payments, Search, Ads, Infrastructure, and Mobile), aligning 4 tech stacks on a shared service mesh. Resolved 3 cross-team dependency conflicts that had stalled progress for a month."
2. "Represented the engineering team in 6 product planning sessions, providing technical feasibility assessments that shaped the H2 roadmap. 4 of my proposals were adopted."
3. "Initiated and led the cross-org observability working group (12 engineers from 7 teams). Delivered a shared dashboarding standard that reduced mean time to detect production issues from 22 minutes to 4 minutes."
4. "Drove alignment between the mobile and backend teams on the new real-time sync protocol. Hosted 4 architecture sessions, authored the technical spec, and mediated the trade-off between battery efficiency and data freshness."
5. "Led the vendor evaluation for our new CI/CD platform. Coordinated requirements from 8 teams, ran benchmarks, presented findings to engineering leadership, and drove the migration plan that was adopted org-wide."
6. "Established the SLA negotiation process between the platform team and 6 consumer teams. Defined latency budgets, error rate thresholds, and escalation paths. SLA violations dropped from 14/quarter to 2/quarter."
7. "Partnered with the security team to implement zero-trust networking for the microservices mesh. Coordinated the rollout across 23 services in 4 phases with zero customer-impacting downtime."

Category 5: Initiative and Ownership (8 Phrases)

Initiative demonstrates that you identify and solve problems without being told to. Ownership means you see things through to completion. Together, they signal to the committee that you operate above your current level - the clearest signal that you are ready for promotion.

Weak vs. Strong: Initiative Rewrites

Weak #1:

"Proactively identified areas for improvement."

Strong #1:

"Identified that our deployment pipeline had no automated rollback capability. Built the automated rollback system over 3 weeks (outside the sprint backlog), which was triggered 4 times in the following quarter, each time preventing a potential P0 incident. Estimated downtime prevented: 6+ hours."

Why this works: This shows you spotted a risk, took initiative to fix it without being asked, delivered a concrete solution, and can point to real-world impact. That is the entire promotion story in four sentences.

Weak #2:

"Took ownership of important team responsibilities."

Strong #2:

"Volunteered to own the team's quarterly OKR process after it stalled for 2 consecutive quarters. Restructured the format, ran planning sessions with 12 engineers, and introduced weekly progress check-ins. OKR completion rate went from 40% to 85%."

6 More Initiative Phrases to Use

1. "Proposed and executed the migration from manual QA to automated E2E testing. Built the framework, wrote the first 80 tests, and trained 4 team members. Manual QA cycle dropped from 3 days to 4 hours."
2. "Noticed recurring customer complaints about slow dashboard load times. Investigated without being asked, identified 3 unoptimized database queries, and reduced dashboard load time from 8 seconds to 1.2 seconds. Support tickets on this topic dropped to zero."
3. "Created the team's technical documentation site from scratch. Now contains 45+ runbooks and architecture docs. New engineer onboarding time dropped from 4 weeks to 2 weeks."
4. "Identified a security vulnerability in our session management during a routine code review. Implemented the fix within 24 hours and authored a security checklist now used by all 3 frontend teams."
5. "Initiated the weekly tech talk series for the engineering org. Organized 18 sessions over 6 months with speakers from 9 different teams. Average attendance: 35 engineers (40% of the org)."
6. "Built a cost monitoring dashboard that exposed $23K/month in unused cloud resources. Led the cleanup effort, reducing our monthly cloud bill by 31%."

Words and Phrases to Remove From Your Review Immediately

These phrases actively hurt your promotion case. They are vague, passive, and signal to the committee that you were a participant rather than a driver. Every one of these should be flagged and rewritten before you submit.

The "Participation Trophy" Phrases

• "Helped with" - Replace with what you specifically did and what the outcome was.
• "Assisted in" - Replace with your actual contribution and its measurable result.
• "Was involved in" - Replace with your specific role and the impact you drove.
• "Supported the team" - Replace with the concrete thing you did that made the team better, plus a metric.
• "Contributed to" - Replace with what you built, decided, or changed, and the result.
• "Participated in" - Replace with what you led, created, or delivered.
• "Was responsible for" - Replace with what you actually accomplished in that area.
• "Worked on" - Replace with the specific output and its measured impact.

Every single one of these phrases has the same problem: they describe proximity to work without proving you drove the outcome. The committee reads "helped with the migration" and thinks: "So what did they actually do?" Do not make them guess.

Other Phrases to Avoid

• "Various projects" - Name them specifically.
• "Several improvements" - How many? What kind? What impact?
• "Significant impact" - Quantify it or the committee will assume it was not significant.
• "Successfully completed" - Completing is the baseline. What was the outcome beyond completion?
• "Gained experience in" - Committees promote impact, not learning. Rephrase as what you delivered using that experience.

Power Verbs That Committees Respond To

According to UC Davis HR, George Mason University, and the Department of Defense performance management guidelines, active voice with strong action verbs is the single most effective way to communicate impact in self-assessments. Here are the verbs that signal next-level performance.

Ownership Verbs (You Drove It)

Led - Drove - Owned - Spearheaded - Championed - Initiated - Launched - Directed

These signal that you were the driver, not a passenger. Use them when you were the primary person accountable for the outcome.

Creation Verbs (You Built It)

Architected - Designed - Built - Developed - Created - Established - Introduced - Implemented

These signal that something exists because of you. They work best when followed by the scale or adoption of what you created.

Impact Verbs (You Changed the Numbers)

Reduced - Increased - Grew - Accelerated - Eliminated - Optimized - Streamlined - Transformed

These are the most powerful verbs in a self-assessment because they imply a before-and-after. Every time you use one, follow it with a number.

Influence Verbs (You Moved People)

Aligned - Coordinated - Negotiated - Facilitated - Persuaded - Mentored - Coached - Influenced

These signal cross-team scope and leadership without formal authority. They are especially critical for senior-to-staff promotions where the committee expects you to move work across organizational boundaries.

The Rewrite Test: 3 Steps to Fix Any Weak Phrase

If you are not sure whether a phrase in your review is strong enough, run it through this 3-step test:

1. Step 1: Remove all adjectives and adverbs. If the sentence says nothing without them, the sentence is empty. "Made significant improvements to our complex system" becomes "Made improvements to our system" - which is clearly too vague.
2. Step 2: Add a number. If you cannot find a single number to add, you have not thought deeply enough about the outcome. Everything has a number: people impacted, time saved, error rate change, adoption count, revenue effect, hours recovered.
3. Step 3: Ask "So what?" Read the phrase out loud. Would a stranger understand why this matters? If not, add the business context. "Reduced build time by 60%" is good. "Reduced build time by 60%, recovering 8 engineering hours per week and enabling same-day deployments" tells the full story.

How These Phrases Fit Into Your Promotion Packet

Strong phrases are the building blocks, but they need a structure to live in. Your promotion packet should organize these phrases around your company's specific promotion criteria - not in a chronological timeline of what you did.

When committees evaluate your case, they are checking boxes against a rubric. If your strongest impact phrase is buried in the middle of a paragraph about a different criterion, it will get missed. Map each phrase to the criterion it best supports, and put your strongest evidence first within each section.

For a deeper look at how to quantify work that feels unquantifiable, and for what promotion committees actually look for from people who have served on them, check out those guides.

If your promo cycle is approaching and you do not have time to rewrite everything from scratch, GetPromoted builds your entire promotion packet through a 10-minute guided interview. It maps your work to the exact criteria your committee evaluates and uses the kind of specific, outcome-driven phrasing that gets candidates promoted. A career coach charges $500+ for this. GetPromoted is $99 $79 with a 100% money-back guarantee.