The Bunny Narrative for Tech Promo Cases
Public version, Kurt Brown, July 2020 - Dec 2024
© 2024 by Kurt P. Brown, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Self link: tinyurl.com/bunny-narrative
Disclaimer: Personal views, from promo committee service, packet editing, & role profile writing (mgt & individual contributor)
Tech folks, on any tech job ladder (role profile), at any level, are prone to submitting promo cases that lack an effective narrative structure. “Effective” in this case is defined as: all members of the promo review committee can quickly comprehend difficulty, impact, leadership, org development, process innovation, or whatever the pillars of the particular job ladder call out - regardless of how familiar they are with the problem space.
Very often, tech promo cases are structured as a long list of mostly first person past tense: I did this, I did that, I did this other thing, I did more things, I co-did these things, etc. Sometimes this list is tagged/decorated with links indicating impact or difficulty, or clustered into a moderately helpful outline structure, but because the underlying framework is still primarily a list of “I dids,” promo review committee members are forced to perform their own archeology on the case to determine how it aligns with the job ladder pillars.
This document proposes a narrative structure that has resulted in clear packets that have a high degree of success in promo review committees. As a side benefit, the structure also makes it clear to the candidate themselves (and their manager) if the case meets the bar for an attempt or not.
Each project section in the promo packet conforms strictly to the following three part narrative structure:
The Dark Lord ruled over the land. The sky was black with clouds, washing the barren earth in a perpetual cold and windy rain. The trees were gnarled and bare. The grass and crops lay dead and brown. No signs of life - no birds, no butterflies, and all the bunnies were hiding, cold and shivering, in their dens.
Our hero arrives on the scene. The hero uses their sword to slay the Dark Lord's dragon. The hero leaps over the chasm, avoiding the deadly Orcs, and freeing the slaves. Enlisting the help of the Ewoks, Elves, and Ents, the hero mounts a successful battle against the Dark Lord’s evil army and finally slays the Dark Lord himself.
The sun is shining, the sky is blue with puffy white clouds. The trees are full of fresh green leaves. The grass and wildflowers are in full bloom. Birds are singing. Butterflies are flitting. Bunnies are frolicking in the grass.
Part I is the “before” state, and the worse it is, the better the case. Part III is obviously the “after state.” Part II is the standard list of “I dids” that constitute the majority of the typical packet without an effective narrative, and our “hero” is the promo candidate, of course. It is basically a stripped down hero’s journey[1] structure.
Note that it’s not the absolute value of either the “before” or “after” states (Part I and Part III) that make a case - it is the size of the delta between them. That delta is the case’s impact. In some dire turnaround situations, the end state can simply be relatively unremarkable, but assuming the “before” state is horrific enough, the case is solid because the delta between “before” and “after” is so large.
While the links in the above narrative are just for fun, they are meant to indicate a preponderance of evidence for each claim in the narrative (along with peer statements). They point to artifacts that prove and expand on the simple one or two sentence summaries in the narrative. The detailed explanation is intentionally deferred to the linked artifacts in order to keep the narrative succinct and avoid getting it tangled in weedy details.
The sentences and evidence links in Part III each need to clearly convey an improvement / impact, ideally using some kind of metric. How green is the grass? How happy are the bunnies? How many are there? How many species of flowers and do they include particularly unusual ones? Give the reader a real sense of just how wonderful the new state is. As clear and as metric-based as the picture you paint of how horrific it was before you (our hero) arrived on the scene.
There should not be any “I did” in Part II that doesn’t have a strong tie to some element of both Part I and Part III. In a hero’s journey, we don’t really care what our hero had for lunch, unless that meal was intentional and material to their journey (e.g. they put a magic ring in their ham sandwich and ate it to hide it from the Nazgûl).
The Ladder Pillar Structure is a common attempt at a narrative structure that explicitly delineates the principal pillars of a ladder (e.g. Difficulty, Leadership, Impact, etc. for a software engineering ladder). While a perfectly sensible mechanism, the problem with this approach is that, if it is used as the outermost organizing framework for a packet or for each project, it is rather challenging to connect any individual “I did” with that “did’s” specific effect on a before → after state transition (i.e. to crisply link cause and effect). There is no clear story arc.
To address this problem, the Ladder Pillar structure is sometimes used inside of each “I did.” E.g., for each “I did” there is a Difficulty, Leadership, and Impact subheading (continuing with the SWE ladder as our example here). This makes the cause/effect link more clear for each one, but the result is still, overall, a packet that is a list of “I dids.” And each “I did” is often a rather tortured Difficulty/Leadership/Impact story.
Why tortured? Because it’s almost always the case that the sum of all the candidate’s actions worked in concert to achieve impact, show leadership, and overcome difficulty, and thus this structure is almost always rather strained and convoluted, for both the writer and the reader. The Bunny Structure avoids this problem by looking holistically at each contribution section in the packet.
All that said, however, the pillar structure is often ideally suited for the manager’s supporting statement.
Regardless of the narrative structure you choose, before typing a single word into your promo packet draft, try to tell someone (yourself even), verbally, your bunny story. How bad was your Dark Lord’s reign? What were your weapons of battle? And just how happy were your bunnies in the last chapter of your hero’s journey?
“I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”
Drop a line to kpb if:
Credits:
A: Great question. This is the “evidence of absence” issue, or colloquially: “how do I prove a negative?” This arises a lot in promo cases for infrastructure people who don’t have much of a “Dark Lord’s reign” for their Part I. Unlike a feature development effort where the Part I → Part III arc is: “nobody could do this thing” → “everyone can do this thing,” or an infra turnaround effort where: “everything is awful” → “everything is awesome,” this case seems, on the surface anyway, to be: “everything is awesome → everything is still awesome.”
The key here is to think of what the degenerate case requires:
Everything awesome → Our hero just napped the entire time → Everything is still awesome!
Odds are good that a long hero nap is not the case you’re making. So then what is the difference between a nap and what the hero did? Here’s some examples:
The key is: identify what changed, and then how that change was handled in a way that keeps the bunnies just as happy in Part III as they were in Part I. Once you know what changed, then:
A: Yeah, what she said.
A: The bunny narrative structure is meant to be used for each project section in a promo packet or performance review. Thus a packet with N projects will have N bunny narratives.
A: If you can’t find one, two, or max three thru-line narratives that tie all your projects together, then you will likely have trouble proving L+1 impact. With a high number of projects (what I call a “volume case”), odds are that they all show solid L level contributions, which can give you a high rating at level L, but promo cases require evidence of L+1 impact.
Volume cases can occasionally succeed, but are much more difficult than cases with a strong narrative. In my experience, they only work when two things are present:
Yes! This alternative sequencing of the three parts is especially helpful if Part II is rather large.
Nice headings for this structure could be “Where We Were,” “Where We Are,” and “What I Did.”
Thanks Robby and Divyesh for clueing me in to this cool alternative.
Yes! Finally. You’re reading it now.
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