The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 2019
Stripe's brag document: a living list of your work that makes reviews honest
Stripe engineer Julia Evans turns invisible accomplishments into a 'brag document' — a running list shared with managers and peers at review time.
Stripe
What it had to solve
At performance review time, Julia Evans found she couldn't remember six months of work, and her manager couldn't either — so important contributions went unrecognized. Fuzzy work like mentoring, refactors and on-call improvements was the first to disappear.
How it works
In June 2019, Stripe engineer Julia Evans published 'Get your work recognized: write a brag document'. Her starting problem: at performance review time she invariably felt a demoralizing 'wait, what did I do in the last six months?' — and every time she dug through pull requests, tickets and launch emails she found important work she had completely forgotten, from mentoring an intern to shepherding a migration.
The fix was a single living document, updated through the year, with sections for goals, projects and their impact, collaboration and mentorship, design and documentation, company building and what she learned. The crucial move was sharing it: a manager who has the document can advocate with specifics instead of saying 'their work is awesome', and a new manager three months before review gets a ready-made picture of your impact.
To spread the practice, Evans and coworker Karla Burnett ran a 'brag workshop' just before review season: people spent one to two hours writing their list, then paired up to catch places where they had undersold themselves — a feature that shipped, without the number showing what it caused. A friend's group meets over video chat every couple of weeks to update documents together, pulling in people from Portland, Toronto, New York and Montreal.
Why it lands
- A brag document makes invisible work visible — mentoring, refactors and on-call improvements are exactly the contributions most likely to be forgotten.
- Sharing it with a manager turns the review into evidence rather than memory: the manager gets a ready-made, defensible case for a promotion.
- The workshop format helps people who undersell their work learn to state impact with numbers and outcomes, not just actions.
- Because the template is free and simple, the idea spread across teams and companies without any corporate mandate.
What it did
The post became a reference practice in tech: teams adopted the document as a norm, peer reviewers ask for it, and people from different companies hold biweekly video sessions to update their brag documents together.
What you can take
Recognition isn't automatic — if a company only looks at work once a year, give people a simple shared ritual for recording and communicating impact, and make asking for it normal, not boastful.
Since then
The brag document became a standard part of engineering culture: career guides, blogs and companies kept recommending and adapting Evans' template for years, and the post remains the canonical reference for the practice. Evans herself left Stripe in August 2019 — after five years there — to build her Wizard Zines business, while the ritual she documented stayed behind as a widely copied work invention.
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