The trap of being promoted from within

Two weeks ago, I stepped into a new role as Engineering Zone Lead over the Workflow Zone at Zapier. In less Zapier-specific terms, I’m now leading a broader division of the company after spending the past year managing one piece of it. The first thing I did was start booking meet & greets.

Which sounds very normal, except these aren’t really “nice to meet you, here’s who I am” conversations. I’m not walking in brand new. I’ve been managing part of this zone for over a year, so I already know a good chunk of the people, the backlog, the projects, the recurring arguments, and the things that have been stuck in place for longer than they probably should be. I have context. But that’s actually the problem.

The danger of being promoted from within is that it feels like you already know what’s going on. You’ve sat in the meetings, watched decisions get made, and felt the friction firsthand. You know which things have made you quietly mutter under your breath after a meeting ends. Hypothetically.

So the easy move would be to take the promotion, open the list of things I’ve been mentally collecting for the past year, and start acting on it. But that list is not the truth. It’s my truth, from the seat I was sitting in.

I knew my view was partial. The risk was letting that partial view feel complete just because I’d been looking at it for a long time.

The classic first 90 days advice usually assumes you’re walking into unfamiliar territory. Learn the people. Learn the culture. Listen before you lead. Don’t start changing things before you understand why they exist. It’s good advice, but it's not quite as clear-cut when you’re promoted from within.

When you’re already inside the organization, you don’t feel unfamiliar. You know the people. You know how planning works. You know where the weird handoffs are, which projects have been stuck, and which decisions somehow keep reappearing like they’re trapped in four different versions of a Google Doc, all with unresolved comments.

That context is useful. It’s also exactly what makes the transition tricky.

But I don’t think being internal means you get to skip the listening part. I think it makes the listening part harder. You’re not trying to learn from scratch; you’re trying to separate what you actually know from what you’ve assumed for long enough that it started feeling like knowledge. It's a completely different exercise.