How to Get on a New VP or Directors Radar
New VP doesn't know you?
Get a plan to build visibility with new leadership before they form opinions.
A new VP or director just landed in your org. Maybe they were hired from outside, maybe they got promoted internally from a different part of the company. Either way, they don't know you.
This person will influence your promotion decisions, your project assignments, possibly whether your team exists in six months. And right now, you're one face in a crowd of engineers they're still trying to learn.
Most people respond to this by doing nothing. They keep their heads down, keep shipping code, and hope their manager will handle the introductions. That's a mistake. Because the new VP is forming opinions about everyone in their first 30 to 60 days, and engineers who stay invisible during that window tend to remain invisible long after.
Why New Leadership Is Actually an Opportunity
When senior leadership changes, the existing power dynamics get reshuffled. The engineers who had the old VP's ear don't automatically keep that access. The in-groups and out-groups haven't formed yet. For a brief window, everyone is on roughly equal footing.
This is rare. Under stable leadership, breaking into the "known" circle takes months of sustained effort. With a new VP or director, you can shape their impression of you from scratch. The playing field is temporarily level.
As staffeng.com notes, senior leaders "rarely support folks whose work they don't know." The inverse is also true: they can't overlook you if you've given them a reason to pay attention.
What New VPs and Directors Actually Care About
Before you try to get on someone's radar, understand what they're looking at. A new senior leader's first 90 days are consumed by three questions:
- What is the current state of this org? They're trying to understand the technical landscape, the team dynamics, and where the problems are.
- Who are the key people? Not just managers. They want to know which ICs are the strongest, which teams are functional, and who they can rely on.
- What needs to change? Every new leader comes in with a mandate, either from their own boss or from their own assessment. They're looking for allies who can help them execute.
If you can help answer any of these questions, you become useful to them. And usefulness, not self-promotion, is what gets you noticed.
Five Ways to Get Noticed (Without Being Obnoxious)
Solve a problem they care about
Find out what the new VP's priorities are. Listen to their first all-hands, read their first emails, pay attention to the questions they ask in meetings. Then connect your work to those priorities.
If the new director is focused on reliability and you're the one who proposed and led the alerting overhaul last quarter, make sure that story surfaces. Not by bragging, but by referencing it naturally when it's relevant: "We saw a similar reliability gap in our service and addressed it by restructuring the on-call rotation. Happy to share what worked if it's useful."
You're not selling yourself. You're offering context that helps them do their job.
Be the person who shares useful ground-level context
New VPs are drowning in status updates from managers but often starved for on-the-ground perspective from engineers. What's actually slowing the team down? What's working better than the metrics suggest? What do engineers talk about in Slack that never makes it into the leadership digest?
If you can surface this kind of insight, even casually in a meeting or a direct message, you become someone the new leader values as a signal source. This is what Will Larson describes as one of the most valuable inputs for incoming engineering leaders: honest, specific intelligence from people who do the actual work.
One caveat: ground-level context means observations, not complaints. "Our deploy pipeline has a bottleneck that adds two hours to every release" is useful. "Management doesn't listen to us and everything is broken" is not.
Contribute in the meetings they attend
If your new VP or director sits in on a particular standup, design review, or planning meeting, prepare for those sessions differently. Come with sharper observations, more concise updates, and questions that show you're thinking about the bigger picture.
You don't need to dominate the room. One thoughtful comment in a meeting with 15 people will register more than 15 silent meetings. Senior leaders notice who adds signal and who adds noise.
Write things down that travel upward
Technical documents, architecture proposals, postmortems, and project summaries are artifacts that can reach people you've never met. If your VP reads your well-written design doc before they know your name, they'll remember the quality of your thinking when they finally meet you.
Katie Sylor-Miller, a Staff Engineer, puts it directly: "A big part of being promoted is making sure that your work is visible, that people know your name and you have a good reputation." Documents are one of the most scalable ways to build that visibility because they persist and circulate independently of you.
Support your peers publicly
This one is counterintuitive, but new leaders pay close attention to team dynamics. Engineers who publicly recognize good work from their peers, who amplify others' contributions in meetings, who share credit generously, get flagged as culture carriers. And culture carriers are exactly the kind of people a new VP wants to invest in.
You're not doing this performatively. You're doing it because it's the right thing, and because it happens to also be visible.
What Not to Do
Don't schedule a 1:1 with the new VP in their first week. They're overwhelmed. Give them two to four weeks to settle in, then reach out. If they establish open office hours, use those instead of requesting private time.
Don't come with complaints about your manager. A new VP hearing complaints about their own direct reports from people they just met will not think "this person has valuable intel." They'll think "this person is a risk." Address manager issues through your direct manager first. If it is not your VP but your skip-level who changed, rebuilding your relationship with a new skip-level covers the specific dynamics of that transition.
Don't change your work to match what you think they want. If you start chasing the new VP's stated priorities at the expense of your actual commitments, you'll look unreliable. Do your job well first, then find natural connections between your work and their agenda.
Don't try to be the new VP's best friend. Excessive social outreach from an IC they don't know feels awkward. Let the relationship develop through work context, not forced rapport.
The Long Game
Getting on a new VP's radar isn't a one-time event. It's a 90-day campaign that transitions into an ongoing relationship. Here's the arc:
In the first month, your only goal is to be a name they recognize positively. One strong contribution in a meeting, one useful document, one helpful piece of context.
In months two and three, deepen the association. If they've noticed your work on reliability, keep delivering in that space. If they valued your ground-level insights, share another one when it's relevant. Consistency builds trust faster than one big moment.
By month four, the new dynamics have solidified. The VP has their mental map of the org: who the top performers are, who the reliable operators are, who the future leaders are. Your goal is to be on that map before it hardens.
Once you're there, the relationship largely maintains itself through continued good work. But if you miss that initial window, breaking in later is much harder. The first few months of a leadership change are when career trajectories get set for the next one to two years. For a broader playbook on navigating the full transition, how to position yourself after a leadership change covers the strategic arc beyond just getting noticed.
CareerClimb's AI coach, Summit, helps you prepare for exactly these moments: new leadership transitions, visibility strategies, and building the relationships that influence your next promotion. Download CareerClimb to stay ahead of org changes.
