this is for the ops people, biz ops people, and anyone else at a company where the engineering promotion process is well-documented and everything else is a mystery.
i spent 3 years at a nonprofit and 2 years at a 60-person SaaS company. neither had a real leveling framework. which means promotion conversations were weird and subjective in a specific way.
the problem with unstructured leveling
when there's no ladder, you can't point to a rubric. you have to argue from market data and business value. this is actually not that different from engineering promo conversations but the levers are different.
for ops roles in 2026, the frame that works is: what decisions is the company now able to make that they couldn't make before, and are those decisions going up in ambiguity/stakes over time?
if you're the one who implemented the first real forecast model and now the exec team makes headcount decisions based on it, that's senior ops work regardless of what your title says.
how I structured my case
i pulled market salary data for 'Senior BizOps Manager' in my metro (SF Bay, remote-blended comps skewed this but I used Levels.fyi and LinkedIn salary where available). my current comp was 18% below market for the responsibility I was carrying.
then I listed three decisions that went through me in the last quarter that previously would have escalated to my manager. operational leverage is the clearest proxy for scope in an ops role.
what worked
being direct. i said: 'i'm doing senior work at a mid-level comp. i want to fix that this cycle, not next year.' my manager's response was to ask for a written case. i gave them the market data, the decision list, and two paragraphs of framing.
approved within two weeks. no formal packet, no calibration committee, just a manager who needed something to show their VP.
what might not work for you
if your manager isn't your ally, skip the skip-level approach unless you have a real relationship there. at small companies the org is flat enough that going around your manager is visible in a way that it isn't at big tech.