three years of "you're really close" and "next cycle for sure" and I started to think I was just going to plateau. what finally worked, and I genuinely didn't expect this to be the thing: I stopped waiting for the right project and started making noise about the projects I was already on.
specifically: I started writing brief internal posts after any non-trivial work. like, two paragraphs in our eng channel about what we shipped, what the tradeoff was, what I learned. nothing fancy. people started responding. the skip-level started referencing my posts in meetings. someone I'd never spoken to asked me to consult on a similar problem they had.
my manager told me afterward that calibration went almost entirely smoothly because three people in the room had seen my name attached to something concrete. didn't ship anything different that cycle. just made sure more people knew what I was doing.
probably obvious in retrospect but I genuinely thought the work would speak for itself. it doesn't. you have to say the words.