Brag document template

A free guide from Eidos · prepare a self-review, promotion case or job application with real examples

A brag document is a running list of what you did at work, written while you still remember the details. When review season arrives, you do not have to reconstruct a year from memory: the examples are already there. It is not boasting. It is evidence, kept in one place, that makes your work easy for someone else to understand.

What to record

• Projects you shipped or moved forward — including the ones that were cancelled or changed; what you learned counts.
• Problems you solved — an incident, a process that was slow, a customer that was stuck.
• People you helped — onboarding, mentoring, reviews, documentation others now use.
• Work nobody asked for — the clean-up, the tool, the fix that saved hours.
• Feedback you received — a thank-you message or a quote from a review, with permission.

The template

Copy this structure once per example. Short is fine; specific is better than long.

Two worked examples

Engineering

Topic: Checkout reliability. Situation: card payments failed for some users after a provider change. My contribution: I traced the failures to a timeout setting, wrote the fix and added an alert. Outcome: failed payments dropped back to their usual level within a week. Source: incident review document. Date: March.

Design or marketing

Topic: Onboarding. Situation: new users left during sign-up. My contribution: I ran five user interviews and redesigned the first two screens. Outcome: the team adopted the new flow; completion improved in the next test. Source: interview notes and the test summary. Date: June.

Year-end review checklist

1. Pick the 3–6 topics your manager or the review form cares about.
2. Under each topic, keep the one or two strongest examples.
3. Rewrite every "we" sentence into what you did and what the team achieved.
4. Remove client names, personal data and anything confidential.
5. Share only the fields this reader needs — a manager may want outcomes and dates, an interviewer your contribution.

Keep it without a spreadsheet