The promotion process in my company specifies that you have to check a couple of boxes, one of which says "in order to be promoted you have to have worked on the design of a component or service”. My interpretation of this was, a service that talks to another service, does some processing and/or storing, etc.
My manager agreed that my team doesn’t provide many opportunities for new designs, and so I was promoted without having checked this box, because otherwise I’d have to wait for such an opportunity to arise and that could take forever. I’ve always worked on code that didn’t require any design.
Now, I want to switch teams, and upon talking to the team's manager he told me that first he wants to see a design doc that I have produced. I have no such thing. I have worked on designs with my team and I can talk about them, but I haven’t written one that is entirely of my own.
How do I bring this up with this team’s manager? I don’t want to be turned down right off the bat. Or worse, I don’t want this manager to question why I was promoted in the first place. I bring value to my team, just not in the form of designs.
