How to ask for what you need & what to do if you get a 'no'

Lightning Lessons

Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

How to ask for what you need & what to do if you get a 'no'

Hosted by Ethan Evans and Chaitali Narla

Thu, Jul 10, 2025

7:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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Featured in Lenny’s List

Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive

Ethan Evans

View syllabus

Thu, Jul 10, 2025

7:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

Featured in Lenny’s List

Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive

Ethan Evans

View syllabus

What you'll learn

How to effectively ask for what you need

Real situations where people struggle to ask and how you can stand out

How to be prepared for (and react to) if you are told 'no'

Real situations of when people are denied and how you can overcome it

Q&A

We will take real-time audience questions

Why this topic matters

Hoping (or waiting) for someone to help you or give you an opportunity...is a losing proposition. Learn how to effectively ask for what you need AND how to be prepared if you are told 'no" (and even better, how to overcome it).

You'll learn from

Ethan Evans

Retired Amazon Vice President (70+ patents; led 800+ global teams)

In my 15+ years at Amazon, I led global teams of 800+ and invented well-known businesses and products such as Prime Video, Amazon Video, Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime), and Twitch Commerce.

Hold 70+ patents.
Helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are mine.
10,000+ resume reviews.
2,500+ live interviews.
1,000+ hires.
Was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators.

I've promoted 8 reports from Senior Manager (Amazon L7) to Director (Amazon L8), contributed to 25+ Director promotions, hired 10+ Directors internally and externally, drove the promotion of 3 engineers to Principal, and of my former reports 2 are current Amazon VPs (L10) and 5 are C-Suite outside of Amazon.

I retired from Amazon as a Vice President in September 2020 to allow me to focus on paying forward my good fortune to others. Prior to Amazon, I spent 12 years at 3 startups.

My signature course Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive is featured in Lenny's List, has 1,200+ alumni, is rated 4.7/5, and we have upcoming cohorts in July and October.

Follow me on LinkedIn.

Chaitali Narla

CTO; x-Google Director | Career Coach

I am an engineering executive with 15+ years of experience at Google and Stripe. I grew my own career from internship to directorship with 5 promotions in 10 years at Google. I also got Superb and Outstanding ratings for most of my time at Google.

I truly believe that setting yourself apart with bold strategies is the way to have an accelerated career in a competitive landscape. I now coach leaders from top tech companies to be outstanding.

I have given multiple talks (Women TechMakers, Ethan Evans Level Up Community) and written guest posts (Google Blog, High Growth Engineer, Path To Staff) on many of my unusual career growth strategies.