How to Ask for a Raise or Promotion With a Quiz Your Boss Cannot Fail

Asking for a raise is rarely hard because of the numbers. It is hard because of the opening line. You rehearse it, you book the meeting, you move the meeting, and eventually you send a message that says "do you have five minutes at some point" and then sit there watching the typing indicator.

So do not open with a sentence. Open with a quiz your manager cannot lose.

Why a quiz opens the conversation better than a meeting invite

A calendar invite titled "chat about my role" makes everyone tense before anyone has said anything. A link that says "settle something for me, five questions" gets clicked in about four seconds, usually during a meeting they were not enjoying.

That is the real trick here, and it has nothing to do with software. You have replaced a confrontation with a game. Your manager arrives at the conversation having already laughed, and having already answered yes to everything, which is a considerably better starting position than a silent room.

A NoodleStrike quiz looks like an ordinary yes/no quiz. The difference is that one button per question quietly refuses to be pressed. It slides away from the cursor, or it ignores the first few taps, or it swaps places with the other button at the exact moment they commit. Whichever answer you decided on in advance is the only one they can physically give.

Nobody is fooled, which is the point. They know. They will still try the other button. Everyone tries the other button.

Yes/no questions where only one answer is available

The craft is in writing questions your manager would probably answer that way anyway, and then removing the option to do otherwise. A rigged question that is also true is funny. A rigged question that is obviously false is just awkward.

Here is the sort of thing that belongs in a promotion case dressed as a quiz. The answer in brackets is the button you leave working.

• "Would you say I have been reliable this year?" (Yes) Start gentle. This one they were going to say anyway, so the trick barely shows.
• "Do you remember the last time I missed a deadline?" (No) A negative that flatters. Very hard to argue with a memory they do not have.
• "Am I the person you message when something urgent breaks?" (Yes) If this is true, it is the strongest question on your list, because they already know the answer and so do you.
• "Has this team been easier to run since I joined?" (Yes) Slightly bolder. Works best if you can name the thing you took off their plate.
• "If I left tomorrow, would you need to hire two people to replace me?" (Yes) The classic. Delivered as a joke, it makes a real point about scope.
• "Is there anyone on this team more deserving of employee of the month?" (No) Cheerfully unanswerable. This is the one people screenshot.
• "Should we put fifteen minutes in the diary to talk about this properly?" (Yes) The most important question in the whole quiz. See below.
• "So. Employee of the month?" (Yes) Finish on the punchline. They have now said it on the record, and the shareable card at the end has it in writing.

Five questions is the format, so pick your best five. The last two earn their place every time: one lands the joke, the other turns the joke into an actual meeting.

Give it to Luigi

The character narrating your quiz does a lot of the work, because they set the tone before anyone reads a word. For anything work related, Luigi is the one to pick.

He has twelve moods, including bored, confused, unable to understand, and relaxed, which between them cover the entire emotional range of a performance review. A slightly exasperated moustachioed man reacting to each question is doing something a plain text box cannot: it signals clearly that this is affectionate, not a grievance. The same five questions delivered with no character at all read like a demand. Delivered by Luigi they read like a bit.

Browse all the characters if you want to see the alternatives, but for a manager, Luigi is the safe funny choice.

Building it takes about a minute

There is no ready made template for this one, and that is deliberate. A promotion case only works if the specifics are yours. Nobody gets a raise off a generic quiz.

1. Open the quiz builder and choose Blank Template, because you are writing all five yourself.
2. Give it a title your manager will understand at a glance. "Five quick questions" works. "My promotion case" works better if your relationship can take it.
3. Type your first question, then pick which of the two buttons should be the hard one. That is the button that dodges, and the other one is the answer they will end up giving.
4. Choose a trick per question. Mixing them is better than repeating one, because the second time someone meets the same trick they stop being surprised by it.
5. Pick Luigi as your narrator.
6. Write the punchline that appears on the result card at the end. This is the line that gets screenshotted, so spend a moment on it. "Confirmed in writing, employee of the month" does the job.
7. Generate the link, play it through yourself first, then send it.

If you want to see the mechanics before you write anything, the quiz examples are all playable, and how it works explains each trick in detail.

Read the room, though

Worth saying plainly, because this is your job and not a group chat: a rigged quiz is an icebreaker, not an argument.

It works when you already have a decent relationship with your manager, when the things you are joking about are broadly true, and when you follow it with the actual conversation. It works badly if the team is mid crisis, if you have never discussed your progression before, or if the honest answer to "have I been reliable this year" is complicated.

Send it to open a door. Bring the real case, with the numbers and the examples, through the door afterwards. The quiz gets you the fifteen minutes. What you do with the fifteen minutes is still up to you.

Build your promotion quiz, pick Luigi, and go and get the meeting.