We come here today to talk about an opportunity for retail space planners, and it’s a big one.

Retail space planners deserve more appreciation than they get for their excellent work, including their roles in the big wins that move their companies forward. What’s more, they are due their fair share of credit for the many little things they do to ensure space strategies are executed as intended. These “saves,” as space planners call them, should not go overlooked.

These successes, and the recognition they should merit, can fuel career advancement opportunities for space planners. So how can space planners get their just due? According to experts, it comes down to space planners consistently tracking their wins and saves, artfully telling a compelling value story highlighting those achievements in context of the business and proactively creating a strategic consistent “drip” campaign of communications driving home their ongoing importance to the enterprise.

That may sound like a lot of work. But it’s manageable, and it’s worth it. Let’s help you get started with these three steps.

Step One: Create your “brag book,” a database of your major successes over the calendar year.

Getting the credit you deserve starts with compiling the data of your strong performance. Without data, your value story isn’t nearly as compelling.

Catherine Rymsha, a lecturer on managerial leadership and leadership processes at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, advises space planners keep their personal KPIs and company goals in mind when logging their biggest moments of the year: “Track what you’ve done, why it mattered, and how it aligned with your team, department, or organization’s goals. When it’s time to write your review, you can turn that into a story that connects your daily work to bigger outcomes.”

Highlighting Your Successes

So let’s talk outcomes. Your brag book should have three primary elements. These are:

“Wins,” positive outcomes that tie to business strategy; the best ones will have a clear, positive financial result.
“Saves,” the decisions and fixes space planners routinely make to protect shelf space and solve other problems.
“Kudos,” client and internal praise (save those emails!).

Wins

Your space planning wins laddering back to stated company, client and/or unit goals are the foundation of annual reviews. This applies both to macro and micro space planners, though the types of wins highlighted will differ depending upon the function. Macro space planners will be looking for wins across departments and stores, whereas micro space planners will be category-focused.

We asked one space planning leader with more than three decades supporting retail planograms and layouts how he approaches his reviews. Here's what he shared:

“Nobody outside of my team cares how many POG updates I accomplished,” the experienced space planner told us. “However, everyone connected to the projects I work on care about the financial impacts and the customer experience. What increases in return on sales and growth in category sales can I tie space planning decisions to? If I can show increases in movement, margin, or sales, and show how the use of space and decisions we have made support those numbers, I can show my value to the organization.”

Other examples of space planning wins to highlight include:

Overall Space

Did your products gain space over the last year as measured by points of sales?

Space-to-Sales

Did your analysis unearth over-spacing for your product (leading to slower inventory turnover) or under-spacing (out-of-stocks) — and did you offer a solution that solved the problem, with resulting business benefits?
Going further: Were you able to offer category-based data about over-spacing in other categories (or under-spacing relative to your own) that resulted in better placement/sales for your products?

Captaincy

Did you help your brand gain a Space captaincy for key stores/retailers? Can you highlight positive business results from gaining the captaincy highlighted in key metrics, including sales gains and/or more space given to your brands?

Product Advocacy

Growing product segments: Did you provide clients category data showing new products merited space that once belonged to old standards?
Protecting cash cows: By contrast, can you show examples where you fought to keep space for reliable sellers under pressure from innovations in other categories?

Innovation

Did you suggest, create and/or implement an innovation that resulted in:

a cost benefit for your business unit?
a labor savings benefit for your business unit?

Saves

Space planners might be tempted to overlook saves. It’s akin to a baseball catcher blocking a pitch in the
dirt; it’s part of the job, right?

Still, like a catcher keeping the ball in front and the inning eventually ending without a run scored, a space planner’s saves can be the difference between winning and losing at-shelf.

According to James Aldape, space planning manager at Pabst and ARC's 2025 Space Planner of the Year, these are common saves that space planners unearth:

Incorrect UPC data flowing into retailer sales data. This can lead to supplier sales not being captured, resulting in products being removed from future planograms.
Item swaps to keep existing space allocation. Slower-selling items are at risk of being removed during resets. If, say, two items are going to be removed, can the space planner suggest two other products to take their place, to at least keep the same space allocation? If yes, that’s a save, and the space planner should take credit for the good work.
Knowing the importance of cubic space vs. linear space. The depth of the shelf or the cooler is significant, as Aldape notes. More facings and less depth aren’t necessarily a good thing, and space planners need to fight for their spots along the X, Y and Z axis.
Knowing the quirks of shelving — and having a strategy for not getting stuck in places you don’t want to be. Here, Aldape shares an example. “Shelving matters and especially in beer,” Aldape says. “I don't want to be on a on a hinge. I don't want to be in a break. Why? Because I'm going to lose a pack-out.”

As with wins, the best saves will have a resulting tangible benefit. It can be a financial benefit, but it can also relate to customer experience KPIs, as the experienced space planner whom we quoted earlier told us.

“For the most impactful fixes, we should show what was done about them, along with the before and after results,” the space planner said. “That should be done in that category recap post-mortem (and if impactful enough, included in the annual recap). Showing the impact on sales, customer shopping experience or team member experience is the key.”

Kudos

As a best practice, space planners should keep record of positive feedback received for their work. Written correspondence, whether in an email or captured in meeting notes with a timestamp, is preferred. And praise for work resulting in cost savings, or another key result, is especially valuable.

In addition, Rymsha suggests space planners ask colleagues what they did well over the past year. The answers may well unearth insights that can super-charge annual reviews.

“[Peer] feedback can help shape your story,” Rymsha says. “Ultimately, it’s not just about listing what you did, but showing how your work influenced results and supported something larger.”

Step Two: Harness storytelling best practices to present confidently and effectively in reviews and other key touchpoints.

Good news! You’ve now collected the data you need to highlight your space planning successes.

Now here comes the hard part. How do you take that data and make a case that clearly displays your importance to the organization?

The answer? Storytelling. As Aldape sees it, good storytelling is essential for "leadership to recognize the value space planning provides."

Space planners looking to get started in storytelling, or those seeking to level up in this vital skill, should start first with the fundamentals taught by The Presentation Company. TPC’s teachings on creating a compelling story first, with clear signposts of where your story will go, are foundational to bringing structure to all that data. From there, space planners can best position and visualize their data.

As space planners craft their story, they should keep their audience firmly in mind. In many cases, the audience will be their manager. Melissa Franks, a long-time operations executive who now runs her own California-based business consultancy, suggests professionals keep their manager’s goals at the center as they write their reviews or self-evaluations.

“Employees often do one of two things: focus on data or write a long-detailed narrative of the year,” Franks says. “Both are ineffective because they are missing key elements. The first point of consideration is knowing your audience: who is reading your self-evaluation, and what do they care about?

“Managers have goals, too, and when you are crafting a summary of your performance, you want to highlight clearly and succinctly how your results have enabled your manager to achieve their results. You want to demonstrate through facts, data and brief descriptions how your actions, results, innovations and ideas have not only checked the boxes for what was expected of you, [but also] how they have also materially contributed to the larger goals of the organization.”

Step Three: Create an annual communications plan to update key stakeholders, including your manager, on your performance.

To truly gain influence, space planners should artfully highlight their successes, and other key business updates, on a regular cadence during the year.

“You need to celebrate wins and discuss improvements constantly, not only on your performance review or right before it, but throughout the whole year,” says Jan Hendrik von Ahlen, the managing director and co-founder of JobLeads, an online job platform. “The performance review is just a checkpoint, but the actual growth and the actual opportunity to get a promotion happens between them.”

So, what does a good internal communication plan look like? It could be a weekly or monthly email hitting on elements typically covered within your review, as well as key project updates. Perhaps it is a standing touchpoint with your manager.

Daniel Burrus, a noted retail futurist who has worked with scores of Fortune 500 companies, offers some dos and don’ts on keeping your organization apprised of your work throughout the year. His tips:

DO: Give quick, regular updates that tie straight to business results.

DON’T: Self-promote.

DO: Call out problems early.

DON'T: Drown your manager in details.

DO: Highlight what’s keeping the team ahead.

DON'T: Talk simply about staying busy.

Seizing the Moment

You, the space planner, deserve credit for your good work — and it shouldn’t go overlooked. So bring those accomplishments into the light, and in a smart way. To summarize, here’s your three-point plan for the rest of this year:

Get your “brag book” together: compile your wins, your saves, your positive feedback.
Harness storytelling fundamentals to best highlight your value in reviews and other key performance settings.
Proactively provide regular updates to your manager and other key leaders on your biggest wins and initiatives.

Follow these steps, and we guarantee: you’ll feel more confident about the value you drive. Others will see it, too. And with recognition comes the opportunity for advancement. Most of all, you will control the narrative about your career, and that’s never been more important than at this very moment, in a sea of change.