Introduction
“Feedback cycles can be wonderful things: rarely do we get the space to reflect on and bask in the accomplishments of our team members. But they are also likely to fill us with dread: feedback cycles are time consuming, they involve heavy process, and since the business doesn’t stop moving during this time, they amount to an additional workload that we often avoid addressing until right before the deadlines.” —Jill Wetzler, 2019 “Writing Better Performance Assessments”
It’s about that time of year again: performance review season. I used to hate perf review season. I’d procrastine due to the abject dread of tallying up my shortcomings in order to be judged by my superiors. It felt like the career equivalent of getting my report card with the HR system as the permanant record file folder. With the wisdom of amazing leaders and the experience gained as a people manager myself, I’ve learned to actually see performance reviews as a tool for growth and reflection. I’m sharing my learnings here to inspire you to hate them a little bit less, too.
Why are performance reviews important? They’re a chance to:
- Check-in with previous goals
- Create new, important-to-you goals
- Practice continuous learning/growth
- See evidence of your improvement
- Help the people you work with succeed
Preparing for your manager/downward review
Receiving a review means being vulnerable with someone who holds power over you.
Lead with curiosity. Take what you want and leave what you don’t. There are, unfortunately, a lot of ways for a manager to screw up a review.
Your downward review is your boss’s interpretation of your work, but it’s not the whole story of this point in your career. That’s what your self-review (and peer reviews, if your process has those) help round out.
Performance reviews should be unsurprising, fair, and motivating.
Your manager should deliver your written review to you before you have a conversation about it. Take some time to sit with it, noting how you feel with some guiding questions. If your review contains pieces that are hard to take in, Paloma Medina has a week-long process for untangling the difficult feelings that arise from scary/frustrating/triggering feedback.
Your manager wants you fully understand any growth areas they’ve noted for you and it’s their job to foster this environment and conversation! For insight into how they may approach this, read how Lara Hogan sets up feedback for success.
Write a 360/peer review
Good feedback is specific, actionable, and helps the other person grow.
- Be specific; use tangible examples of their successes
- Trust that they want to grow; be unfailingly kind (not “nice”)
- Avoid mentionining one-offs (unless the example was egregious)
- Check your biases (like gender bias)
To give critical feedback, follow the Feedback Equation:
- Observation: A fact about behavior, not a judgment
- Impact: How the behavior affects your work
- Request: A question or request to adjust behavior
Calm self-review nerves
Review season is stressful, even if the process is light.
It’s a lot of mental overhead. Going over six months to a year of work is overwhelming. It’s hard to remember everything. And talking about yourself is emotionally taxing.
If reflection is not a regular part of your life, it can be scary to be forced to reckon with your performance over a long chunk of time.
Being evaluated is almost-always stress-inducing, including assessing yourself.
Promos and raises
Your self-review does not determine your promotion or raise.
Your self-review is a tool to help you and your manager understand your perspective on your work (including identifying gaps in your manager’s assessment of you).
Your manager already has their mind made up about promotions or salary adjustments for this review period. You can’t write your way into changing the last 6–12 months. If you’ve been working with your manager toward a promotion, your self-review may be included in a promotion packet during the Calibration process. Even so, your self-review is not the only artifact, nor the primary artifact, that determines a promotion.
You can’t write a self-review so good it gets you promoted. You can’t write a self-review so bad it gets you fired. This terrified me at first, but it quickly became the biggest weight off my shoulders. Hopefully it unlocks something for you, too.
Purpose and value
The actual purpose of your self-review is:
- Reflecting on your accomplishments
- Identifying your areas of improvement
- Planning for the next 6 months
There’s still value in the self-review when you remove the possibility of a promotion/raise. That value is why you’re encouraged by every therapist and self-help book and career coach to journal your thoughts and feelings.
Review season is an invitation to set aside time at work to do short-form journaling and planning about work! It’s an opportunity to reflect and goal-set for this job, but it’s also an opportunity to consider this point in your career. Embrace the journaling session.
What about the things I’m not great at?
“Focusing on growth areas will help you navigate your career with intent vs. happenstance. Ask yourself: “Where do I want to go and how will I get there?” — Smruti Patel, 2021 “Navigating engineering performance reviews”
Try to let go of the idea that “areas for improvement” are “things you’re bad at”. When you consider where you want to be in your career, your “growth areas” are shifted from deficits to actual focus areas.
And if that doesn’t resonate, it’s okay to not want to be better at job-stuff. Late-stage capitalism means we all gotta work. Staying aspirational keeps me sane in the system. But, by all means, fake that section if it’s better for you.
Philosophies for writing your self-review
Remember that your self-review is not a persuasive essay.
Focus on progress. This is especially important if you’re caught up in disappointment about projects that didn’t ship or were rolled back. Your review should show you are always moving forward, even with setbacks. Whether you have a list of glowing accomplishments or a list of projects that didn’t go as envisioned, you’ll use your self-review to tell the story of your progress and growth.
Tactics for writing your self-review
Instead of long sentences/paragraphs, try formatting with Markdown headings and bullet points. Keeping the format light can help you focus on the content. (Secondarily, if you’re driven by empathy, your manager has to read a few of these, so they’ll appreciate the brevity, too!)
Trade your draft with a colleague before you submit it in the HR system. The (positive) social pressure of promising to swap edits with a coworker will help you avoid procrastinating. We’re often our own biggest critics, so your colleague can help you identify areas where you’re not giving yourself enough credit.
Prework framework
Now that you have some philosophies and tactics to follow, you can start the prework.
Step 1. Brain dump/Research
This is probably the most time-consuming and annoying part of the process if you don’t keep regular reflection docs (like a work journal). Gather all the evidence you can of what you’ve done in the last 6–12 months. This includes:
- Docs and decks
- Closed authored/reviewed PRs
- Figma Drafts and Recents
- 1:1 and meeting notes
- Non-recurring calendar events
- Slack @mentions and DMs
- Other nice things people have said about you
- Company Changelog and blog posts
Try to first list everything you recall off the top of your head without looking anything up. Then, go back to fill in the blanks.
Step 2. Metrics/Impact
For each project from Step 1, try to quantify its impact.
Not everything you’ve worked on will have a flashy number directly tied to activation, retention, or revenue. Being personally solely responsible for making the company’s key KPIs go up and to the right is not realistic, but you have contributed to positive metrics! And there are other ways to measure your work.
- Speed/performance or accessibility wins
- Time/effort saved for internal process improvements
- Volume of work (number of icons designed/audited, number of PRs reviewed)
- Stats from a refactor or vendor software upgrade
- Social validation (Tweets, the rare positive HN comment)
Identifying these metrics can help your work prioritization next cycle. If you can’t find any measurement for a project, or your metrics are often about breadth rather than depth, it may indicate that you and your manager should change your focus for the next review period. For example, identifying that you merged 400 PRs could be a signal that you’re not working on the right things vs. merging 4 high-impact PRs.
The goal here is to connect your work to a measurement to show its value. Otherwise, you’re just listing completed tasks. Listing completed tasks is for stand-up, not for the performance review.
Step 3. Skills, not just deliverables
Your projects and their impact from Steps 1 and 2 show impressive results. Don’t forget about the skills you’ve developed in the last 6–12 months. Your “growth areas” or “areas of improvement” are likely skill-focused rather than project-focused. Consider your achievements in skill development and how they’ve helped you in your project work as accomplishments, too.
- Soft skills are skills!
- Communication, collaboration, leadership
- Glue work often fits in here
- Resilience, mindset, personal growth
- Developing hard skills
- New frameworks/libraries, optimizing vendor software, new focus areas
Step 4. Acknowledge your wins
The self-review can essentially be distilled into two questions: What did you accomplish and where do you want to grow? Be sure to answer both completely, with care. It’s easy to be hard on yourself. Culturally, you may find it’s really easy to be hard on yourself and really tough to acknowledge your successes. (If you’re deeply struggling here, tag in a trusted coworker to help you.) Balancing your accomplishments and growth areas shows self-awareness.
This is a chance to advocate for yourself. No one else is as close to what you’ve done as you. Your manager can’t remember everything you’ve done in the last 6–12 months. Take advantage of the opportunity by writing it all out with pride.
“You are the only person with complete insight into everything you do. You are the person who can most accurately and effectively hype yourself.” —Marie Chatfield Rivas, 2018 “You Are Your Own Best Hype Person”
“Give yourself permission to pause on your work and reflect on what you’ve accomplished. Don’t skip your reflection just to get something submitted.” —Neha Batra, 2021 “An engineer’s self-review guide”
Start writing your performance review
The mechanics of actually writing the review are up to you. I like to write in my preferred text editor, where I’m comfortable and limited by distractions. I put on a study-along/work-along lo-fi playlist and a pomodoro timer to set myself up for a productive session. When I’m finished, I copy/paste the text into the platform HR uses.
There’s no single best way to write your review. Hopefully the tactics, philosophies, and framework above help make you more comfortable with the process.
Improve next year’s review process
- Start a brag doc or work log
- Consider supplementing it with a journal
- Ask your manager/skip-level manager for an alignment or leveling exercise together
- Collect nice things people say, keep a doc or folder of screenshots
- Mentor, coach, or sponsor your peers for continued leadership development
- Spend some time at the end/start of each month to do a “mini-review” with yourself or your manager (using your brag doc/work log as a guide)
Thinking about your performance review as an ongoing process with casual monthly check-ins can help you feel less overwhelmed than having two big, dreadful, panic sessions each year.
Closing
You’ve got this! 💪(• ᴗ •)🤙
Big thanks to Neha Batra for catalyzing my personal mindset shift for performance reviews while at GitHub. đź’•