perf_reviews.md

Performance Review Writing

This assumes the specific format for performance reviews we have now. Here are the specific steps I take:

1. Keep notes throughout the year for specific praiseworthy or critique-worthy things the person does. This especially helps prevent recency bias.
2. Before looking at the person's self-assessment or peer reviews, write a quick pre-review. This can be a simple set of bullet points including achievements/praise and areas for improvement. This can come from the list in the above step, looking over the person's tickets for the past year, and overall impressions. It need not be especially detailed or time-consuming. The point is to get your own independent thoughts captured before they are influenced by others. I try to capture as big a list as I can of specific achievements, two or three key strengths, and two or three key areas for improvement.
3. Read the self-assessment and peer reviews. I like to print them out so that I can underline and highlight things. After reading the self-assessment, I'll note down the top two/three ideas that emerge, including areas of interest to the person.
4. Then, I'll incorporate what I've just read into my original pre-review. This may mean just reinforcing points I've already captured, or it may mean swapping them out for other points if those new perspectives have changed my thoughts. I'm essentially trying to come up with a 360-degree mental model of the person's key strengths and weaknesses, given all available data.
5. Though it's rare, I might ask the person or peers to elaborate or explain more about their feedback.
6. At this point I'll usually have my first conversation with the person. I'll talk through the achievements, strengths and areas for improvement. You can have a big laundry list of achievements, but it's important not to provide more than 2 or 3 (maybe 4) strengths or improvement areas. You do want to have at least as many positives as negatives, or ideally slightly more. If you provide too many of these, then the person doesn't know what to focus on -- whether positives to double down on, or negatives to work on. In fact, having just one area of improvement might be the right thing. In a review, it's not your responsibility to faithfully list out everything the person needs to work on. It's your job to use the review to the best impact in the person's growth and success. If you give them 7 things to work on, they won't remember them and if they do, they'll diffuse their energies, or might choose to work on lower-impact things that are more memorable to them. (Note that you may still end up including some of the lesser points in the peer feedback area.) In this initial conversation, you want to check that you're essentially on the same page as the person about where their strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance is at.
7. In that same conversation, you can start to talk about goals. This should include taking the person's expressed career interests and goals, incorporating a shared understanding of their current performance, and coming up with goals that address those areas. There's some difficulty in not just imposing goals -- the person should come up with goals themselves so that they have ownership over the goals, but the goals also have to be specific enough to be meaningful. For example, "get better at testing" might be a legitimate area for improvement, but it's too vague to be a meaningful goal. One of the questions to ask in this situation is, "Let's say that a year from now, we're looking back at all the improvement you've made here. What looks different?" This can be a bridge into identifying good specifics.
8. The person then may have some homework on their goals -- to go back and come up with a good set of goals.
9. Then your job following on from this is to write the actual review, given the pre-review and conversation. I break the main manager review into four sections:
   1. Summary: you may want to write this last. A quick summary of the below sections
   2. Achievements & Strengths: a mix of what impact the person had, including specifics accomplishments, alongside notable strengths/positive traits
   3. Growth Areas: A few (usually 2-3) areas that, if address, will be most impactful for the person's growth. This may be something that they're doing wrong that's holding them back, but can also be an invitation to a new opportunity or skill that they haven't developed
   4. Next Steps: One or two paragraphs of prose indicating the kinds of goals you'd like the person to have in order to grow, incorporating their own stated interests.
10. Add a judgment on their performance against previous goals. Be accurate and tactful.
11. Add peer feedback in the appropriate section. You can summarize it or copy it verbatim. I will usually copy it verbatim, but might make small edits if it helps make things more clear, helps provide a little more anonymity, or takes the edge off a critical comment without actually changing the message. I don't think the peer feedback has to be censored to only include the key things I wanted to highlight; better to allow that transparency. Though I may cut out comments that don't seem to add much value.
12. You should be continuing to help the person develop goals -- this may take a couple more conversations. After a conversation and verbal agreement, I may write draft goals and then ask the person for feedback on them. This often helps expedite the process without trouncing over ownership. Though it's also great if someone writes their own goals.
13. Once that's done, then it has to go to the manager's manager for approval. This should be mostly a rubber stamp process, but there might be some important questions to address.
14. Then, send the final review to the person and give them a day or two to read it.
15. Walk through it in a meeting. At this point, this should be straightforward, even boring, because nothing should be a surprise.
16. Throughout the year, check in occasionally on progress against goals and growth in general.