How to Get the Most Out of Your Next Performance Review
Learnings from writing and reviewing 100+ perf & promo packets
Do you like writing self-review documents every 6 months?
There’s no escaping it.
I used to hate spending multiple weeks every six months to get a good rating.
I never liked preparing for self-reviews. Until my manager helped me find a way to be excited about it.
Today, let’s talk about how you can turn your reviews into accelerator for growth.
In the rest of the post, I’ll use “perf” as the replacement word for self-review.
The template that I’ll share with you captures my learnings after reviewing 100+ perf packets. You will learn how to:
🎯📍 Focus on the right things on your perf
📊🚀 Use Perf reviews as a tool for accelerated career growth
📝🌟 Create a structure to format your responses to highlight impact
🎁💝 Bonus: Get the template that got me the highest rating at Google, twice!
We’ll get started with who’s looking and what are they looking for.
There’s a lot to cover today, let’s get to it!
🧐 👀 Who’s looking?
This is fairly company specific but typically it’s,
You
Your manager
Peers you ask for review
Managers in your organization
There may be others in your company or for higher levels. For example, Google used to have out of organization reviews for L6+ promotions. But for today’s discussion, this wouldn’t be very relevant.
⁉️ What are they looking for?
The secret behind writing a good perf relies on your understanding of the audience. Unfortunately, you’ve a single document to convince everyone.
My biggest mistakes were,
Treating perf as a periodic public status update
Summarize what I achieved during that period
Not providing clear evidence for impact
Writing very long stories that hid my achievements
Most of the time, your performance rating is directly tied to your compensation. My mistakes cumulatively have cost me a lot of money. I learned about the importance of the audience when my manager pointed them out. Here’s what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes:
You: Instead of treating it as a chore, see perf as an opportunity to demonstrate impact.
Your manager: They’re your partners and biggest advocate. Work with them to create the document. It should equip them with all ammunition needed to defend your promotion or rating.
Peer reviewers: They are looking for data points to include in your review. Make it clear where you collaborated with them.
Organizational managers: They are mostly looking for impact. Often there’s a stack ranking. Basically engineers within the same level gets ranked. Your perf needs to make it very clear why you deserve that high rating.
Their job is not to hand them out. Every organization sets a budget on these things. Often the decision depend on your ability to convince the committee that you deserve it.
When you know who’s going to read your packet, you can customize it accordingly.
🆙 ⏫ Level Up your Career with Perf
I was always in a hurry to finish my self-evaluation. It was just another chore on my list. I got lucky because my manager caught this before it was too late. Let’s explore how you can use Perf as a tool to accelerate growth.
📍 1. Set a target rating: Chat with your manager at the beginning of the cycle. Set goals and align with a target rating. This will help create accountability and facilitate continuous development.
🏃 2. Maintain a work log: Drop every win into a living document. However small or big. It’ll save a lot of time and be the primary source for “What did I do?”
🪜 3. Align with ladder expectations: Match your achievements with organizational expectations document. Most organizations have these. If not, work with your manager to define expectations for your current and the next level.
👥 4. Know your peer reviewers: Work with your peer reviewers to explain areas to focus on. This will help you avoid surprises. Your peer reviewers are going through their own reviews. Senior folks usually get many of these requests. Expecting they will have all the context will disappoint you.
Using these tools you can make this tedious process benefit your career. As you get more involved, you’ll be essentially shortening your feedback cycle. In an ideal world, a peer or manager shouldn’t wait for reviews to provide feedback.
When developmental feedback impacts you’re next year compensation, it loses effectiveness. Whether you’re a leader or IC, proactively identify and close gaps. Don’t wait for it to impact salaries.
💥 ✨ Success Formula: Structure for Impact
Exponential impact comes from optimized ideas and a stellar delivery mechanism. Now let’s focus on how you can organize your perf to demonstrate maximal impact.
My mistake was to dump all details in my perf. This made it difficult for others to understand:
The problem statement
The impact it had on the business
The complexity of the problem
What was my contribution
You can avoid this by structuring your perf. On your next perf try this form,
Objective: Clearly communicate the problem statement.
Impact: Highlight metrics to demonstrate impact. Don’t leave any room for ambiguity here.
Difficulty: Briefly explain the challenges and the complexity of the project.
Leadership: Feature any coordination or ownership attributes.
Team work: Bring out any intra or inter team collaboration.
You might need to repeat this pattern for each of your projects. Consider combining related items under a single title. The goal is to demonstrate the maximum impact with fewer words. Typically there will be a limit of 1000 words.
🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts
Mistakes I made with not writing good perf packets had real financial consequences. I got lucky with a leader who showed me the path. It was a game changer for me when I shifted my strategies. Many engineers struggle to connect their ratings to their work. It might feel unjust at times. I hope you can apply some of these into your next self-review and get better results.
Be specific and be concise. Formats and pillars might differ between companies. What are some important factors for your organization? Share them in the comments!
Do you want a template that you can use directly in your next review? Subscribe to Leadership Letters and reply to the welcome email. It’s a free forever publication, what’s there to lose?
If you are an existing subscriber, thank you for supporting me in this journey so far. Please reply to this email and I will send you the template!
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👋 💬 Get In Touch
Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.
If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org.
If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.
Great approach. Many people see the performance review as a result they have no control over.
Instead, we have to focus on the next year's review, not on the one we just received. Work backwards from that review to achieve the objectives!
Awesome share Akash, I think it's really good advice for performance review.
Something I also use to bridge company expectation and peers feedback, is to create a form aligned with what the companies expectatioms are. This worked as a support for my log. 3rd party support for your brags of the year provides more credibility to them.
Also really happy you enjoyed my post and thanks a lot for the mention.