Assess accomplishments, not responsibilities
Q2/2023 has only started, and many of us are still ~3 months away from the Performance Reviews process.
Yet it's already a good time to think of how you will assess your teammates.
If you do regular 1:1s with constant feedback and discussions about expectations, goals alignment, achievements and lessons, you are fine. Performance reviews should bring no surprises.
If not, start practicing this. 👇
Assess accomplishments, not responsibilities.
So when your teammate does self-assessment, rather than this:
"I did a great job, because I was responsible for..."
- hiring
- testing and quality
- software architecture
- building new features
- teammates onboarding
Expect them to come with that:
"I did a great job, because I..."
- Improved quality from x to y
- Hired high-performing team member
- Built architecture that helps with parallelizing work
- Helped new teammate to push new change within 7 days
Ideally, accomplishment should come with the outcome too:
- ...improved processes so that we can deliver to our customers more frequently
- ...increased code coverage, so we have fewer production bugs
- ...fixed critical issues, so the conversion rate is x% higher
- ...improved pipelines so that we can deploy x faster
