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The Ultimate Guide to Ace Your Annual Performance Review

The Ultimate Guide to Ace Your Annual Performance Review
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya / Unsplash

As we're in the middle of February 2023, companies are starting with the annual performance reviews. I wanted to write this issue of The Weekly One On One to distill down some really important lessons I learned in the past years.

I’m hoping that these lessons will help progress in 2023 (and beyond).

Like most advice, it should be taken and adapted to your specific situation rather than followed blindly.

Without further ado, here is my process of preparing for the performance review.

1. Structure

First of all you want to be prepared with facts.

But you also need a way to structure them.

I've tried different approaches over the years.

The following structure I adopted from Julia Evans' idea of a Brag Document.

This outline helps me understand what I accomplished, learned and how I impacted my team and the company.

  1. Projects you worked on
  2. Collaboration & mentorship: how you helped your peers
  3. Design and Documentation: what and why
  4. What you learned: people, tech, lessons learned

2. During The Meeting

I like to do 2 things during the meeting:

  1. Make notes
  2. Ask questions

Making notes helps me being present during the meeting. It is also the safest way for me to capture and categorize feedback and action items on the fly:

  1. Things to improve
  2. Things done well
  3. Promises made by me
  4. Promises made to me
  5. Goals

It is also an excellent way to ask follow up questions.

Once during a review I was given a grade: 100. The next one would be 120, so I asked what I needed to do the next year for it to be 120. We had an interesting discussion about how 100 and 120 look in the real world and left with practical steps to implement.

3. After The Meeting

There is usually not much to do after the meeting to impact or change its outcome.

But times flies and what you can do now is to start preparing for the next review.

  1. Review your notes from the review meeting regularly (set a monthly reminder)
  2. Start adding items in the structure from #1 on a regular basis (set a weekly reminder)

Those 2 habits will make the next review a breeze.

That's it for today