Seven Tips for Review Season
Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash
It has been an incredibly challenging year for all of us. It can feel like so much and yet so little has happened. When it comes time to write your end of year review, you might find yourself at a loss. Remember that it has been a hard year for everyone. Instead of going in with the mindset of all the ways you’ve failed to live up to your goals this year, reflect on what you have accomplished. You originally created your 2020 goals with the mindset that it would be an ordinary year, so of course not every goal was met. That’s completely understandable.
Getting to this point where you are still at your job and still surviving is a huge accomplishment and one not everyone experienced this year. The goal of the review is to reflect on what you did accomplish. So take the time to promote yourself and be thorough, but go in with the mindset that you’ve already done more than enough. When you start to write it down, you just might find yourself amazed at everything you have done this year. You’re doing great!
Seven Tips
1. Schedule time for this work and break it up — In a traditional review setup where you have peer feedback and a self-review, most people write their peer reviews first and then do their self review at the end. There’s nothing wrong with this approach as long as you’re pacing yourself and giving yourself plenty of time. But you can easily run into problems if you’re writing six peer reviews the day before the deadline followed by your self-review. You just won’t have the energy by the end to do it well. Personally, I try to limit myself to two peer reviews a day and save a whole day for my self review. I will still do other work tasks on those days, but save my review energy for one or two tasks. As requests start coming in, I automatically schedule time to do the reviews.
Make sure you’re allocating a lot of time for your self review and if you’re someone who is going to procrastinate consider doing this first. This is your opportunity to highlight your accomplishments. Your manger will definitely remember the biggest things, but you are probably the only one who can remember all the details.
2. Search for what you worked on
It’s hard to remember what we worked on February under normal circumstances, but throw in a pandemic and it can feel impossible. Instead of wracking your brain, search through existing resources at work:
Notebooks / Bullet Journals — Skim through any notes you’ve taken this year for reminders on big decisions you’ve made this year, challenges you faced, etc.
Jira, Ticketing Systems — Search for stories created by you, stories assigned to you, etc. If you were scrummaster or involved in any major backlog grooming projects, include that as well.
Git History (or equivalent) — Look through pull requests you’ve submitted this year and search for the ones you’ve commented on. These will remind you of your biggest projects, but also the impact you’ve had on the team through this feedback.
Calendar — Skim through your calendar, looking beyond the recurring meetings toward the meetings you ran or attended. These can remind you of committees you were on, ways you helped teammates and related teams, design reviews you participated in, etc.
Emails — Search for emails you’ve sent and emails that you’ve received to remind you of key ways you helped people this year. I find this reminds me of simple things I did throughout the year that can add up to broader narratives about influence, mentoring, etc.
Wikis, Google Docs etc. — Look through the docs you wrote and the ones you’ve edited.
Prior Reviews — If you had a formal mid-year process, you’ve probably already written half your review. Make sure to use that as starting point.
This tip works well for your self review as well as peer reviews, especially for people you’re worked with throughout the year. Go through these resources once and write down rough notes based on what you find. This can include links to things you’re finding or just the names of the project.
3. Start with the big things and work backwards
Using the resources you’ve gathered above, start with a blank document for each review and write down bullet points with a few sentences to remind you of the big takeaways. I use the Notes app on my Mac and create a folder for reviews and a note for each person I’m writing feedback for. If you have the time start this a few days earlier, even better. As you remember things to write about, jot down some notes.
Here’s an example:
Interviewing
Project A — Launched on-time despite issues
Project B — Helped solve the high severity issue last minuteProject C — Got a lot of positive feedback from the team
Mentor for X, Y and Z
Committee D
4. Focus on Impact
When writing your self review and peer feedback you should write your feedback in the: Situation, Behavior, Impact (SBI) format. The situation refers to the context, the behavior is the action you took, and the impact is the result of your work in quantitative or qualitative terms. The hardest one to come up with is typically the impact. For projects that launched, ask your manager or the product manager for launch numbers or metrics. You can also look at internal dashboards or launch announcements that you have access to. But you don’t have to limit your impact to this type of data. Especially for OE and other tech projects, you can define impact in terms of hours saved or issues prevented. If you’re not able to get the exact numbers, an approximation is fine.
For recruiting and mentoring think about ways to clarify the impact you had (Did you contribute to hiring a new team member? Did you empower them to contribute fully after 3 months? etc.) If your team had specific goals or milestones, how did your work contribute to those? Whenever possible document these with links to wikis, code reviews, etc, to make your case.
5. Tell A Story
Regardless of the exact questions on your review, your self review should tell a story of your key contributions, your learnings along the way, and what you’re going to do next. Ultimately whether you submit this formally to your manager or not, this is your most important takeaways for the year so you can start crafting goals for next year. To get started, take your bullet points from above and notice what themes you have.
What did you spend a lot of time on this year?
What could you spend more time on next year?
What were the biggest challenges or failures you had this year?
What connects them together?
What do you want to do next in your career?
What do you need to focus on in 2021 to get there?
You can write out a few sentences about these questions and incorporate them into your review.
6. Include Everything
Ok, don’t literally include everything, but when I’ve shared these tips before people are always surprised to learn that they can include interviewing or mentoring or onboarding support. You don’t have to limit your work just to the big projects that your team delivered. Think about everything you did that was impactful and write it into a narrative. Once you have all these items you can definitely cut the items that are less important, but don’t arbitrarily limit yourself to certain projects.
7. Time Box
If you’ve started early you’ll have plenty of time, but counterintuitively this can cause problems if you’re dragging this on throughout the day. I try to give myself a set amount of time (let’s say 2 hours) and have that correlate with a meeting I have coming up, lunch, the end of the day, etc. to motivate me to finish on time. While you still want to maintain high quality for this document, sometimes this extra motivation will prevent you from getting distracted and allow you to be as efficient as possible with your time.
Before submitting read through one more time and then give yourself permission to submit and move onto the next review. Your review should be thorough, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Take the time it needs and make consistent progress, but don’t hold yourself back with trying to get it to 110%.
