Streamlining performance reviews
Simple organization tips to help prepare you and others for the big day
When my Product Design career began at Lyft, comprehensive performance reviews were very new to me. Over a span of 4.5 years and endless keyboard strokes, I have definitely been through my share of reviews and promotion rationales.
Feedback loops are one of those things “you can’t learn in school,” but through trial and error, you will develop efficient ways to go through the process.
But before getting started, what are performance reviews?
Generally, “perf reviews” are a way to track and measure your accomplishments in a specified timeframe (typically 6 or 12 month periods) and will be used to help determine whether you get a promotion or compensation adjustment. On the flip side, it is also a way for you to provide constructive feedback to your peers or manager.
Simple enough, right?
Nope.
Although it seemed pretty straightforward, I was not prepared for the challenges of tracking the many documents I would accumulate over time. These tips will help you organize your projects to provide clear and succinct assessments about your work.
1. Maintain a single source of truth
If you are unorganized, now is the time to break that habit of yours! For starters, I recommend creating a document to track all things related to your reviews and ratings.
💡 Pro-tip: If your company utilizes short links, create one for yourself and link it to the document for quick referencing. As an example, I use ‘go/ota’, which is easy to remember and easy to pass along to relevant individuals
The sections I have included within my document are:
- All ratings I have gotten from past reviews, each one linked to the formal feedback I have received
- Links to past docs I have written related to self assessments or peer feedback, organized by year and cycle
- Helpful internal resources, including career pathways, self-reflection tips, and performance/compensation FAQs
👉 Here is an example template you can useAnother recommendation I would make (which I will start doing myself), is to create another section to track accolades given by your peers. Were you praised in an email after a successful project launch? Or perhaps you were recognized in a team all-hands. Track your recognitions because they will become extremely valuable during promotion cycles.
💡 Pro-tip: Has no one praised or recognized you? Perhaps you need to start the trend! Don’t be afraid to recognize a teammate if they have been doing a good job. Build a positive culture and others will follow.
2. Identify project milestones
Until recently, I updated a separate document with key milestones throughout the year, organized by month. I personally found it useful to use Apple Notes, because it was quick, lightweight, and easy to access anywhere.
My (previous) method:
2021Apr 4/29 — 100% rollout, 10% decrease in drop-off rates reported'
4/12 — 25% rollout of product update
4/5 — Led design QA session, resulting in 22 bugs filedMar 3/22 — Organized team hike
3/12 — {{ Name }} — successfully led research kick-off by creating milestones and action items for the team
3/1 — Led stakeholder meeting with directors
I thought this would be a great way to look back at my progress and reference accomplishments, but I started to realize:
- Project highlights were scattered all over the place, making it difficult to connect the dots to create a cohesive story
- I would forget details of a summarized milestone over 6 months old
- It wasn’t helpful when it came time to recall or provide structured feedback to my peers
Beginning this year, I revised my documentation methods and now track milestones by project, not by date. By doing so, it will help me prepare a summary of work much quicker and my thoughts will be better organized. Consider this a “living document,” meaning, you will need to update content as it becomes available, as well as edit your content to be brief but comprehensive.
Here is a template to help you get started:
{{ Project Name }}What: What is the project you are working on? Summarize this in a couple of sentences so anyone outside of your immediate team can also understandWhen: When did this project start? When did it end? Or perhaps it is on-going. Providing a length of time will also become important.Who: Who were key partners closest involved in this project with you? Limit this to 3 or 4 individuals who are willing to provide you with feedback when the time comes. If they were in positions higher than your own, even better.How (most critical): How were you involved with this project and what were your main contributions? What did you lead, own, or co-drive? Optionally, try to include a quote from a stakeholder which highlights your strengths and leadership skills.Impact (also critical): What were the positive outcomes of your work? Include metrics as supporting evidence to help build your case.
💡 Pro-tip: Link any appropriate documents or files where necessary and once your project summary is near finalization, bold or highlight keywords to make scanning by others easier.
Every company will require a different set of criteria for performance reviews, so adjust how you document your work accordingly. To further strengthen your voice, ask someone to review or edit what you have been writing and by doing so, you won’t be scrambling at the last minute to organize these various aspects of a project.
3. Ask for feedback immediately
Once a project is wrapped up and still fresh on your teams’ mind, ask for feedback from one or two peers, but keep the process lightweight and simple — how would you like to receive their feedback so you could reuse it in future reviews?
Talking points to ask them to provide:
- What are one or two things you did well on the project and are there specific examples they can speak to
- What are one or two things that you could improve on or things they see potential growth in and are there examples they can speak to
- Be proactive and do a majority of the work for them: prepare an email with bullet points highlighting the things you’ve done well and things you’d like to excel in. If you can align these points with an internal career ladder at the next level, even better
- Ask if they can provide a quote that you could potentially use in the future
This type of feedback will also become valuable if an individual decides to leave the company. Once they have left, it will become rather difficult to ask for feedback, especially if it is months after they have left. Having a small record of their thoughts will be better than nothing in the future.
If you ask for feedback, keep an open mind and do not get defensive about any feedback given — at the end of the day, they are doing you a favor and trying to help you. However, I do encourage clarifying questions if their responses seem vague and/or you have better examples to provide them with.
Finally, once you receive the feedback, don’t forget to save and document this somewhere! Make it easily accessible for you in the future and stay as organized as possible.
Bonus: Supporting Figma files
One thing I wasn’t prepared for was organizing and using my Figma projects to cite my design work. In hindsight, what better way to advocate for ourselves than to use visuals.
I would keep this portion lightweight because whomever is reviewing your work will most likely be scanning everything quickly and won’t have the time to review a detailed journey map or complicated prototype.
First, I started by opening an existing project where the bulk of my design work was done and created a new page titled ‘Curated Selections.’ Next, within that document, I divided my design work into different sections, in order of importance and relevance:
- Current (live) experience: A snapshot of the experience being updated. 3–5 screens should suffice and be sure to be thoughtful with your artboards
- Final proposal: This is your pride and joy. It is a comparison of the screens cited above or a way to highlight the new user experience
- Explorations: Although we go through many explorations, keep this to a minimum and select the mocks that best represent your creativity and approach to problem solving
- Other: This section could include mocks from another designer or team you had to partner with or perhaps additional resources that helped with your design decisions.
💡 Pro-tip: Add a brief annotation to each mock. Chances are your manager (or whomever reviewing this file) will not remember the project or the details of each screen. Again, keep annotations extremely brief and use bullet points if needed.
Finally, be sure to copy and use the appropriate link in your documents so a person is taken directly to the correct page and does not waste time searching for the proper file to review. The easier it is to reference work within your projects, the more it speaks to your ability to be an organized and thoughtful designer.
⚠️ Caution: Before going through this exercise, speak to your manager and understand if this would be beneficial or if they have a recommendation on best practices to review your design work and contributions when perf reviews come around.
I hope the tips above provide you with a starting point on how to go about organizing your career journey throughout your company. This is not a strict framework and I encourage everyone to adjust these recommendations as needed.
In a follow-up post, I will provide further suggestions on how to write better project summaries and how to think about impact when you don’t have metrics to include.
Are there other tips or tricks you have learned throughout your career to help you streamline your performance reviews? Comment below, I would love to hear them!
Good luck on your next perf review or promotion! I hope this article provided you with some helpful tips.
