End-of-year performance reviews often create stress for you and your teams. But with a few simple ideas, you can use this opportunity to more easily reflect on, learn from, and highlight your work.
Feeling the stress and not sure where to start? Here are a few concrete steps I’ve shared with teams and individuals (Maybe another time I’ll write something from the POV of the manager of Product teams).
Prioritize Your Review: Start early. Block out time now, ahead of day to day work. Many people delay this step, never creating the space and time to think, and end up rushing their self-review at the last minute. This approach doesn't do justice to your year's work and doesn’t help you synthesize and learn. Set aside dedicated time slots for thoughtful reflection ASAP.
Gather Feedback: Proactively seek feedback from colleagues and stakeholders early. Use this information as a growth tool, identifying your own areas of strength and improvement that you can blend into your own self-review writing and thinking for next year.
Focus on Impact: Shift from listing activities to highlighting impact. What tangible differences did your team’s work make? Think metric or revenue impact, improved user feedback, and/or other real-world effects. What did your team learn from shipping a project? Frame achievements around their impact and avoid just listing day -to-day activities.
Draft a Structured One-Pager: Jot down key highlights from the year on a blank sheet of paper.Then I recommend enriching these highlights with key details that fill in your story. Aim for one-page (max) bulleted outline across these key dimensions that matter:
Strategy: You created clarity and movement for a team’s plan of action to achieve its mission. The strategy and plan always has to be crystal clear to create execution. How did you facilitate this and what steps went into it?
Execution/Impact: Describe the outcomes and learnings of your work. Reminder, it’s the outcome that matters — so highlight that as independent from activity. Ex: X experiment shipped and Y was learned, or X improvement shipped and created Y impact. Articulate why X is better, more helpful, or maybe didn’t work but you still learned. Always be looking for the work’s impact on real people, real learning or moving the business.
Capacity: Reflect on team health, cross-team collaboration and contributions to team and company culture. Bonus points when you can highlight things you want to improve on or change.
Refine for Clarity: Spend a little time honing your one pager so it’s crisp and tight. Why? Because the impact and work will shine through more clearly. If you just blast away listing everything, the real impactful work blends in and is fuzzy. You want it to pop off the page.
Summarize in 80 words: Now that you have a clean one pager focused on impact, write a 80 word summary of that doc, and put that summary at the top of the page. Many mid to large company performance review calibration meetings flash very short descriptions like this on a screen as individual performance is discussed. At Facebook, for example, the internal tool at the time limited summaries for reviews to exactly 80 words. The best scenario is for you to contribute to this type of summary now—and even better is if you and your manager write and hone it in advance as part of ongoing 1:1s throughout the year.
Bonus tip: I’ve seen many people way overdo writing peer feedback and completely overwork themselves. If you are writing 20+ long peer feedback notes, that is too many/too much. Sign up for fewer peer reviews and focus on the ones where you and that person worked the closest. Set a timer and write each one for 10 minutes. Review once more before sending.
If this helped you think more clearly about leading teams or products, I write here once a week.
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