Performance reviews

It’s performance review season and my annual reminder that your job is to make it easy for your manager to let their peers know how awesome you are. Ideally you’ve kept notes over the course of the year. If not, now’s the time to document the concrete things you’ve done.

Focus on ways that you’ve measurably improved

• the value users get from your product
• the way the business makes money
• the productivity of the organization

Don’t forget company specific expectations and ways you have helped others grow.

A company-specific expectation I miss from Microsoft is “how have you leveraged the work of others?” This is such a brilliant cultural hack to fight NIH and promotion driven development.

Former Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo on performance reviews