Are Your Engineers Unicorns?
Engineers at Careship must be sound in more than programming. Here is how we track and develop our professional careers.
Feedback culture
One of Careship’s core values is an open feedback culture. We welcome any feedback, and everyone is encouraged to share it. It is crucial in all Careship teams and positions to help us get better and prevent conflicts before they arise.
Careship’s People and Culture team organised a couple of workshops for the whole company. They explained the importance and benefits of open feedback, prepared a few example situations and provided guidelines on giving and receiving feedback.
Giving feedback is sharing the impact that the Receiver’s behaviour had on the Giver with the purpose of helping him grow, self-develop or become more self-aware.
(Christopher Tripp. Feedback Manual. Retrieved May 2, 2021, from https://members.eyp.org/sites/default/files/news/files/feedback_manual.pdf)
Feedback in the Engineering team spans from peer-to-peer everyday work, code reviews, ideations, retrospectives to bi-weekly 1-on-1 meetings between an engineer and a manager (the author). Twice a year, we perform 360-degree feedback between an engineer and a supervisor with input from the team and coworkers from other teams.
We believe that 360-degree feedback is essential for developing engineers’ careers, setting and tracking goals, and maximising the engineers’ value for the team.
Scorecard FTW!
How to motivate individuals with various qualities? Everyone is different. How can we compare individuals? How to provide visibility and set expectations? Feedback talks are tailored for individual engineers, but they all follow the same framework — we call it the scorecard.
Inspired by countless scorecards and skill matrices, we created a scorecard fitting our small team and the idea of engineers with more than just programming skills.
We group skills loosely into three categories on the left-hand side:
- technical skills,
- product collaboration, value understanding,
- social competencies, personal self-development
and describe four skill levels — junior, mid-level, senior, unicorn — in four columns, leaving the fourth column empty to be defined by engineers reaching the top of the scale. Senior engineers know themselves, their team and our product well enough to express the unicorn level together with their supervisor and use their expert potential as well as possible.
The goal is not to become the best in every row. Everyone is a little different. However, we encourage every engineer to rank somewhere in the higher half of each skill.
The manager’s task is to identify strengths and weaknesses and help the engineer reach their full potential. Together we work on finding the right place within the organisation to have the most impact while creating a strong team covering all parts.
How do we use the scorecard?
Our goal is to reevaluate the scorecard every six months. That allows us to set challenging goals and have enough time to work towards them. Biweekly 1-on-1 meetings help us stay on track.
The preparation has two main parts: self- and manager evaluation. Along with other general questions about happiness and collaboration, both the engineer and their manager prepare a rating for each row of the scorecard, numeric and verbal. Together they review their rating during the conversation and settle on a status quo.
The second goal of the feedback talk is to identify a couple of goals and improvements. We often stick to one or two goals, allowing us to focus on each of them. The achievement of the goal should be, in the ideal scenario, projected as an improvement in a rating in one or more scorecard rows the next time we reevaluate it.
We define SMART goals —Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely — and the scorecard is a big help.
The whole team benefits
Careship’s Engineering scorecard isn’t only technical. It aims to capture the engineer’s personality, communication abilities and self-awareness. All of these are critical features helping the team achieve the best possible outcomes.
The scorecard helps engineers identify gaps in their knowledge, collaboration, and potential improvement. Last but not least, it sets clear expectations on professional growth and shows the path of professional development.
If it’s well maintained, it helps managers support the growth and development of their colleagues, highlights gaps and potential improvements in a team, and serves as a guideline while searching for new talents for a growing team.
