Exploring Early Career — Part 4: Preparing for Performance Reviews
Co-authored by Jessica Fan
Stepping into a new career, whether you’re a recent graduate or shifting your professional focus, can feel overwhelming. Effectively navigating your new environment while expanding your knowledge and network presents a challenge that, if approached with care, can foster professional growth in many rewarding ways. In the early stages of your career, the choices you make and the resources you leverage can significantly shape the way in which you impact your community and contribute as a developer!
This series will outline tips and strategies that will make this daunting endeavor a bit more digestible and help you leverage the resources you’re given to identify your strengths and build a robust network to propel your career.
Roadmap
- Understanding what the expectations are for yourself as an early-in-career engineer
- Learning how to navigate a relationship with your manager(s)
- Finding and learning from mentorship
- Owning your career growth
The focus of this blog is owning your career growth especially around performance review! There is a ton that you can do for yourself in advocating for yourself. While your manager is the one who will ultimately be conducting your review and will do things like put you up for promotion — there are still actions you can take to make sure you are driving your career forward and tracking opportunities for growth.’
Proactively work with your manager to align expectations and track performance
As highlighted in part 2 of this series — knowing how to navigate a relationship with your manager can be really integral to career success. This is especially important come performance review time. Different managers have different approaches to performance review — some will be very proactive and drive these conversations and some will expect you to drive them.
Managing your career growth is something you should ideally do continuously with your manager — not just at performance review time! When it comes time to perform a performance review, you should be working with your manager to ensure they have the correct visibility into your work and accomplishments.
Be proactive with your manager about where you fall on the spectrum from your current level and at the next level. Especially if you are going for a promotion, don’t assume that your manager knows the ins and outs of what you’re doing — work with them to build a solid promotion case, and pick their brains about what you could be doing to help yourself. Your manager will ultimately be driving your performance review and present your work to any performance review board (if your company has one) so you want to make sure they are representing you well and understand the work you have done.
Get continuous feedback!
Feedback (from your manager and teammates) is very important for your growth. Learning to give good feedback is a skill in itself, and it’s important to both give and ask for feedback from your team. Make sure to ask for feedback on a regular basis, especially on your areas of growth. Do not just wait to get feedback at performance review time when you can be blindsided. When asking for your manager or team for feedback — ask them for specifics! For instance if your manager/team says something like “you are doing good!” — it is okay to ask them to dive deeper and say what specifically you are doing well.
One strategy you can take here with your manager is to do an analysis of every attribute at your current level and of if you are meeting, exceeding, or sometimes meeting that attribute (and do this for the level you are aiming for as well). Your manager should be able to have open and honest performance conversations with you as you are doing this. If you do not think you are getting good feedback from your manager, then speak with your skip manager or a mentor about this. Your manager should be explicit with you about your performance. Some questions you can ask are:
- “What rating do you think I’m tracking against right now?”
- “What else could I do to demonstrate I’m meeting the expectations of the next level?”
Track your accomplishments
Make sure you and your manager are also tracking your accomplishments and any goals that you have hit! A strategy that works well here is maintaining a weekly hype doc — you can track PRs as well as any metrics here. To ease into this you can even track non-PR wins such as slack threads where you were helpful, references meetings where you made good contributions, as well as any non-pr documentation (confluence articles, google docs) that you wrote or contributed to. Experiment to see what works best for you to track your work.
You could also consider keeping a work journal of what you work on, questions you ask, and things you learn. It’s a good way to measure your progress and you can look back on it in a few months and see just how much progress you’ve made.
Understand and Highlight your impact
Remember at performance review time that it is also important to highlight the impact of what you have accomplished. For example, a project you led or contributed to could have led to 90% automation or made an endpoint run 50% faster.
Like with feedback, proactively getting a sense of the impact of the work you do can really help! When you work with your manager to define what projects will help facilitate your growth and identify areas of work to be done, the two of you should also align on what success metrics look like here and regularly track them in 1–1s. These metrics can come from numbers that the team’s projects are aiming to impact when they land (ex. This new feature led to 20% more adoption) or can be other technical metrics such as performance gains, number of lines of code removed, etc. You can also have success criteria on ‘softer’ metrics — things like how communication skills are developing and/or how smoothly leading a feature or project goes.
If possible and if you are comfortable doing so, you can ask your manager (or a mentor) to connect you with someone who did a recent level jump you are aiming for. It can be useful to know what kind of projects they did and how they framed the impact as a starting point for you on framing your own projects.
There are many ways to frame impact — working with a manager, senior engineers, and mentors on this framing can go a long way. If your team has a product manager, they typically have a great sense of impact and can help you!
Wrap up
Performance reviews can be daunting and figuring out the best approach in order to transition up a level can feel difficult, but hopefully leveraging some of these strategies can alleviate some of this difficulty! Being your own advocate is a skill that one must learn throughout their career and especially when you are early in your career. We hope this series has provided some insight into some avenues to explore and skills you can develop in order to own your career growth!
This concludes our series on navigating growth in early career! If you haven’t already, check out our earlier posts on avenues to navigate growth linked above in our Roadmap section!
