This post is part of my weekly engineering manager competency review series. At the end of each week, I publish a review of the notes I thought over the past week. My goal is to create a log where I can capture these insights for future me to review.

The competencies below are from Square's Software Engineering Career Ladder.

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Coaching & Development

The goal is to coach, provide timely, actionable feedback, and invest time in career development of team members; e.g., via 1:1s and aligning employee growth with opportunity.

What's New

• Ditching numbers in performance reviews

It's performance review season again and so I thought it would be nice to ask around what could be improved in how we are doing performance reviews at Apollo. I asked a mentor from PlatoHQ what to do when people ask what does a 3.8 or 3.9 means in a performance review. I was hoping my mentor would tell me I should create some rubric for calculating scores. My mentor told me that giving people scores is a bit tricky because it makes it the focus of the performance review. What my mentor suggested instead is to ditch the scores and use words to describe their performance. Instead of using a number like 3.9, try just using "Meets Expectations" or "Exceeds expecations". When we use words, it shifts the focus to what someone did a good job at and can do better.

Do Better

• Being clear which metrics contribute to performance reviews

In a recent performance review call I had, a report asked me about the impact of the Slack message metrics we add in their performance review documents to their performance review. One think I can do differently next time is to arrange the document in a way that it's clear which items directly affect their performance review rating.

Action Item

• Update performance review template to be clear about which metrics affect their performance review rating