I’ll be frank. I hate writing about myself, and yet, it’s that time of year again, where it needs to happen, or else you’ve just made it incredibly difficult for your manager to go to bat for you for rewards or a promotion.
Here’s how I approach things:
Collect Links
If I’ve been good, the work that I’ve done has been generating artifacts. As a software engineer it looks like PRs, closed epics, various sorts of written documentation, and even text chats. For the review period find your links. You don’t need to digest them yet, just put them in a document, the more the better.
Synthesize
Found all your links? Good, for the next part we try to find common themes. Did you ship something impactful that moved key metrics for the company? Did you help someone else grow? Do you have examples of how you’re performing at the next level for that promotion you’re aiming for? Do you have key skills you’d like to highlight?
Write these out in bullet points and associate the backing links.
Be blunt about your career goals
Reflect a bit and think of what you want to try next. Do you want to try the management track? Go back to being an individual contributor? Interested in that rotation that will help you grow? Is life busy, and you are you happy where you are? That’s perfectly fine too.
Or perhaps, you have no clue what you want? That’s normal, but life is short. Why not work a bit to figure out which direction to try? Genuinely chat with folks in other roles to see what makes you excited. Try things and keep track of what gives you energy and what doesn’t. If this sounds interesting, I’ve found the book Designing Your Life to be very helpful.
Whatever it is, write it clearly. Chances are that you may be using this for the looking forward section. Ideally your manager already knows what your career goals are from your 1:1 chats. If you don’t write this part down at all, don’t be surprised if opportunities don’t arrive. After all, your manager cannot read your mind and they may not be experienced enough or too busy to direct career chats. Be clear and blunt.
Draw the owl
Okay you’ve got this! Using your collected themes and goals, write your feedback.
I like doing this in an outside editor like google docs. It keeps a record of my self-feedback if I ever move on, and it also saves work much more reliability than whatever terrible feedback system your company has likely implemented.
If you like procrastinating, one popular option is writing an excessively long AI chat prompt to summarize this for you. I find that it’s faster to just write it myself, but you do you!
Summary
- Find your work artifacts/links.
- Group them into themes.
- Clearly state your career goals. Your manager cannot read your mind.
- Draw the Owl (Just write it!).