A personal performance & feedback system
The target audience of this post are ambitious, self-driven product folks seeking a better performance management system for themselves than a typical company performance review process offers.
First, an anecdote on feedback
Some years back, I was in a 1:1 with a PM on my team discussing her working relationship with her counterpart Engineering Manager. She was reflecting happily on a major breakthrough they’d achieved. After months of struggling through adversity & under-performance, their team had recently started to turn the corner. And the interpersonal relationship between her and her EM was stronger and more trusting than ever before.
A few weeks prior, with a nudge of encouragement from me, she had mustered up the courage to initiate some very candid feedback conversations with her EM. In those conversations, they frankly laid out and debated their expectations of each other - and identified places where they were falling short. While this was a hard and slow process, it helped them identify their misaligned assumptions, clarify their implicit expectations of each other and diagnose gaps. And they started to tackle them together with almost immediate impact.
At the end of a fairly gratifying 1:1, I suggested that she might want to have another candid feedback conversation with her EM soon. My suggestion took her aback somewhat - why would that be necessary? aren’t we in in a good place now? My rationale was simple: candid conversations about mutual expectations are healthy, and can occur consistently - whether you’re in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ space. And in fact, these kinds of conversations are typically only seen as ‘hard’ because we often wait until the situation gets ‘bad’ to have them.
In our subsequent 1:1, it was her turn to surprise me. She had committed herself to having monthly-to-quarterly ‘peer feedback’ sessions with her EM and with multiple other cross-functional partners too. She realized that those sessions could act as a forcing function for them to continuously align their expectations, share feedback & build deeper relationships. This ultimately turned out to be a major unlock for the team.
She had built a mini performance & feedback system.
Process vs. system for performance & feedback
I write this post at a time when many organizations have recently conducted their formal performance review processes. These typically occur in Q1, which coincides with the beginning of the fiscal year for many organizations. Having participated in many of these cycles over the years, I have observed an interesting pattern of tension they tend to bring to the surface:
Company performance review processes tend to be very high-fidelity, but sporadic (1-2x per year). When I speak of fidelity, I’m referring to many things - the structure, the rigamarole, the variety and depth of feedback (ex: self review, manager review, peer reviews) and the level of investment that goes into them.
Our individual approach to analyzing & evaluating our performance tends to be low-fidelity, but continuous. We have an ongoing dialogue within ourselves that seeks to contextualize our perceived performance highs & lows into a cohesive narrative - relative to the expectations we have of ourselves in our careers. This is especially true for the ambitious, high-achieving types among us, and folks who operate with strong growth mindsets.
Upon reflection, my sense is that the asymmetric nature of this dynamic is a useful demonstration of the difference between a system and a process. In this particular context, the system is our personal performance & feedback state machine (#2 above). In contrast, the process (#1) is a specific, limited ‘how’ that is intended to influence the general system to be more effective.
There are two meaningful takeaways from understanding this concept:
Formal performance reviews do not need to be the only, or even primary, input to your personal performance & feedback system.
If your personal performance & feedback system is well specified & developed - you have a higher likelihood of any input process to it being more efficient & effective.
The remainder of this post offers a simple ‘architecture’ for what a personal performance & feedback system could look like.
Architecture of a performance & feedback system
Any complex system worth its salt requires a set of continuous, well-oiled & interleaved feedback loops to run effectively. In my opinion, the core feedback loops needed for a personal performance & feedback system are to:
Solicit & seek inputs from your peers & colleagues
Validate & calibrate the inputs you receive from them
Synthesize & prioritize the inputs in your wider system
Distribute & align your processed outputs with others around you
Solicit & seek
First, you should seek to diversify the inputs you are receiving about your performance. This requires you to move away from formal performance reviews (with both their strengths and limitations) acting as the primary or outsized input to your system.
Here are some questions you might want to consider to do this:
How may I get insight into my performance from others on a continuous basis?
How may I ensure that the feedback I’m getting is balanced & diverse in nature (thus minimizing the risk for bias and blind spots)?
How may I provide a mechanism for those around me to easily provide feedback?
On the last point, I’ve found it useful to explicitly tell my peers & colleagues that I am open to and eager for their feedback. It’s easy to assume this will happen naturally, but that isn’t always true. It depends a lot on the comfort & trust level they have in your relationship - and their own judgement of when it makes sense for them to share feedback. Additionally, on a more nuanced note, many strong performers tend to give off an impregnable aura that can make it challenging for others to give them feedback.
Validate & calibrate
When you receive feedback, it’s important to take the extra time to validate that you understood what was intended. In other words - did you get what they meant, beyond what they said? This is valuable for two reasons:
Distinguish the message from the messenger. Feedback can be valuable, even if the person sharing the feedback is imperfect or limited in their ability to convey or communicate it.
Deepen trust in the relationship. Validating the feedback is a way to demonstrate your genuine curiosity, which builds trust & reduces the barrier for entry for future feedback conversations.
An alternative framing on this process could be - try to avoid garbage in, garbage out. It’s easy to reach the wrong conclusions and actions if you misinterpret the substance and intent of the original feedback. So it’s worth taking a bit of extra time to validate & calibrate that your ‘sensor’ is picking up the right inputs.
It’s worth pointing out that up until this point, I have not implied that you must agree with the feedback you’re receiving. In fact, you might actively and vigorously disagree with what you’re seeing or hearing come through. Regardless, there is value in establishing a high-quality open channel for your peers & colleagues. You still reserve the right to deprioritize or filter it out later.
Synthesize & prioritize
As I stated above, the inputs you receive from others are by definition additive to the ‘state machine’ of performance & feedback you are running continuously. This system is running on top of all of your own inputs, priors, tendencies and patterns of past feedback from others. When you add new inputs into what is already a complex system, things can get… messy.
This is why you need to spend some time trying to synthesize & prioritize incoming feedback. By synthesizing, I mean identifying patterns of feedback that you are seeing & hearing. By prioritizing, I mean determining what set of actions you may or may not want to take, based on patterns of feedback.
At a high-level, I’ve often found that patterns of incoming feedback can be:
Confirmatory: feedback that is validating & strengthening your existing knowledge of your own performance. This is most common, and typically requires no ‘new’ action on your part.
Contrarian: feedback that goes against the grain of your prior knowledge of your own performance. This could be signal or noise - and if it’s signal of what could be a stable change, you will want to either reinforce it (if positive) or preempt it (if negative). This type of feedback is less common, but can be quite insightful.
Novel: feedback that is brand new and should be cause for deeper introspection, or possible a deeper reevaluation of the entire system. I’ve seen this feedback tend to correlate with major shifts in your operating environment (ex: new company, new team, new role…)
Synthesizing feedback patterns & prioritizing actions to take based on them is the core and gut of your performance & feedback system. This is where the magic happens, and there is no single formula or playbook to run this system. You are fully empowered to design this bespoke to what your needs are, and it requires your unique critical thinking & judgement to be personally effective.
Distribute & align
Your personal performance & feedback system intersects with those of the many peers & colleagues you work with. At the core of teamwork is a solid understanding of mutual expectations, and where you may be exceeding or missing them. As a result, it’s important to design any ‘interface’ that you create with your colleagues re: feedback to be bi-directional in nature. This is especially true for your direct team-mates and closest colleagues.
Don’t be shy to share the ‘outputs’ of your system with others. This includes gratitude for their feedback to you, where you landed on it after you had a chance to process it, and also sharing feedback inputs for them to be more effective. And also, pay it forward. If there are ways you’ve learned to tune or optimize your system over time, you can share with others going through similar personal development too. There is mutual benefit in doing so.
Lastly, a footnote on the perils of feedback
One of my core tenets as a product leader is that empowered people build empowering systems (products, teams, communities…) that unlock durable, positive outcomes. This tenet has guided much of my work and career - and the driving motivation for this post.
Feedback, on the other hand, is not always empowering in nature. In some cases, critique can be quite disempowering or even crippling. This often stems from either the quality of the message, or the dynamics & relationship you have with the messenger. It’s important to acknowledge that increasing feedback channels alone may not lead to positive outcomes for you.
If this issue resonates for you, I hope that this post lays out a model for a system that is fundamentally empowering - because it puts you at the center. Your ability and rigor at synthesizing and prioritizing feedback is at the core of making this entire system work well. And hopefully it gives you some mechanisms to manage both valuable and counter-productive feedback.