In any company, you would be hard pressed to find any process that impacts people’s behavior more than performance reviews.

People may ignore the company’s mission, principles, the supposed culture, but never ignore how their performance is evaluated. For this reason, reviews have the power to shape culture more than anything else — by rewarding good behavior and correcting bad one.

Yet, there isn’t much consensus on how to have them.

Sure, we have plenty of examples, usually from big tech, but most other companies use their own recipes, which are sometimes similar, sometimes remarkably different.

Some companies don’t have reviews at all, some run committees, some run peer-based processes, and more.

So, today, like we often do on Refactoring, we will unpack this by reasoning from first principles. We will figure out the goals of performance reviews, list various approaches, and evaluate upsides and downsides.

Here is what we will cover:

🎯 Why we have reviews — let’s not take anything for granted.
🍱 What goes into a review — work summary, feedback, and goals.
🙋‍♂️ Who contributes to the review — the role of subjects, managers, and peers.
🤝 How to have the review — a practical, step-by-step process.
🔀 Alternative approaches — case studies from unconventional companies like Valve, Netflix, Morning Star, and more.
📚 Resources — templates, articles, and books to learn more.

Let’s dive in!

🎯 Why do we have reviews?

Reviews are personal conversations about growth and career. You hold them to provide feedback and set people on a growth path.

Of course, reviews aren’t the only time (hopefully 🙈) where you touch on these topics: good feedback is continuous — it happens daily, in 1:1s, retros, and more.

Such moments, though, are mostly tactical. They are meant to steer the ship to catch more wind, or to avoid a storm. Reviews, instead, are strategic. They are when you take out the map, lay it on the table, and decide where to go.

This difference is similar to what you see in other processes, like planning. Weekly cycles and (e.g.) quarterly goals complement each other. If you only ran weekly sprints, you would end up doing mostly small, iterative improvements. If you only did quarterly planning without frequent check-ins, you would set goals but likely diverge from them.

So, for this reason, it’s always a good idea to have performance reviews, regardless of your team size. Small teams and startups may hold simpler reviews, because planning is uncertain or career frameworks are simple (or absent), but some version of them is always useful.

🍱 What goes into a review?

A good performance review includes three main things:

📋 Summary of your work — during the last period.
🔍 Feedback about your performance — during the last period.
🎯 Goals and priorities — for the next period.

There are more conversations that descend from these, most notably about promotions and compensation. But they do not strictly belong to the review itself, and I also argue you should have them separately (more on that later).

Moreover, for any of these items, there are three types of people who can contribute: 1) the subject of the review (with self-reviews), 2) their manager, and 3) their peers (with peer reviews).

These all have a crucial role. Let’s look at what goes into a review from the perspective of a manager, and then cover self-reviews and peer reviews 👇

📋 Work Summary

The work summary includes projects people have worked on and what they specifically did in them, including notes on scope, impact, collaboration, and more.

You need to get this right, as it is the common ground on which the whole review is built.

You can find a lot of advice online about how to get this right, which mostly says to go through everything your reports have done, just in the weeks/days before the review. Now, while you definitely need to dig through tools and docs, I have found that if you only rely on this, you are in for a bad experience.

In fact, when you go through stuff (e.g. design docs, emails, issue tracker) that is months old, most often you don’t have the context for a fair judgment anymore. Not to say that it’s a ton of stuff. Multiply that by, I don’t know, 6-7 reports, and it is just unbearable.

So, as engineers, one of the things we are good at is splitting big tasks into smaller ones that are easier to handle. My preferred way of splitting this is by keeping a journal about my reports.

The journal includes my notes about what they did and how. It isn’t for tracking who did what — you have tools for that — it is for storing my impressions: how they acted on feedback, how they worked with others, how they handled deadlines, and more.

I use these notes in two ways:

Performance Reviews 🏅

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