We just finished the first quarter of the year. With that, I tried something new. I went through a performance review cycle for everyone in my team. In the past, I've been doing this twice a year. This time, I decided to do a formal one every quarter. I found this both easier to do, and more impactful. I recommend it to anyone leading teams.

The Process

We work in 6-weeks cycles at Shopify. We aim to deliver a significant milestone at the end of every milestone. This means, in a given quarter we fit 2 cycles. Or in other words, we complete 2 milestones. This makes it very easy to reason about when going around performance reviews. It's much easier to reason about 2 milestones than 6 months or 1-year. With good note-taking habits and transparent communication, the process becomes straightforward.

I love Kent Beck's quote on software changes. We can apply this to performance reviews.

For each performance review, make the conversation easy (warning: this may be hard), then have the easy conversation.

An indicator of a conversation that went well is when there are no surprises on any side. To get there, we need to have a constant conversation around expectations. When I started leading teams, I found this was a difficult topic to approach. I kept doing it anyway, and like any skill, the more you do it, the better you become. It's not easy as an individual contributor easy. I aim to share feedback at least once a week and invite my reports to share feedback as well. This is habit building. The more we practice sharing feedback, the easier it becomes.

At the beginning of each quarter, we set intended outcomes. We keep track of these in a shared document and it's a frequent point of conversation to it during 1:1s. On top of this, I share any observations that I've had during the week. Either positive feedback, constructive feedback, or observations I've had.

To keep track of things, I build a list of observations and have an emoji system to categorize two things:

Here's an example for someone in my team in January. I keep a log in Notion of feedback I have. Each feedback is a row in the table with a date, a description, screenshots, links to PRs, and more. This makes it a very concrete thing to share, which results in focused conversations.

Keeping this log allows me to have a good source of documentation at the end of the quarter. It's not enough to log it, you have to communicate it. This ensures a transparent relationship and I've had great discussions around these points. It's also making my next step much easier.

At this point, I've completed most of the hard work. The next step is taking all the notes from my Notion log. Note that I've already talked about them with my report at this point. It's an exercise of summarizing and organizing those notes. I usually write the full evaluation in a single session without worrying too much. I give myself a few days to come back to it to tweak and to make sure I give the most accurate evaluation possible. Having it written down forces me to re-read myself and making it as clear as possible. I aim to have something clear enough that someone without context could understand what happened in the last 3 months. Once I'm happy with the evaluation, I'll book a meeting with the person, and share the full document ahead of time.

At this point, we've talked about this so much, it's almost annoying. There should be no surprise in the conversation and I usually walk the person through the written evaluation. I invite questions and clarifications, this is not a speech, it's a conversation. Once we go through the document, we talk about the next steps. If the person is not happy with where they're heading after 3-months, it's a good moment to adjust.

Having performance reviews every 3-months is a good forcing factor to talk about how it's going and course-correct if we want to. It's much easier to fit in 2 milestones and talk about them, than thinking about a full year of work. So far it worked well, and I'm looking forward to the next round of performance reviews