Make the Most of Your Performance Review
Get inspired to make your next performance review your best one yet with these insights from a senior designer.
你好 designers!
I hope your performance reviews went well and that you're feeling energized for the months ahead. I recently had my own performance review and I wanted to share some tips that I found helpful in making it a successful experience. The tips are coming a bit late, but you can save them for later. 👀
As a product designer and facilitation enthusiast, I've always felt that traditional performance reviews can be a bit dry and difficult to understand. That's why I've made a habit of making my performance review sessions more visual. This year, I did just that using Figjam to create a clear and concise picture of my performance so I can have a smooth discussion with my manager.
Feedback
During each performance review, we gather feedback from our team and colleagues about our work and how we can improve. This feedback often comes in the form of text, which can be overwhelming to process. To make it easier for my manager, I distilled the feedback into patterns and presented them in a bit more format.
Competence Mastery
At Klarna, we have a competence mastery program that outlines expectations for each level of our career path. As a Level 3 Senior Designer, I'm working towards becoming a Level 4 Lead Designer. To help me understand what I need to do to reach my goal, I assessed myself against each of the statements in the competence mastery program. I graded myself based on my progress, with red indicating that I have not yet met the expectations, yellow meaning that I have made progress but still have work to do, and green indicating that I have successfully delivered on the expectations.
Now, Next, Later
With the feedback from my peers and my own self-assessment, I created a plan for the next 6 months. I divided my goals into categories based on the time horizon to keep my priorities straight.
Moving Forward
After my performance review, I had some ideas on how to improve the process. Next time, I plan to focus even more on making my performance reviews visually appealing - the reviews are an important part in accelerating our careers after all.
I also want to jog my peers' memories of what I have accomplished in the past 6 months and make it easy for them to write compelling feedback that can help me accelerate my career. I also aim to write more persuasive self-assessments that clearly show what was expected of me and how I met those expectations.
With five months until my next performance review, I have plenty of time to prepare and make it the best one yet. I hope these tips inspire you to make your own performance review process more engaging and impactful.
Best regards,
Dan