The #1 Mistake To Avoid During Performance Reviews + Taro on Web 👨🏽💻
Happy August — it’s National Sandwich Month! Today we’ll cover:
The main insights for software engineers about performance review.
Taro now has a (bare-bones) web app! app.jointaro.com
Estimated reading time: 3.3 minutes 🔖
Improve Your Performance Reviews
Thanks to the ~500 of you who joined us to discuss how to navigate your performance review. The biggest mistake we’ve seen among software engineers in performance review is assuming that others understand their work.
To avoid this issue, discuss each of your projects in 3 parts:
What is the project?
Why is the project interesting and/or challenging? (explain the context)
What role did you have in the project’s impact?
If you make it simple + easy for someone to understand your impact, you’re already doing better than the majority of engineers. Here are the other takeaways from the session:
Understand the perf review process. Who decides promotion, and what role does your manager or TL play?
Work with your manager at the beginning of every cycle to create a clear and living expectations document. This should be written down.
Be deliberate about the peers you want leaving feedback on your performance review. Assemble that cast at the beginning of the cycle and build deep 1:1 relationships.
You can find the session recording available in the Taro app. An unfortunate part of every perf system is the PIP. I just made a video about what you should know about PIPs here:
Taro now has a webapp!
Intuitively, an upskilling product for a knowledge worker will be used primarily on a laptop. So it’s surprising that we haven’t had a web app for Taro until now. We hope the app makes it significantly easier for you to discover + apply the content.
Yes, we are planning to get some design help :P We’d love your feedback!
From the 100+ Taro Premium members, we’ve gotten great feedback around the Q&A database, where you can find questions according to company + level. You also get access to an ever-growing set of case studies (I recently did one about my promo to E6 at Meta and receiving Additional Equity). You can also ask your own questions as a Premium member.
Our next live session on Aug 27 is about how to be an amazing interviewer (LinkedIn event). We’ll talk about the job + mentality of an engineering interviewer, which is valuable as both an interviewer and candidate. See you there!
Best,