By Péter Szász in Engineering Leadership Challenges — Oct 7, 2024

Engineering Managers' Guide to Effective Annual Feedback

Enoch Wood Perry: Talking It Over (1872)

As we’re entering the last quarter of the year, the time has come when many tech companies start their yearly feedback cycles, providing formal feedback on the performance of their employees. While time-consuming, if done well, this is a great tool for Engineering Managers to make a difference in the professional life of their reports, so to help, I summarized what I’ve learned about this process during my career.

What's the point?

You might face some frustration about this process, as some find it unnecessarily bureaucratic, so it’s worth going through the values of it. The main goals of a regular, written feedback cycle are:

Recognition, support for self-reflection and personal growth
Alignment with team- and company needs
Documentation

Breaking these down with some explanations:

Recognition, support for self-reflection and personal growth

Hopefully, you’re giving regular feedback on the performance of your team members, but a more official, regular, written feedback cycle can further emphasize achievements and boost morale. Looking back on a successful year can motivate people and increase their engagement.

The self-review part of a typical feedback cycle strengthens self-awareness and career ownership, by forcing your team members to take a step back and critically assess their performance. The resulting ownership attitude will help develop the habit of continuous self-improvement.

Besides confirming (or challenging) their self-assessment, these formal feedback checkpoints help you identify blind spots and areas for growth that the individual might not have recognized.

While people own their careers, the role of managers is to help set challenging but attainable goals and give support to achieve them. A solid assessment that offers clear, actionable feedback to help individuals be successful in their roles is a great foundation for this work during the next period.

Alignment with team- and company needs

The feedback cycle is the time to clarify expectations for the coming year and, therefore, a good opportunity to compare the performance of the individual with the requirements of the current (and maybe next) career level. Similarly, this is a good point to discover any ambitions to move vertically or horizontally in the organization, something that can be worked on in the coming months.

You also need to ensure individual efforts are aligned with broader objectives. For example, if the company’s backend is built in Node.js, there’s limited value in a junior engineer starting to learn Rust. (Though it might be an appropriate tool for a Staff Engineer to fulfill their goal of increased scope of impact and finding performance improvement areas in the tech stack.)

In case of misalignments between individual performance and company needs, making these issues clear and explicit can help move the discussion from ignorance and dismissal to the support the person needs to improve.

Documentation

The output of the feedback cycle process is an actual document, which creates a record of performance and growth over time. This record can be a basis for future decisions on promotions and assignments — or performance improvement plans.

Having this track record ready helps ensure continuity even through management changes, and offers legal protection for both the company and the employee, should disagreements escalate. Also, well-documented feedback is a great source for picking successful projects and achievements for a CV.

Other considerations

While not the primary goals of feedback cycles, they are helpful in further areas too:

Relationship building, by deepening the trust and understanding between manager and report;
Skill development, by practicing giving constructive feedback, coaching, and mentorship;
Deepening organizational understanding, by gathering valuable information about personal performance and team health; and ensuring fair and consistent evaluation across the organization.

So, while it may seem like a bureaucratic chore, a well-executed feedback cycle is a powerful tool for both individual growth and organizational success. It's an investment in your people and, by extension, in the future of your team and company.

Preparation

Effective feedback is built on continuous work during the year, the most important cornerstone of it being regular 1:1s. Nothing someone reads in their yearly feedback document should come as a surprise. So, while concentrated work is just coming to you now, the difficulty of it and the quality of the outcome will depend on how much effort you put into regular feedback during the year.

As a first step, get familiar with company requirements: the timeline, format, etc. Check your company’s engineering career ladder expectations, review and refresh your understanding of the skills and behaviors expected from someone with the person's title. This ensures your feedback is calibrated to their role and level, promoting fair and consistent evaluation across the organization. Review company values and culture pillars too. Reflect on how the individual has demonstrated or could improve in embodying these principles, to help tie your feedback to the organization’s expectations.

Schedule calls to get further feedback if necessary from different people in the organization. Be mindful that others are juggling feedback tasks too, so you might need to give a longer heads-up.

You should block off appropriate time to write good feedback. I usually need around 4 hours per person to do a thorough discovery, distill my thoughts, and then write and finalize my feedback. This is a considerable time investment, but a good review's impact makes it worth it. Try to spread these writing sessions to different days, the exercise can be very energy-draining. Also, I find it helpful to have a final draft, sleep on it, and do the last edit with fresh eyes.

While doing your research, prepare specific examples to support your feedback points. Concrete situations help illustrate your observations and make the feedback more actionable.

Finally, consider potential emotional reactions and prepare for difficult conversations. Think about how to deliver sensitive feedback constructively and how you might respond to various reactions. Kim Scott's book "Radical Candor" offers excellent advice on delivering feedback with compassion and clarity. If you feel unprepared for potentially challenging conversations, ask for help from your People team or your manager. Just make sure to give them plenty of advance notice, as this is one of the busiest times of the year for them too.

Writing the Feedback

If you’re done with all the preparations and managed to block off a few distraction-free hours, it’s time to start writing.

The Main Document

I like to keep one big internal document for all the materials related to a person’s feedback. I typically don't share this with anyone, though there were some cases when it was useful that I could show the whole context to my manager when I was working on a particularly tricky feedback. This personal document has the following structure, and is filled out sequentially:

Kickoff thoughts: I have a list of questions that I answer first to myself, before looking at any other feedback or self-review. It has a double goal: first, to capture my unbiased opinion; and second, if there are many areas where I struggle to answer or realize later that I missed something, then it’s a good reminder for myself that I’m losing track of this person and next year I need to do a better job supporting them. A few useful example questions that can translate to most workplaces:
- What's my gut feeling about their performance?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are their blind spots?
- What areas am I not comfortable judging and how can I increase my confidence in them?
- What notable events do I remember them having this year? (Releases, incidents, talks, blog posts, etc.)
- What other aspects of their work can be relevant?
Others' feedback: The amount of material here hugely depends on the company, but ideally, you have peer feedback, 360 feedback (even from different teams and departments), a self-review, and upward reviews if you manage managers. I copy-paste them to this document so everything is in one place. You can also reach out to coworkers, mentees, partners in different departments, etc. The more specific you are with your questions, the less generic and more useful the answer will be. (eg: instead of "How was Mark doing this year?" ask "Mark was the dedicated developer working on the newsletter feature with you as the designer this year. What did Mark do that made the work easier for you? What did you find challenging during the collaborations with him?" — and you'll get better answers than "He was okay!")
To ensure I haven't missed anything, I quickly go through my 1:1 notes with the person and add high-level pointers to this document.
I like to dig up my last year's review to ensure continuity and full coverage. I usually don’t copy everything just the main points, to keep the document manageable.
The Actual Feedback: this is the main text that I'll write based on the above, and that I'll share with the person once done.
Delivery: I like to do a live delivery of feedback, see more details on that below. Here I'm adding a very short high-level bullet list that's in front of me during the talk, ensuring I'm not missing any important aspects. I also take notes in this section during the delivery about how the meeting went, their reactions, etc., so all information is in one place for later retrieval.

The Actual Feedback

The format of the feedback depends on the organization, but it usually follows a “positive” / “negative” structure, often euphemizing the latter as “growth areas”, “rooms for improvement”, etc. Refer to your organization's specific requirements.

If you only take away one thing from this article, it should be the concept of Strength-Based Feedback. Unlike traditional approaches that attempt to "fix" weaknesses, strength-based feedback acknowledges that, realistically, weaknesses can only be managed, not fixed. This approach shifts development conversations from problem-solving to focusing on growth, empowering employees to excel in doing what they do best. Strength-based feedback can lead to meaningful engagement and performance improvements and allows individuals to contribute more effectively to their organizations.

Think about it like this: if someone struggles extremely hard to “fix” their weaknesses, they have a good chance of becoming average-mediocre in that area. However, if they spend this energy to double down on what they already do well while being mindful of and compensating for their blind spots and weaknesses, then they can be exceptionally good performers.

Besides focusing on strength-based feedback, I try to follow these principles:

Be concise, don’t waste anyone's time;
Be specific and provide examples;
Avoid recency bias, focus on the whole year not just the last few months;
Don’t extrapolate from a big event (successful release or failure, promotion or performance problems, etc.), make sure you cover the whole year equally;
Avoid taking good performance for granted, and don't overlook long-lasting questionable behavior;
Be compassionate.

Recently, the use of Large Language Models, relying on AI tools to write reviews came up in EM discussions. My opinion on it is that I try to judge the output and not how it was created. If the resulting text is solid feedback, then I’m happy for you to save a bit of time by using ChatGPT. If not, you need to work more on it, regardless of the tools used.

I use LLMs to kick off ideas, simplify, summarize, structure, and validate my draft. I don’t use them to extend my text or make it sound more official. Some situations where I found AI-assisted writing useful:

Validating my draft feedback to ensure it contains everything from my notes;
Help rephrasing feedback to ensure it's clear and actionable;
Summarizing and structuring lengthy text into key points.

As always, check your company's policies on AI use first, and make sure you don’t disclose any sensitive or confidential information to third parties without previous approval.

When you’re done with your draft feedback, check with your manager and HR business partner, especially in case of the extremes: if you're planning to give feedback that ventures into performance problems, or if you know you'll want to promote your report soon. (In some organizations, you need to get an OK from your manager or HRBP before delivering the feedback, make sure you’re familiar with your company’s rules.)

Delivery

Once you have a final text, you need to deliver your feedback. Here are two approaches that I tried but didn’t work for me:

Sharing the written feedback in advance, then discussing it live. It’s easier to misinterpret my written words, miss the emphasis, only focus on the bad parts, etc. Ideally, the written feedback document initiates a great discussion, but this has less chance to happen if my report reads and digests the feedback alone. If your company has a strong async culture, where people are trained and used to interpret written communication maturely, then this might work for you. Still, I advise you not to skip the live part if possible, as it has great value in bringing a shared alignment and increasing trust.
Sharing the written feedback during a live discussion. I experimented with this when I was remotely managing people. The idea is to share my screen and go through the feedback, freely discussing points as needed. In reality, people need more time to digest and come up with good comments, so this ended up being a pair-reading exercise, which is a waste of time, and we only had deeper discussions in subsequent 1:1s.

What worked for me was having a live high-level discussion and then sending over the written feedback. In this setup, I only shared the main talking points of my feedback live, giving them a first chance to react, and in general, set the stage for my full feedback. I then sent over the written document and offered a follow-up call if necessary. This allowed people to process what I wrote at their own pace, and sharing the high-level points earlier ensured they were not expecting any surprises anymore, allowing them to better focus on details.

Avoid the compensation question — or know that nothing else will be heard if you bring it up. It's either good news, and nothing else in your feedback will matter; or bad news, and the person won't be able to focus on anything else. In both cases, your work that went into a well-balanced Feedback will go wasted. Separate the money question from the feedback and focus on what they were doing and how.

Avoid on-the-spot negotiations about the feedback. In case there's a disagreement, explain that this is your point of view, if you're factually wrong, you are happy to be corrected, but otherwise ask them to read through your feedback with all the details in their own time, digest it, and schedule a follow-up to discuss their points.

Follow-up

Sometimes, companies have processes that require both parties to "sign" their feedback. This gives some wiggle room to modify your written assessment based on feedback from your report. Stick to your main points (unless you're proven factually wrong), but show some flexibility in how you deliver them, and consider adding details if you missed something important for them.

Official feedback can be a great foundation for someone to build their next year's goals. Encourage your reports to do this exercise, to come up with what they want to achieve in the next 12 months. Start the discussion of how they'll approach these goals, and what support you can give for them. Tracking the progress of their development, referring back to the agreement you had after the previous Feedback can be a recurring topic once a month or so during your 1:1s.

If your feedback includes a warning about the risk of low performance, make sure you work closely with the person to avoid having to take more drastic steps. Support them with clear, explicit expectations, find tasks that can help them use their strengths to grow in lacking areas, and discuss regularly if the risk is still valid.

If you think the person is ready for the next level, your written feedback will be an important part of a promotion package. Discuss with your manager the process of nominating someone for a promotion, and only disclose to your report when you're confident of the process, to avoid setting overly optimistic expectations.

Once you're done with the entire feedback cycle (CONGRATULATIONS!), spend half an hour while the memory is still fresh to do a mini postmortem with yourself, and see what worked well, what parts of your process could be improved, and what you want to do differently next year.