Insights on Performance Reviews: Week of December 9, 2019

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I’ve been researching the performance review process and talking to customers about what they like and don’t like about the process. Here are the key insights from the week of December 9, 2019:

• I is the VP of Marketing for a 60-person startup.

  • The biggest insight: Issac felt our software was appropriate for folks who “don’t know how to toot their own horn.”

  • He also mentioned Jen Mueller (founder of Talk Sporty to Me) that people are always looking for more concrete feedback (aka objective).

  • He mentioned the Storybrand framework. That is, marketers are obsessed with making the product the hero. Instead, the customer should be the hero (aka “Skywalker”) and the products should be the guide (aka “Yoda”).

  • He also mentioned the three mind states customers have:

    • State 1 external: I need to get this performance review done by the deadline.

    • State 2 internal: Can I get it done?

    • State 3 philosophical: This really shouldn’t be that hard to do.

  • He shared how he branded SkyTap. Originally it was called a “cloud service” which is a bit too vague. Then he positioned it as “the cloud for legacy applications” which helped and then he coined this tagline “We do the lift without the shift.”

  • He shared the story of purchasing Grammarly Premium. He thought it was a good investment in his career development, especially with writing. He did not expense it to his company.

• S is a principal researcher at Microsoft. He recalled an experience as a UC Berkeley Ph.D student where him and his cohort were reviewed / ranked. Everyone’s review was the same with the exception of a key sentence, and everyone had to look at the office door to see how the sentence was different.

• M is a design (front-line) manager at Expedia. He recently finished up reviews for his team last week. While he is empowered to buy tools, he’s usually empowered to buy design tools not non-design tools.

• Ashvin is a former Seattle startup founder. He mentioned that two pieces of advice that might be relevant for me: 1) figure out the sales process (who to sell to, how will it be sold) and 2) get some letters of intent (LOI) signed.

• J is a data scientist at a major LMS provider in Salt Lake City.

  • His company has 4 to 5 corporate values (used to be 8). He doesn’t really remember them aside from “openness.” [He tried to recite them and mentioned “responsibility” which is incorrect. It’s actually ownership, relationships, openness, and simplicity.] At his company, he’s found the values aren’t really enforced.

  • He believes only 10% of companies actually have strong corporate values.

  • His previous startup tried to emphasize values more, but they were very convoluted so it wasn’t as impactful.

  • He felt that employees ideally want to work for a company whose corporate values they believe in.

  • But he felt executives have advantages to having vague corporate values. It could minimize discrimination; it can also allow them to tap into a larger pool of potential recruits.

  • He leads a data science team of three. His boss doesn’t have fleshed out OKRs for him, but OKRs are important to him (he’s a goal-oriented guy). So he defines OKRs for his team.

  • The to-dos are tracked in Atlassian’s Jira.

    • He finds Jira to have a pretty bad UX. For example, when you hit “End” it doesn’t go to the end of the item. It goes to the end of the page.

    • He feels there’s opportunity for a new player to replace Jira, but it’s very much an entrenched standard.

    • He can use their own software Bridge to track OKRs. But very few people use it, even though it’s their own software. Nobody wants to open it in a new tab.

    • He was a big proponent of having our software functionality within Slack. Some of the most popular Slackbots are Google Apps (everyone) and TripActions (managers).

  • He also tracks OKRs within his own notebook; he does 1:1’s with his team 3X a week.

  • Lastly, he’d love to get stats on certain phrases. Like I used this phrase with S, and then have S rate “This phrase was effective (5 out of a scale of 5).”

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