đ This year create a strategy using your 360 feedback (it saved me a year in my promotion)
Transform feedback into actions đ
When I joined Amazon, the yearly 360 process happened in my 4-month mark
The feedback confirmed I was doing good in my onboarding.
While encouraging, when I turned 8-month tenure, the feedback didnât apply anymore.
I would need to wait 8 months to get an useful signal.
I wanted to get a clear direction on my next steps.
So I arranged with my manager an informal 360.
He would ask people and provide me with their feedback anonymously.
I identified clearly what were my next steps for growth.
By the time I received the next formal 360 feedback 8 months later, I was already promoted to the next level.
Itâs not only about receiving feedback. Most companies I know have a yearly 360 process
Itâs about taking action on the feedback.
â In this post youâll learn:
How to identify real signals in your feedback blurbs
The 3 types of signals to obtain from your 360 feedback
How to take action on these signals
First, understand the feedback
đ From free-text blurbs to data
With different people writing about different topics, itâs easy to get lost.
If your company has some role guidelines, tag each feedback with the criteria itâs talking about.
If the blurb is all over the place and you canât identify any, just ignore it. You donât have to take a learning from every feedback.
đŞ Strong and weak signals
Imagine you receive 10 feedbacks.
If 7 out of 10 highlights a weakness and potential improvement in your verbal communication, thatâs a strong signal you should take action on.
If only 1 out of 10 talks about the level of your code deliveries, then you should better ignore it.
Weak signals are not your priority. You can improve any area for sure, but take the action with highest return on investment.
đŞ The 3 signal types
1 - Strengths
If a kid is strong in maths and weak in English, parents would put the kid in English classes instead of finding opportunities to develop that math talent.
We wonât do this. Weâll make sure the kid studies a STEM career.
2 - Weaknesses
We wonât aim to become top performers in those areas, but wonât leave them unattended dragging us down.
Our goal is to be average on them
3 - Potential opportunities
Both low-hanging fruits and the grand vision of what you can achieve in your career.
In the usual positive/negative feedback, structure you may find this signal in both.
In the positive, new ways to apply your strengths.
In the negative, people may call out a recommendation. Something to work towards in the future to minimize the downside of weaknesses.
Then, create a plan
đ˝ď¸ Identify project opportunities
Leverage your strengths to create impact.
If people wrote you great feedback (check đ˛ How to write great feedback in 360 reviews (every year)), they may have made recommendations of opportunities for you.
Like any feedback, use your critical thinking to decide if taking action on it
Discuss with your manager how to apply your strengths to your teamâs roadmap
đWork backward from next yearâs desired state
This works for strengths and weaknesses.
Identify a vision of what you want to achieve by the next 360 review.
Then work backward from it setting up milestones during the year.
A personal example: I wanted to become a solid SDE2 and I saw an opportunity to join an engineering group in my org .
The milestones for these were (I fill them from latest to soonest)
Q4: As a tenured engineer in an engineering program, I propose improvements to my team and the org.
Q3: Finish the onboarding and participate proactively
Q2: I apply to the engineering program and follow their onboarding.
Q1: I analyze all the engineering programs I have available and pick one. I may join any other in the future, but not this year.
đď¸ Change your habits
Small changes in daily actions drive big results.
Evaluate your current actions considering the data you have gathered.
What can you change to remove low-value actions and create room for something better?
What can you change to limit the impact of an identified weakness?
What habit, when repeated over time, will set you up for success?
Iâll give you an example: If you identify a weakness in how you lead the meetings, set up a system to write meeting notes after each meeting.
This will force you to lead meetings with a structure to fill those meeting notes. Itâll also improve the impression people have of you.
đ§ Plan checkpoints during the year
Plans fall apart. Itâs nature.
Donât fight it. Plan for it.
We love making plans at the beginning of the natural year (or the work year after feedback). This is known as the Fresh Start Effect.
Now that you are creating the plan, set up reviews in your calendar.
đŻ Conclusion
Itâs hard to be objective when evaluating others.
Itâs impossible to be objective in evaluating yourself.
Incorporate feedback as a central piece of your career growth actions.
Join the people with lean career growth
đ Weekly applause
I found these articles insightful during the week:
How Uber Finds Nearby Drivers at 1 Million Requests per Second by
. I have never worked with geospatial data. It was insightful to see how Uber indexes hierarchically locations with H3 and how they treat the raw GPS signals from the drivers.How to get đŠ done as a software engineer by
. A clean implementation of multi-scale planning (monthly, weekly, daily). I like having more databases and views to capture more content, but the essence of task management is the same.Is Work Life Balance a Myth for Software Engineers? by
. The degree of completion of tasks is not that much about discipline but about managing that workload properly. Besides Ravirajâs framework, a simple rule of thumb is to have visibility on how many different open things you have at the same time. The more you have, the more drained you may feel.Soft Skills Every Software Engineer Needs And How To Improve Them by
. A comprehensive list of skills to master in our job and our life. I found helpful to reflect on each as I was reading.
Understanding the feedback is crucial. It makes you well aware of what's it about, and putting clear plan on addressing the issues in the feedback is as important as well.
Very well crafted piece, Fran!
Working backwards from goals or objectives has been a challenging but incredibly valuable shift for me.
I started trying it out when I first did my Maven course and needed to work backwards into, "How am I going to finish this by X date"
But now I find myself doing it more and more for other things too, like my annual goals.
Thanks so much for the mention in the article, Fran!