Give yourself enough time, and start early

This process isn’t something you can knock out in an hour and do well. You have a million things on your plate, but plan to spend solid, uninterrupted time working on reviews. Work from home if you need to. You owe your team enough time to read the collected feedback, digest it, and summarize it well. My advice is to start by reading the collected reviews and taking a few notes, processing the information for a little bit before trying to write a full summary. Give yourself enough time to write and come back to what you’ve written at least once before you have to submit the review.

Most companies expect that managers will read feedback and anonymize it as part of writing up their summary, but some companies have open processes where the original peer feedback is visible and identifiable to the person being reviewed. Even in an open process, as the manager you should still read that feedback and use it as part of your review writing, since the manager review is still often considered the most important summary of all review feedback.

Try to account for the whole year, not just the past couple of months

This will be easier if you keep notes on what has happened with each person throughout the year. One tactic is to keep a running summary of your 1-1s, including any feedback that was delivered. If you haven’t done this, I encourage you to look through your email to remember which projects launched, review what activities were happening month by month, and put yourself back into the perspective of that time period. The goal for viewing the whole year is to recognize not just early accomplishments but also the growth and change you’ve seen since then.

Use concrete examples, and excerpts from peer reviews

Anonymize peer reviews, if needed. If you can’t use a concrete example to support a point, ask yourself if the point is something you should be communicating in the review. Forcing yourself to be specific will steer you away from writing reviews based on underlying bias.

Spend plenty of time on accomplishments and strengths

You want to celebrate achievements, talk about what’s going well, and give plenty of praise for good work. This goes not only for the writing process but also — and especially — for the delivery. Don’t let people skip over the good stuff in order to obsess over the areas for improvement, as many will want to do. Those strengths are what you’ll use to determine when people should be promoted, and it is important to write them down and reflect on them.

When it comes to areas for improvement, keep it focused

Writing about areas for improvement is often a tricky part of the feedback. In the best case, there are a couple of clear themes that run through peer feedback, and that you have observed, to comment on. Here are some examples of themes that I have seen. There are people who:

• Struggle with saying no to distractions and end up helping with other projects instead of finishing their own
• Do good work but are hard for others to work with, tending to be overly critical or rude in meetings, code reviews, or other collaborative activities
• Struggle to break their work up into intermediate deliverables, and don’t balance planning and design with getting things done
• Work well with other engineers but do not work well with other departments or teams
• Struggle to follow the accepted best practices of the team, cut corners, or otherwise do sloppy work

More often, you’ll get a lot of scattershot feedback that’s moderately helpful at best. Some people will seem to be reaching for something to say, and others will have a particularly harsh impression that no one else seems to share. Especially in the case of scattershot feedback, make sure that the feedback you’re seeing makes sense before you deliver it. For example, if only one reviewer mentions sloppy work, is the problem that the work is sloppy, or that the reviewer has higher standards than the rest of the team? Use your judgment in this case. If the feedback seems valuable for the person to hear, share it, but don’t just blindly report all grudges.

What about the case where you have very little meaningful feedback for improvement? This indicates that the person is ready to be promoted or given more challenging work. If the person is doing a solid job at her level but isn’t ready for promotion, the feedback should indicate one or two skills she needs to expand to become qualified for promotion. Some people may never need to be promoted out of their current level, but the nature of the tech industry is such that skills need to be refreshed to stay current, so you can also focus on new technical learning opportunities.

Avoid big surprises

Set expectations appropriately before reviews are delivered. If someone is underperforming across the board, the review should not be his first time getting that feedback. Similarly, if someone has recently been promoted, you may want to prepare her for the fact that she will be reviewed based on higher standards.

Schedule enough time to discuss the review

I usually give people a printed copy of the review as they’re leaving on the evening before the review is scheduled. This practice gives them a chance to read it at home, and then come to the meeting ready to talk about what it says. Even though they’ve had the review and gotten to read it, I still take the time to go over each section, starting with the strengths and accomplishments. Again, don’t let them skip over this and jump straight into the areas for improvement. Many people are uncomfortable being praised at length, but skipping that section undermines its value in reinforcing and encouraging their talents.

Some reviews are summarized by a scaled ranking, such as a number from 1 to 5 or the equivalent in words (“fails to meet,” “meets,” “exceeds”). If you have to do this, expect it to be the hardest part of the review to discuss for anyone who got anything less than the top ratings. In my experience, people are uncomfortable being told they merely meet expectations, especially those who are early in their careers. Come prepared to dig into the reasons for this score, including examples of how the person could achieve a higher score.