7 Areas Software Dev Manager Annual Review Template

Ian Nowland
12 min readOct 6, 2022

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For the last 5 years, I have been using the 7 areas of software management as a rubric for how I do annual performance reviews of engineering managers, at all levels — from line managers to VPs. With some tweaks over time, I have found it very useful as a framing mechanism to a frank conversation on successes and misses in outcomes they achieve, and mechanisms they could be using to improve things.

So, following is a template version of that mechanism. One thing to highlight before it is I include a couple of templated areas that I believe are very useful to frame the feedback. One is the data from whatever survey you do across all of engineering, highlighting their relative average performance across each area. I do this as while it is clearly biased, team happiness is one of the true objective areas of performance you can talk about.

The other though is more controversial, which is I paste in all feedback from peers and directs without names but also without any attempt to anonymize who is saying it, nor any immediate attempt to explain or interpret it. Rather, when I do want to explain it, I do it down below in the seven areas. I do this because:

  • I think we all know that attempts to generalize/anonymize feedback greatly lose the impact of detail.
  • I think one of the hardest challenges of a leader is maturely listening to feedback even as you strongly disagree with it. I prefer to be open about that challenge.

To be clear though, I wouldn’t do this for people < 5 years into their career, as they are usually still too attached to seeing all feedback through the lens of their ego and ambition.

In any case, below is the template, as well as some sample text that shows how I talk about performance in the area.

Last Engagement Survey Scores

<pasted verbatim just for reference>

Peer Feedback

Strengths

<pasted verbatim>

Areas to Improve

<pasted verbatim>

Directs Feedback

Strengths

<pasted verbatim>

Areas to Improve

<pasted verbatim>

Performance Evaluation

This is a mechanic based on the taxonomy of management areas described here . For each, I evaluate with a 10/30/50/10 Top/Exceeds/Achieves/Needs-Improvement scale, under an idealistic (i.e. not calibrated) weighting of my expectations of the level.

People Hiring/Developing/Culture (Value)

Org Hiring/Developing (Value)

This is only for managers of managers. This evaluates team growth, attrition and promotion across your org, where it is good/bad, and your personal involvement in making it better.

Example (Exceeds at Sr Director level): Overall you are doing well here:

  • Your team needed to hire quickly at over 50% year over year, and you have ensured they did, spending a large amount of personal time with recruiters, in interviewing and onboarding managers to make it happen.
  • Attrition has been negligible.
  • While there is some feedback from one of your directs about promotion rate, I know your org is not one that the data shows is slow in that regard, thus I tie it to the next section that you need to be more direct and transparent with your directs about their path and likely timelines to promotion.

Directs Hiring/Developing (Value)

This evaluates team growth, attrition and promotions across your directs.

Example (Needs improvement at Sr Manager level): Firstly, I want to acknowledge some circumstances that were a bit beyond your control given overload from carryover of past commits and under-hiring from your last manager, and also that you are already addressing changes. Still the feedback from your directs is pretty clear about lack of feedback, you missing 1:1s, and you making decisions for them in a way they feel disempowered. Now again, from our 1:1s I have no doubt that you want to and are in fact already addressing this, so the main thing is to make sure to stay on top of it even if things become hectic again.

Culture (Value)

This evaluates the data from engagement survey results, and what personal effort you have put into building a good org culture.

Example (Needs Improvement at Director level): it is clear from the engagement survey that your team is significantly less engaged/happy across all areas surveyed. Now as I have talked about, my experience with that case is usually it’s more about overall sentiment than specifics of all areas. And I think in this case, it’s clear in your teams a lot of the overall sentiment problem is a lack of feeling of connection of their work having value to the business. Now, I know some of this dates back to your lack of alignment in team mission with your former manager and so you were forced to take some hires who would never align. However I think we have got that to a good place, so going forward I think you need to engage in more practices so your team understands it and feels good about it. Things I have seen here are quarterly all hands, fortnightly demos/talks sessions, org wide update emails on wins and challenges. I don’t think you need to do them all at once, but I do think in this next period you need to find the time to start doing one.

Example (Achieves at Sr Director level): On one side your engagement survey results are exceptionally good, and from the feedback you are getting from your directs, I have no reason to think that will stop as your scope grows — you build happy teams with strong managers who have them understanding how they add value to the company. The one thing holding me back from “Exceeds” though is you have not done anything yet to bring your disparate teams together to a common mission. Be it all hands, cross team guilds, etc. I do think this “story of why we exist” is an important part of leadership, especially looking towards VP level.

Engineering (Value)

This evaluates:

  • Do you have good engineering strategy, architecture and implementation?
  • Are you achieving this as much as possible by delegating to senior/staff engineers rather than having yourself (or your managers) do it?

Example (Achieves at Director level): I would say until this is an area you struggled on the architecture side until the last 12 months. Now a lot of that was beyond your control, a lot of tactical asks, not enough people to do them, and so the right thing to do was wedge the asks into the existing systems. However with headcount growth you now have the ability to pivot, and you have personally taken that initiative to push along staff engineer YY’s, new architecture proposal of XX, which there seems to be broad agreement it’s the right thing. So all trending good; the main reason for saying “Achieves” in this period of evaluation is that implementation is only starting, and even in the next period, you have to cleanly hand this off so YY is clearly driving it, as sometimes it comes across too much as your technical vision.

Example (Exceeds at Sr Manager level): This is a total turn around from last year where the feedback was you were being a player-coach dominating the technical vision of your team. You hired a staff engineer, have promoted some of their ideas even as they conflict with yours, and helped them establish a relationship with your senior engineers where they feel a lot more confident they can own their own designs through a constructive RFC process. So beware of backsliding, but otherwise; well done!

Product/Portfolio Strategy (Value)

This evaluates:

  • Do you have a documented strategy of what you are investing in and why, with time frame appropriate to your level — (Sr) Manager=6 months, Director=1 year, >Sr Director=3 Years.
  • How good is your strategy in terms of all stakeholders (engineers, product management, management peers, eng leadership) being on board with it?

Example (Needs Improvement at Director level): This is the main regression from the prior review, and it is somewhat difficult in that you did not have too many options at the time due to other things taking a lot of your time. However you did have a few options, and more than that, should have a lot more opportunity going forward. So getting to the point: clearly your peer feedback shows they are questioning your team’s decisions on not delivering enough incremental value on current systems, instead focussing too much on new ones. Now, while I personally think you made the right choices given tops down priorities we could not deliver in the older systems, part of Product/Portfolio Strategy is the management of expectations, and it’s clear you did not do so here. Now, going forward with 3 TPMs, a Staff engineer and an extra Eng Manager, and a team finally free of urgent business enablement goals, you has the resources to better communicate your roadmap and its rationale of priorities.

Example (Top at Director level): Can’t say enough good things here. As we all know, the Product Management org at this company can’t think beyond 3 months in terms of priority, which is fine for many systems, but yours have outgrown that as a planning timeline and you were starting to disappoint peers that you seemed to be moving too slow. I asked you to take the initiative to do what you can, and you not only put together a high confidence roadmap, you got your product parter to collaborate, and the complete buy in from your peers. That includes in the decision to consolidate one peers system XX with your system YY. Finally a couple of peers took your template and have started to use it themselves. Overall, really well done, please continue.

Execution (Value)

This evaluates:

  • How your teams are delivering against goals — both formal ones like OKRs and larger commits, but also informal ones where you tell me a certain thing will take X time and I sign off on you doing it.
  • Otherwise the absence of feedback that people are concerned that your org isn’t delivering the right things, or isn’t delivering in a timely manner.

Example (Needs improvement at Director level): I think we both know this was not a great year for your teams for execution. It is fine to miss dates. It is not fine to miss dates across multiple teams and multiple times with extremely short notice from the date. Yes, some of this is on your TPM, but you need to be active in your engagement with them in the steady state, rather than ignoring things until it comes to a head late then trying to come in and micromanage. You have many things you do naturally well as a manager such as people management. This is not one; so you need to find a way that you are engaged so that myself, my leadership, your teams, and your peers all don’t get these massive last minute surprises.

Example (Exceeds at Director level): In terms of seriousness to the growing business in owning mission critical high tech debt systems so you need to balance operational excellence but also needing to execute on new initiatives, there are few harder tasks at the company than your org. Yet in the face of things hard tops down dates on initiatives XX and YY, you not only kept your teams executing; but had them as early executors, leading the cause for other teams who thought you would be the long pole. This comes with costs in terms of asking your engineers to do more toil than most, but was absolutely what the company needed in this period, and you led your team to deliver.

Operations (Value)

This evaluates:

  • Are your orgs engineers/systems causing lots of incidents, or a fewer number of really bad incidents?
  • Are your orgs engineers burning out on toil or pager load?
  • Are you spending the appropriate amount of time (not too much or too little) ensuring their org is putting the appropriate amount of time to ensuring so.

Example (Exceeds at Director level): I am a “proof is in the pudding” judge here, and while I do have some concerns about level of tech debt that built up, in terms of actual outcomes to date, your team has done a great job staying on top of it by all metrics, and I know you are doing a bunch of processes each week to stay on top of it. Thus a warning that you may need to find a better balance ahead, but to date you have done a great job of supporting the company’s rapid growth without burning out your team.

Example (Needs Improvement at Director level): It is clear that your orgs focus on delivery has cost them reliability. Your sev1 incident rate has been high at > 2 a month over the last 6 months, for a wide variety of root causes. It has not cost the company a large customer yet, but it’s clear we are walking the line. I think the question for you is how do we start getting ahead of the game here — your “ I have 2 lifesavers to bring in for all my bad issues” approach has worked for us in the past but now needs to change given our growing scale in employees and importance of your systems.

Partners (Value)

This evaluates:

  • How many escalations have I had to intervene in between your and your partners — both personally and across your orgs?
  • Are you asking your most important partners for feedback, and are they willing to give candid feedback (of course knowing this could as much be on them not wanting to put effort in)?
  • Where there is tension with partners, have I received communication from you that there is misalignment, why alignment is difficult, and what you are doing to try and improve it?

Example (Needs improvement at Director level): Everyone respects your judgment and willingness to work hard and do what is right for the company. On the flip side, as the examples that have escalated to me the last 6 months have shown, you can be quick to show frustration when you think someone is doing the wrong thing, often escalating your concerns it to high leadership very quickly without first trying to personally and resolve them. Overall this is an area where for you I think “your greatest strengths are your greatest weakness” is true; you rely a little too much on your drive to bulldoze things through with clear short term success, but its costing you relationships in the long term — i.e. people are starting to avoid collaborating with you.

Example (Exceeds at Director level): It is clear that you have built strong personal relationships with your peers that has brought your team some trust and time to build what is needed. You should continue to do so, with the main warning being that this way of keeping the peace is O(peers) usage of your personal time, and the number of directors at this company will steadily grow, as will their team size and they will become less in touch with their team’s unhappiness until it boils over. So you still need to invest in other more scaleable mechanisms.

Company (Value)

This evaluates:

  • Have you spent time to add value to the business outside your direct scope
  • Are you leveraging that time to find its most valuable use, as opposed to falling back on things that we could achieve similar outcomes if done by someone more junior?

Example (Needs Improvement at Sr Manager level): By nature you direct all your time and focus into activities directly related to your team. That was fine at line manager level, but now you need to find a way to create leverage across the organizaiton. We have talked about a couple of examples here such as taking over (and improving) my orgs weekly reliability meeting, which you have been a critic of. Next step for you is taking something like this, and showing you can lead it.

Example (Exceeds at Sr Manager level): Between the external talks you do and the fact that you lead the hiring guild for my entire org, you are clearly more than carrying your weight here in terms of leveraged impact.

Example (Exceeds at Director level): A natural strength for you, shown by your leadership of our coding interview squad, participation in giving multiple outside talks aimed at company wide hiring, and finally being a site lead. If anything this is one where I worry you are spending too much time vs challenges in your own team, and so going forward I recommend you find a way to delegate the interview squad to a staff engineer to lead it forward beyond you having so much involvement.

Example (Achieves at Sr Director level): This is a tough call as you are on the company wide incident commander rotation, which is a massive time sink for a busy leader of leaders, and until recently there was no real option for you to get off. So to clarify, I think given the limitations of the program you did the right thing staying on the rotation, this was high leverage value to the company, and if I was judging purely on merit I would say Exceeds, as there are clearly peers doing much less. Thus, the only reason I rate achieves within this writeup is to make a point with that program finally being fixed, you now need to get off the rotation and start to make leveraged cross-org impact in an entirely different manner — far more leading than participating. Now between potential projects XX and YY I think you are well set up on exactly the type of work to be successful here, you just need to follow through to delivery, then find the next ones.

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