DESIGN MANAGER JOURNEY
Writing your accomplishments with clarity & impact
Self-assessments & promo statements that get results for you and your team.
Why write self-assessments at all?
For many people, writing a self-assessment is part of their reoccurring performance review process, but did anyone ever actually teach you how to do it? Writing about your own accomplishments can be difficult for a multitude of reasons. You don’t remember all the things you did, you don’t know what was important and what wasn’t. It can feel uncomfortable for some people to talk about their own accomplishments too, especially when it comes to taking ownership of your parts of a project that many people collaborated on together. I want to make it easy for you to do just that. But above all else, I want to help you understand that writing self-assessments isn’t for your company, your boss, or because you have to, its because you need to learn to write clearly and impactfully about what sets you apart, and why the work you do is important to you, to your company, and the world.
Make the process easier for yourself
I’ve been there, performance review time rolls around and I scramble to remember, what in the heck did I do for the last 6 months, sure I did things, and of course, they were important, but sometimes time bleeds together a bit, was that this cycle? Last cycle? Did we launch 5 months ago or 7? Did I write about that last cycle? I’m going back and reading what I wrote for the last performance review cycle, scouring my calendar for key meetings to piece together the last 6 months. There’s a better way!
- Keep a simple log, I have a document where every month I write down literally 2 sentences. 1 sentence each about something I accomplished that month, and I’ll usually “tag” each sentence with 1 or more of my company’s evaluation values. E.g. something like “Difficulty, Leadership, Impact.”
- At the end of the performance review cycle I have 12 sentences that are already organized by theme, these are now easy to turn into an outline rather than starting from scratch!
- If you wait to write your entire performance review in a couple of weeks before it's due, it's always going to be a stressful time, if you can spread it out little by little over time, not only is it easier to write, it's much easier to remember.
Knowing what’s important is usually the hardest part (both for your monthly notes and for writing for performance review itself) so what’s your rubric? For me it’s simple. I use nearly the same rubric as I use for defining what to work on in the first place!
- Is it good for the user?
- Is it good for the business?
- Did I learn or grow by doing it?
These are the things you should be spending your time on anyway, if you can map the work you do to these things you’re already on the right path.
Writing for clarity and impact
OK, now you know generally what to write about, how do you actually write it? Do you use a bulleted list? Do you write it out narratively? Do you include the people you worked with on it? Yes.
I’ve created a format, a “cheat sheet” if you will, that I use for myself that I share with my teams, it should not only make the process easier, but also help you write for clarity and impact in a way that even those who aren’t familiar with your work can quickly parse and understand what you did, and why. (steal a copy of my template here)
Summary Theme — Could be a project, feature, theme, program, or intuitiveIntro Sentence — What you did & why. Why it was difficult & important. Who you did it with. How you know it was successful & had the intended outcome(s).Body
Subtheme or Project — Why it fits in the Summary Theme. What you did & why.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome.
Subtheme or Project — Why it fits in the Summary Theme. What
you did & why.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome.
- How you know it was successful / had the intended outcome
[Repeat for as many subthemes as you need][Additonal summary level themes as needed]
For more junior folks I’d recommend each Summary Theme be a single project, especially if you’re not in a situation where you get to choose what projects that you work on (e.g. they’re assigned to you) as you become more senior and have more say in your projects, or if you’re a manager and your team is responsible for a large number of projects or features consider bundling projects into logical groupings or themes and have individual key projects be the subthemes the built toward the bigger theme
The intro sentence is often the most important, especially if the people assessing your performance don’t have as much familiarity as your manager or team. The structure that I’ve found most useful is.
What you did & why — Concretely explain what you accomplished (not the raw steps and process, but the execution) and what users or business value was accomplished by doing the project (measured by qualitative or quantitative metrics)
Why it was difficult & important — There are lots of reasons why work can be difficult, there can be technical challenges that you need to work around, difficulties in working with individual teammates or collaborating across teams. You could be working in a product space where there is no precedence and you have to invent something completely new. Whatever made the project difficult is important to include. Just because something is difficult, doesn’t make it worth doing! Deciding what to do is just as important as being purposeful about what not to do. Explain why the work you did was worth doing, especially if it was a trade-off between doing the work and not doing something else instead.
Who you did it with — The best work is done with others, building off each other’s skills, strengths and amplifying each other. Projects come and go, but the relationships you build, and hopefully the trust others have in you is what you cultivate over time. In almost every company I’ve worked at, designers tended to be partnered with more senior PM and Engineering peers. While this can lead to uncomfortable power imbalances, you can also turn it in your favor. A project was important enough to assign a PM director to? If you focus on the difficulty and impact that necessitated such a senior peer, it could be logical that you were functioning at that same level. Not everyone has the same set of skills, showing you have the ability to identify what skills are needed for a project’s success, and building a team that combines the right people to ensure that project’s success is a great story to be able to tell.
How you know it was successful & had the intended outcome — Answering this question is easier at companies with robust qualitative, and quantitative research practices as well as strong cultures of analytics and metrics-driven product development. At Google we’d talk about “Landings, not launches” meaning that it wasn’t that important to simply launch something, the thing that was really celebrated and acknowledged, was once you had concrete data about how users reacted to the changes and improvements that you’d made. What if you work somewhere that you don’t have access to this type of data? You still have a few options, you can use user perception, news coverage, and qualitatively measured user perception as a proxy in a pinch.
For the rest of the section, you want to focus on the sub-projects (if you’re writing at a theme level) or key milestones of a project.
How do I write my accomplishments as a design manager?
Say this one with me, preferably out loud. “My team’s accomplishments are my accomplishments.”
I had a bit of a crisis early in my career as a design manager, I thought to myself (probably around the perf/promo time!) “what did I actually do?” what work can I actually attribute to me, versus a member of my team. But then a very wise peer reminded me “Your team’s accomplishments are your accomplishments” (I think she even made me say it out loud a few times)
What do I mean by this? You’re responsible for creating an environment where your team can be successful, do their best work, to focus on what’s most important. You are responsible for mentoring them, helping them improve their craft, and ensuring they are working on important and meaningful projects. Could they do it without you? Some of it, maybe, but their success, and the project and feature success has a much higher likelihood with you creating the right environment for that success.
It can be hard to write about our own accomplishments
Tooting your own horn, singing your own praises, whatever you want to call it, for many it can be difficult to acknowledge the hard work that you do. Whether it is shyness or lack of confidence, or cultural differences, for many talking or writing about accomplishments can be quite difficult. A few things that can help:
- Focus on being concrete, just describe what you did, and its effects
- Stick to the facts, no need to tell stories if that doesn’t come naturally to you
- Have someone help you, ask someone close to you who knows your work well to talk about its impact on them or the team.
If you’re not a white male, statistically others are going to give you less credit for your accomplishments, so the reason for telling your own story is even more critical.
Still having to issue writing about your own accomplishments?
- How to Accept a Compliment — Even if It’s From Yourself by Micaela Marini Higgs
- 7 Ways To Talk About Your Accomplishments Without Sounding Like A Braggart by Amy Morin
- Do You Give Yourself Enough Credit for Your Own Successes? by Jeremy Engle
How is writing for promo different?
In a normal performance review cycle, you want to focus not just on what you’re doing well but on areas for improvement. When it comes to writing for promo there are two key differences.
Focus on what’s working and what you’ve improved — When asking peers for feedback and support (often in the form of 360 reviews) you want to identify people who are going to talk about both the things that you’ve accomplished and their impact on the product, the company, your team and theirs. The second thing to give them guidance on writing about is to focus on areas in which you’ve improved. I highly suggest sharing key aspects of your personal growth plans with peers who can attest to how you’ve identified areas for growth, come up with plans to address shortcomings, and made progress towards those growth areas.
Telling a cohesive story — Your company may do performance reviews every 6 to 12 months, and likely multiple performance review cycles will pass between promo events. When making a case for promotion you want to take the time to read over all your previous performance assessments and identify themes that your work has. Instead of simply focusing on a set of recent projects and having them carry all the weight you want to structure your promo statement around common themes since your last “promo event” (e.g. hire or the previous promo)
Do it for you
It can seem like a chore if you’re writing your performance review just because it's your job requirement. But it's not for your company or your manager, it's for you. Writing about your own accomplishments clearly is a processional skill just like any other, it takes effort, it's not easy without practice, and you WILL get better with practice. Depending on your company and its culture and practices you might be the one that has to drive your own career growth.
