Year End Review

by: Josie Bolotski

A year-end review is a self-reflection and documentation process that helps you steer your career to be more successful and fulfilling. The first part is documenting your past year’s work for your manager to put them in the best position to argue for your compensation or promotion. My summary is typically 2 pages of description with 1-2 pages of links to evidence. The second part is a self-reflection exercise to answer the question, “How can I make next year’s work more energizing, valuable, high-impact, high-recognition, and high-growth?”. I recommend that you do this year-end review right before compensation and promotion decisions will be made at your company. 

I have been doing year-end reviews since 2009 when I worked at Qualcomm as a remote individual contributor. At that time, remote work was considered unusual as video conferencing tools were in their infancy. Research shows that remote workers are attributed less credit for their work relative to in-person teammates. The year-end review is one of the mechanisms I developed to make my work visible to my manager to ensure that being remote would not affect my career trajectory. 

I found the self-reflection aspect of this review so valuable that I continued to do it even in later jobs where I was not remote. Having these year-end reviews has made writing my promotion documents exceptionally easy as my manager had ample high-quality content to pull from. Many of my mentees have adopted this process and also find it valuable both for self-reflection and manager communication. 

Here’s how I conduct my year-end reviews. 

Part 1: Summarize your impact

Write down your impact for the year, grouped by project or area. As with a resume, focus on the impact, challenges that you overcame, and use as much quantification as possible. Also summarize areas you grew in skill or capacity. Link to evidence for your work, such as documents or code commits you authored or reviewed. Indicate your effort level for each project. (For example: 70% for 4 months, 20% for 1 month) (see part 2). Target your writeup toward the people who are involved in your compensation and promotion decisions, typically your manager, their leadership team, your manager’s peers, and your skip-level manager. That means that you need to include context beyond what’s required for just your manager and also describe your accomplishments in terms of what this group cares about. Here is a redacted example summary from one of my projects. 

Team X (Aug → EOY): (Effort Level 40% for 5 months)

Led the applied science team for Team X, a partnership between <our team> and <another team> to develop computer visions systems for <specific end-use>. Team X inherited two pre-existing projects, Project A and Project B, to continue their operation and use these technologies as a template for new projects. The science team has N scientists (including me) and will grow to M next year. 

• Defined development and deployment processes [ref 1] and established a science review process [ref 2] that reviewed Z documents [ref 3]. References: Team X Science Development and Deployment Process; Science Document Review templates; Science Review Documents
• Led new Project C for 2 months until a TPM and another PE could be on-boarded [ref 4]. References: Project C proposal.
• Delivered scalability and accuracy improvements to Project A so that it could scale into next year, including a X% reduction via intelligent pre-filtering and a Y% reduction via ML model tuning [ref 5]. References: Project X metrics review document 
• Mentored Team X leads (L7 SDM – new to Amazon, L6 TPMs – 2 of 3 new to Amazon, L7 HDE) as they on-ramped.

Part 2: Summarize how you spent your time 

1) Create 6-10 categories for projects or types of work you did this year. These are typically major projects you worked on, initiatives you drove, and catch all categories for other tasks, such as mentoring, or interviewing. The main goal of categorization is to facilitate insights about the amount and type of work you are doing. If you are unsure, start by breaking your work down into finer categories, because it’s easier to combine categories later than it is to go back and break down tasks into finer detail. 

2) For each month of the year, calculate what percentage of your time was spent in each category. Try to base this on evidence rather than memory. Review your calendar, emails, Jira/task history, code check-ins, and documents written during that month to try to get as accurate a picture as possible. Obviously, it’s better to have a process of collecting this information weekly or monthly throughout the year, but it is very possible and worthwhile to reconstruct this time allocation if you haven’t already. 

3) Graph the categories over time as a line chart.

See below examples of time allocation from two years when I was a Principal Engineer (PE) at Amazon.

Part 3: Self-reflection

Reflect on how you spent your time, the impact you had, and areas of growth. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Was the time allocation surprising? Are there areas you were surprised you were spending so much time? .. so little time?
• Which categories are energizing? Which categories are draining?
• Which categories do I value? Which categories do I not value? 
• Which categories led to the most growth? Which categories am I spending a lot of time, but not growing? 
• What categories are contributing to your long-term goals for your career? 
• Which categories generated the most impact for my team/company? 
• Which categories have high recognition? Which categories have low recognition?

Consider what changes you would like to make next year to make your work more energizing, valuable, high-impact, high-recognition, and high-growth. Think about what aspects you need to reduce in order to free up bandwidth to focus on those other areas. See three specific examples of insights and adjustments below. 

Keep these personal insights separate from your impact summary from part 1. I typically decide which parts I want to share with my manager and mentors and address them in our next 1:1 (see part 4). 

Part 4: Manager and mentor review 

Review your impact summary and self-reflection insights with your manager and mentors and come up with a plan for how you will adjust your work going forward. If you also have regular contact with other senior leaders who will be involved in your promotion and compensation decisions, send your impact summary to them, too. Ask them for feedback on ways you can do more impactful work or areas of growth to focus on for next year. This feedback is critical for you to calibrate on the impact of your work and which aspects of your work are highly-valued or undervalued. 

Example Insights and Adjustments

As I mentioned, this process is invaluable for self-reflection. Below, I detail a few specific insights and adjustments I made based on these reviews. In the first example, I used the year end review to make a proactive plan to hand off a project I didn’t want to continue working on. In the second example, I improved my work enjoyment and decreased stress by working with my manager to shift the type of work I was doing. And, in the third example, I got critical feedback that allowed me to educate an influential VP about my work as well as create a growth opportunity for another engineer. 

In 2018, I was technical lead for an aspect of a larger project (call it BigP) owned by another robotics org. I had completed my part of the technical design work, but BigP would take several more years to implement and deploy. I realized I didn’t want to stay attached to it for the long term. Even though I would not be needed very often, this work was very different from other work I was doing and enjoyed, and the occasional context switch was distracting and draining. My intermittent involvement also wasn’t good for BigP, because it could become bottlenecked on me if they needed me when my own team’s high-priority projects had critical deliverables. After talking with the VP who owned BigP, he identified a senior engineer in his org who I could train to take over for me. The outcome was a triple victory: the engineer who liked this kind of work gained a growth opportunity; the team gained valuable in-house expertise, and I shed the burden of an unwanted task. The year-end review caused me to reflect on whether I wanted to continue on this project and come up with a proactive plan to avoid the future stress and annoyance of staying involved. 

In 2019, I was spending about 10% of my time interviewing, half of which was interviewing for external teams. These teams often requested my help because they either lacked people with the expertise or seniority to evaluate certain job families or they needed me to increase diversity on their interview loops. When I asked myself which categories drained me, interviewing, and especially interviewing for other teams, was high on the list. At the time, I was also nominated to become an Amazon Bar Raiser, which would have significantly increased the amount of time I spent interviewing for other teams. While all Amazon PEs are expected to contribute to hiring and developing talent, I enjoyed mentoring more than interviewing, and I had a waitlist of mentees. After talking with my manager, we agreed that I would decline to become a bar raiser, and I would limit my external interviewing to one per month with specific criteria for which requests I would accept. We also agreed that I would use this extra bandwidth to take on a few more mentees. I created a list of people who loved interviewing that I could recommend as alternates when I needed to decline. While many people were incredulous when I turned down the honor of being a Bar Raiser, my year end review gave me the conviction that I was spending my time on something that was equally valuable and better aligned to my strengths.

In 2020, I was surprised when a VP in a sister-org asked why I was spending so much time on a specific project because he didn’t think it was difficult or important enough to warrant my time. I would never have gotten this feedback if I hadn’t shared my annual review with him. I thought the work was important, but his feedback showed me that this project was not well-recognized in the broader company (and specifically among people who make decisions on my compensation). I took steps over the next few months to educate the VP and his key technical leads about the importance of this work and keep them apprised of the outcomes, which they appreciated. His feedback also provided a reality check that, outside of one particularly tricky aspect, most of the work did not require a PE, so I carved out the rest and mentored another engineer to take it over, decreasing the amount of time I needed to spend and creating a growth opportunity for someone else. 

Time Allocation Examples

In 2018, my time allocation showed that I was able to stay focused on leading technical work, the thing I love most, with two big projects consuming more than 75% of my time. I successfully avoided getting spread across too many projects where my impact would have been diluted. While I also led the development of two technical roadmaps for my organization, I found high-leverage processes to complete those with a small time investment in order to keep my focus on things I enjoyed more.

In the beginning of 2019, I got spread very thin as my organization went through a significant reorg and my attention was scattered across multiple efforts. I was able to get back to my preferred allocation in the second half of the year, primarily focused on a single big project. Throughout the year, my involvement in org-level and company-level leadership initiatives increased. The time allocation to these latter tasks was very surprising to me when I did this year-end review. After discussing with my manager, we decided that this level of involvement was appropriate and desired for a PE who was approaching Sr. PE, and that we would work together to balance my work within my org to allow me ongoing space to contribute to these broader initiatives. The year-end review was a helpful tool to get on the same page as my manager and solicit his ongoing help in balancing competing demands for my time. 

Conclusion

The year end review is a mechanism to be intentional about your future career, as well as a means to arm your manager with data and evidence to increase your compensation and facilitate your promotions. While I initially developed it to overcome the negative career impact of being remote from my team, I found that this exercise has yielded benefits far beyond that initial goal. My long-term career growth and satisfaction was accelerated by the compounding effect of cumulative changes I made each year to deliver more impactful, highly-valued, and enjoyable work. 

FAQ

Q: This seems daunting; what if I only have 3-4 hours to put into this exercise?

A: Well, the impact summary is often requested by your manager anyway. May as well start with that since they’ll ask you. If they don’t ask you, then even better for you. Imagine your manager armed with your well-documented contributions when comparing against other teams! You’ve worked hard the entire year, 2000 hours or so. It’s worth 4 hours to help get recognized for that. 

To motivate you to spend a bit more time to complete the self-reflection sections, think about the 2000+ hours you will spend working next year, and ask yourself, “How much time should I spend making sure those hours will be the most enjoyable and impactful they can be?”. Can you spare 2 more hours (0.1% of 2000)?