Writing Effective Goals for Performance Reviews

I want to understand what are some most effective ways to articulate your person goals and growth areas to your manager.

I think you can just run the standard meeting playbook here:

1. Write all your thoughts down into a growth plan doc
2. Organize it as much as you can with clear sections and bullet points
3. Share it with your manager before your 1 on 1 meeting and tell them that it would be great if they could read it beforehand to maximize their preparedness for your meeting
4. Discuss it in the meeting and sharpen the plan
5. Repeat the process across your 1 on 1 meetings accordingly as growth objectives and team context change over time

We talk about these concepts (and more) in-depth here: [Masterclass] How To Have Impactful 1 on 1 Meetings

Something I want to make clear is that you shouldn't feel pressured to have the "perfect" growth plan. Growth is hard and fuzzy - It's very rare for people to really know where they want to be 2, 5, and 10 years from now. Just get something on the board, clean it up as much as you can, and work with your manager and other support figures to get it to a good place.

When it comes to figuring out what your career goals should be, here's the very basic algorithm I use:

1. Do a bunch of stuff
2. Figure out what stuff you really like
3. Orient your career around that stuff you really like

For me, mentorship was far and away the most enjoyable part of my job. There were days at Meta where my calendar would be completely full of mentee 1 on 1s, and I would come out of those days feeling super happy and fulfilled. From there, it was really clear to me that Engineering Manager was the best long-term career path for me. My situation is a bit weird as I'm sort of an "Engineering Manager At Scale" now with Taro, but if I had stayed in industry, I'm very confident I would be an EM today.

When it comes to soul searching, I recommend this video to help: How To Discover Your Work Passions And Hatreds