What’s a good example of a 1:1 document to help your manager keep track of your accomplishments?

Here's what I did:

• Have one doc as the "brag document" -- your accomplishments or achievements you contributed to. This is more evergreen, something you can revisit with your manager as the half progresses. I'd break this down into the 4 engineering axes for Meta.
• Have another running doc to track talking points and agenda items for your regular 1:1s. The format I did for this:
  • (1) Top of mind for the report
  • (2) Top of mind for the manager
  • (3) Discussion topics
  • (4) Action items

@Rahul Just curious. ".. the 4 engineering axes for Meta.." which are these?

As mentioned in the original post, the 4 engineering axes for Meta SWEs are as follows:

1. Engineering Excellence
2. Impact
3. Direction
4. People

If you're interested in exactly what these axes mean, check out our in-depth guide to Meta performance review here: https://www.promotions.fyi/company/meta/performance-review

I feel like maintaining a brag journal that's split up across the 4 Meta performance axes for engineers is overkill: It's true that it would be nice to have this pre-processing done prior to PSC to make self-review easier, but the cognitive load seems high.

For example, let's say you add "Delivered an internal tool that helped 15 engineers" to your doc. How would you split it across the 4 axes? How would you prevent double-dipping across axes? It's just too much IMHO, especially for an E4.

I actually didn't maintain a structured brag journal at all at Meta; instead, I mainly logged my accomplishments across 2 existing and more natural avenues, which I'll detail here.

Manager 1 on 1 Doc

• Every week, I would have a "Wins" section in the agenda and talk about it with my manager to keep them aligned on what I'm doing and get proper credit.
• Whenever I needed to gather my wins for a self-review type thing, I would simply go through my running manager 1 on 1 meeting notes doc, Ctrl + F for "Wins", and cherry-pick what I wanted.

Sharing your wins (and trying to get praise to keep your mental state positive) is an important part of that "awkward" 1 on 1 experience, which we talk about in-depth here: 1 on 1s Are The Time To Be Awkward

Workplace Posts

• Almost all things worth bragging about in a self-review probably deserve a Workplace post as well, especially once you start progressing to E5 (relevant for you as an E4). And from there, it only gets more important as you progress up the ladder.
• Whenever you achieve anything, try to make a post about it. For bigger accomplishments, post in larger groups. For smaller, more "local" accomplishments, post them in the smaller groups. Meta has this deep culture around sharing everything in public (and this very much includes the wins!).
• When you need to cobble together performance review achievement, just go to your profile and read your old posts. It's easy to skip over the less meaningful ones where you're asking for help debugging your unit test or whatever - These generally have less likes. Conversely, the posts with more likes are probably more important for your PSC.
• Side note: For folks reading this who aren't at Meta and therefore don't use Workplace, use Slack/Teams/Email to capture these wins instead.

Here's a bunch of resources about Workplace and how to write awesome posts:

• "How to make communication succinct and more impactful?"
• "How to get more visibility on work?"
• "Is posting on Workplace required for good performance?"

I lean on the side of having a rough idea of what progress looks like and how it's measured (e.g. OKRs) and keeping a running journal of things that are worth noting down. I like Alex's suggestion regarding putting "tags" so they become easier to find later. The point of not only relying on your BRAG doc and publishing your accomplishments / presenting wins & milestones achieved during townhalls, quarterly events, packaging it into a training/documentation for others to consume, and writing up a case study should all be in your arsenal.

Having a habit of collecting a quick testimonial when you've had a positive impact on others is very powerful as well (I've forgotten many times in the past). This has the added benefit of preventing a mad scramble at year-end to collect 360 feedback. Overall, social proof is extremely important since a written narrative will only get you so far during calibrations.