You worked hard in the last six months and hopefully made a lot of impact. It's not widely understood that one of your jobs during performance review is helping your manager advocate for you. A two-minute calibration discussion will determine your final rating. Your manager is busy doing their evaluation plus the whole team's. Save them time by arming them with the best evidence.
I've done 20 performance reviews as IC and manager. Here are five tips:
#1: Focus on Outcomes & Share Context
Focus on user/business-facing outcomes, use numbers, and contextualize your impact. If you took an emerging ads product from scratch to $10M in revenue while onboarding a new engineering manager, that's more impressive than growing a mature product from $500M to $550M. Context is important.
#2: Specify Your Contribution
Don't say "I helped ship X." Many people worked on that project. What exactly did you do? Started a new initiative? Unblocked the project? Analyzed the experiment result? Be specific.
#3: Org Specific Calibration Format
Ask your manager for the specific format they'll use. This is sometimes different from the official self-evaluation template, as there are org-specific calibration templates.
#4: Ladder Specific Language
FAANG+ companies have written job ladders. Use ladder-specific language on what dimensions you met/exceed/strongly exceed expectations. You already did the work — this is just mapping it.
#5: Be Succinct
I've been in calibrations where we discussed each person for 3 minutes or less. Your manager needs to summarize six months in 60 seconds. Think about how to do that.
Folks who do the prep work for their manager have a higher chance. It's a bit unfair, but it's true. Do your homework, help your manager help you.