Review season is approaching, as it always is. Peer reviews, self reviews, upward reviews, quarterly reviews, and yearly reviews, need to be written, read, and relayed. For some, this is a much-appreciated time to celebrate your co-workers, give constructive feedback, learn how you can grow yourself, and (hopefully) get confirmation that overall you’re doing a good job. For many, it’s a time of endless feedback-writing, filling out form after form with the same couple of prompts, trying to remember what happened even just a few weeks ago and what working with a given person was like two months ago, and either trying to not sound like an ass when pointing out areas for improvement or glossing over any larger problems altogether.

I’ve come to realise that many despise writing reviews. Not necessarily because they don’t see their importance, but because they dislike the process, struggle to write something they see as useful, and feel like it quickly gets repetitive. I’ve had those thoughts too. But the more I’m part of people and performance conversations, whether through mentoring, being a people lead, or being part of technical leadership, the more I see just how vital reviews truly are to both the individual and the organisation. So, I want to talk about how I write about people, to people.

The advice in this document is, I believe, equally applicable to reviews of your peers, your reports, and your leadership chain (“upwards reviews”). It’s phrased for peer reviews, but all the concepts apply directly if you’re writing any of the others. I think you can follow the advice in here quite closely when you’re writing self-reviews too, even if it may feel a little odd at first.

A human will read what you write – write like it

People reviews are, inherently, for people. The review doesn’t go into a machine that spits out a number on the other end (and hopefully we never end up in such a world), nor is it expected to represent a formal argument for submission to some academic journal or a checklist for someone to tick off. It will be read by the person it’s about, by that person’s lead, used as part of an argument to other people further up “the chain”, or some combination of the above. All of those people have their own feelings and opinions, and your goal isn’t to impose your views onto them, but rather to supply your perspective and experience to augment theirs.

This has two primary implications for how you write reviews:

Write with compassion. You can write the most accurate and insightful review in the world, but fail to get any of it across because the reader cannot get past the way you have written it. Phrasing matters. You should still say the hard thing(s) without burying the lede, but take the time to find the right framing. A useful litmus test here whether, if you received the same feedback, you would actually consider what was being said or brush it off as “just this person’s unfounded criticism”. Concretely, I’d recommend brushing up on the fundamental attribution error and avoiding words like “always” and “never”.
Make it actionable. Praise is nice, critique is unpleasant, and neither is all that useful. In the spirit of “write what you’d want to receive”, prefer highlighting specific things that the person in question could do something about. This can be stuff already do that they should double down on or pair back, or it could be things they’re not currently doing that would make them more impactful if they did. If someone reads your review and still wonders afterwards “so what are they good at?” or “but how could this person do better?”, you have failed to get your message across.

Spend the time to make it short

The more you write, the less attention each words gets. Thus, if you want your feedback to not just be glossed over, you have to polish the text down such that only the most important bits remain. My recommendation is that you limit your answer to any one prompt on any feedback form to a paragraph and a half or three bullet points of at most two sentences each. Any longer and you risk that the reader will miss at least some part of what you’ve written. It may be frustrating, but it is reality.

My process is usually to first do a brain-dump with no length constraints, then to take a pass over the dump where I group related feedback into short paragraphs of full sentences, and then to take a second pass where I aggressively cut each such paragraph to half the length. This leaves you with a decent first draft that you can hone down into the final review.

Attempt this and you will quickly discover that this is really not very much text to get your feedback across. Even if you permit yourself to go a few sentences over, you will feel like you have so much more to say. Filing down the text often takes a significant amount of time, as nicely expressed in the oft-misquoted words of Blaise Pascal: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter”. It takes me about an hour to write one review.

Remember, the review recipient can ask you for more context if they need it! Don’t exhaustively describe evidence for every point; refer to data concisely and instead supply details as needed.

Two take-aways is too many

What do you remember of the last review you received? Do you remember concretely what learnings or advice you took away from it? Reviews, like much of the content we consume (what do you remember of the last presentation you watched?), disappears into some black hole in our brains, never to be recalled again. This is partially related to the length of the content – I know if I’m given a single page of information, I’ll be lucky if we remember a fraction of what was on it even a week later. But much of it comes down to information overload. If the entire text on that single page served to make a single point like, say, “deer are the worst animal”, I’d be much more likely to remember that one point a week later!

Reviews work the same way. If you want the reader to remember the feedback you’ve given, whether positive or negative, you need to give less of it. Much less. My rule of thumb is that humans usually remember (at most) one big and one small thing from any given piece of content they’re presented with. And worse yet, the scaling is negative beyond that point: if you make three points, the recipient will probably remember only one. If you make four, they’ll remember nothing.

Concretely, this means that when you’re writing reviews, you’ll usually get a lot further in terms of helping the other person by presenting one main thing they do really well or would benefit significantly from improving upon, and one smaller thing that you appreciate or think is getting in their way. That’s all you get, no matter how much you’d like to list out the twelve reasons they’re excellent or the dozen things that are holding them back.

Getting down to the most impactful 1.5 points to raise, you guessed it, takes time and effort. You’ll usually want to take the set of all things you’d want to include and look for patterns in them. Then look for patterns in the patterns. Distil the points until any further generalisation would make them useless, and then pick the one you think is most important to convey. Then pick one to mention with just a couple of sentences at the end (see where I got a paragraph and a half from?). File the rest away as feedback you might give next time around – including them, no matter how tempting, is very likely to be counter-productive.

And before you say anything, yes, I know, this post already makes more than a point and a half.

Writing about people, to people Jon Gjengset (8 min. read)

A human will read what you write – write like it

Spend the time to make it short

Two take-aways is too many

Further reading