{"id":28095,"date":"2016-06-08T10:44:03","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T17:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/?p=28095"},"modified":"2016-06-08T10:50:46","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T17:50:46","slug":"evaluating-employees-in-product-design-development-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2016\/06\/evaluating-employees-in-product-design-development-roles","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating Employees in Product Design & Development Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Results. Metrics. Impact.<\/em><\/p>\n

When deciding how to evaluate employees, these are often the things companies land on. It makes sense on its face. If a company\u2019s goal is to, say, grow its customer base from X<\/em> to Y<\/em> in 12 months, what better way to align employees to that objective than to try and directly measure their contribution towards it? You worked on Project A<\/em> and it singlehandedly got the company 20% closer to its goal? Congrats, you are judged to be a successful employee and you will likely enjoy everything that goes along with that.<\/p>\n

But what if you worked on Project B<\/em> \u2014 not even by choice but because you were assigned it \u2014 and it ended up being a failure? Your results were terrible, you didn\u2019t move metrics, and your project had no impact. Then what?<\/p>\n

Welcome to the controversial world of employee evaluation in product design & development.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I want to cover five aspects of this subject, and in doing so, provide an outline for others to use as they seek to improve processes at their own companies:<\/p>\n

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  1. Why this matters<\/li>\n
  2. Decision quality vs. outcome quality<\/li>\n
  3. The four pillars we use(d) at Twitter Design and why (optional past tense because I left my role as Head of Design at Twitter earlier this year)<\/li>\n
  4. How to measure success<\/li>\n
  5. Putting your own plan into action<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Why this matters<\/h3>\n

    Treating designers, engineers, PMs, researchers, and any other employees fairly is an unspoken goal across almost every tech company. The only controversial part is how to actually make that happen. In order to do that, we have to recognize what the nature of a job in product development entails. Specifically, working well with others, taking risks, being creative, and embracing high-judgement failure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Product development is a lot more like poker than chess. As an employee, you aren\u2019t always in control of the hand you\u2019re dealt, the other people at the table, or the unpredictable ways the process unfolds. It is your job to behave<\/em> in a way that maximizes the chances of success. If you\u2019re a designer, this may mean prototyping an interaction an exhaustive amount of ways. If you\u2019re an engineer, this may mean writing throwaway code so you can test an approach before investing too much in it. If you\u2019re a PM, this might mean yielding to your engineers and designers on something in the name of keeping team energy high.<\/p>\n

    In chess, a great player beats an average player 100 times out of 100. In poker, however, the \u201cbest\u201d player loses all the time. The difference between good and bad poker players is how they behave. How they behave \u2014 or the quality<\/em> of their decisions \u2014 is the difference between winning and losing over the long haul.<\/p>\n

    Decision quality vs. outcome quality<\/h3>\n

    There is a phenomenon in tech called easy-to-measuritis<\/strong> which says that we tend to concentrate on the things we can easily measure rather than the things that are most important. For example, the best thing for our business may be happy customers, but in order to measure happiness, we may have to build a ton of unwieldy survey infrastructure, so instead, we just measure bodies coming through the door and use that as a general proxy for happiness. What then happens is we build things to optimize bodies coming through the door and we move that number whatever way we can, perhaps even to the detriment of customer happiness.<\/p>\n

    The traditional way of evaluating employees \u2014 based on things like results, metrics, and impact \u2014 is just another manifestation of easy-to-measuritis. We want objective, binary ways of evaluating people so that they are uncontroversial and unassailable, but what we end up with are objective, binary ways to measure the wrong things, or at the very least, things that employees are not in direct control of. Instead, we should be measuring decision quality instead of outcome quality. After all, how we behave is always 100% within our control.<\/p>\n

    Won\u2019t you follow me on a personally painful sports tangent for a moment? Come along!<\/p>\n

    The worst sports moment of my life occurred on February 1, 2015, at 6:59pm. I was in Arizona watching the defending champion Seahawks play the Patriots, and after marching down to the 1-yard line with less than a minute left, the Seahawks called a pass play to Ricardo Lockette instead of a run play to the best running back in the NFL, Marshawn Lynch. If you pay any attention to football, you know what happened next. The ball was intercepted by undrafted rookie Malcolm Butler, preventing the best and most exciting team in the NFL from winning a second straight Super Bowl.<\/p>\n

    \n

    That was the worst play call I've seen in the history of football.😞<\/p>\n

    — Emmitt Smith (@EmmittSmith22) February 2, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n