Overview

Starting in 2023, Warp runs an annual whole-company performance process in Q4.  We do this in order to (a) systematically collect performance feedback for everybody in the company, so that leadership has a good view of everyone's impact and then give feedback on how to grow, and (b) to update everyone's compensation to market rates in a systematic way. This doc describes how that process works.

We collect feedback from each individual contributor, their peers and their leads. The feedback itself will be shared only with your manager and leadership. Your manager will aggregate and summarize that feedback, along with suggestions for career development, to share with you.

Timeline and Plan

1. Decide your peer reviewers. We'll set a date for this typically in the first couple weeks of Q4.
   1. Each person should have 3-5 reviews from their peers, people across the team that you’ve worked with. That should include some mix of your immediate peers, folks who've been crossfunctional stakeholders, and anyone who can give good feedback on your work this year.
   2. You should propose reviewers and then agree on the list with your manager. Ideally you should do that in a 1:1, but if you want to talk it through on Slack that’s fine too.
   3. Leadership will review and, in a few rare cases, adjust those reviewer lists. In practice, we’ll mainly do this if we see certain reviewers being asked to do extremely large numbers of peer reviews, to spread the load in a fair way.
2. Complete your self and peer reviews. We'll set a date for this that's typically two weeks after the previous step's deadline.
   1. For both self and peer reviews, we’ll provide a tool (a Google Form as of this writing, which in some future year will be replaced with a more elaborate tool) and three prompt questions to answer.
   2. We’ll also provide some guidance on writing effective reviews.
3. Warp’s managers and leads will review, calibrate, apply our comp philosophy, and write individual reviews. This date will typically be a week after the previous step.
4. Managers will share the results of this process with their reports. They’ll return written reviews and feedback, along with salary raises and equity refreshes as appropriate. This is typically 2-3 weeks, depending on the calendar (e.g. in the US, Thanksgiving often overlaps here!).
5. Time limits
   1. If you’ve started at Warp before Apr 1 of the current year, you should participate in both the performance and comp reviews.
   2. If you’ve started at Warp between Apr 1 and Jul 1, you should participate in the performance review: write a self review and get peer reviews.
   3. If you’ve started at Warp since Jul 1, you do not need to participate in this process except to write the peer reviews that may have been requested of you. That is, you don’t need to write a self review or request peer reviews.

Why this structure

Goals

First things first: the primary goal of this process is to help us all be more effective at making Warp a successful company and a great place to work.

Our additional goals are to help people in their individual career growth and to make sure we’re fairly compensating everyone on our team.

Finally, we’d like to do this in a way that is accurate and fair while also respecting people’s time.

Self evaluations

We’re going to ask everybody to write a self review. The primary goal here is to encourage us all to do some introspection on where and how we’ve made an impact at Warp, what we’re doing well and where we can do better. Sharing that with your manager helps them understand your mental model of your impact and growth here, which then allows them better to target their feedback and help you grow.

Peer reviews, privately shared

We think your peers have a lot of great information about what you’ve done this year! Your manager knows a lot, and also there are other perspectives on your contribution: your manager will benefit from those perspectives.

So why not share those peer reviews with you? Fundamentally, giving feedback is really hard. It requires both a deep honesty and transparency to talk through what’s really going on, while simultaneously understanding how to frame that truth in the way that’s going to be most effective in helping the recipient accept, understand and grow from that feedback. We’ve done a bunch of training sessions on how to do that, and it’s still pretty hard. Writing this kind of performance-review peer feedback is an order of magnitude harder: doing it in writing is harder than face-to-face because there’s no opportunity for tone or interpersonal feedback to let the giver understand how the feedback is being received and clarify; giving that feedback as part of a performance review raises the stakes, magnifying misunderstandings.

Privately shared feedback allows the peer to focus on being direct and transparent, communicating that to the manager. It’s then up to the manager to take that feedback, together with their own and other peers’ feedback and the individual's self review, and formulate it in the way that’ll be most effective for the individual’s growth and development.