Transparent Career Goals: A Pave Experiment
About Me
Hey, I’m Stefan, an Engineering Manager at Pave. I joined in June 2020 as employee #4 and have been helping build Pave ever since. Best of all, I’m more excited about working at Pave right now than when I first joined.
Why I’m Writing
Pave is a special combination of people, challenges, and mission. But the problems we’re solving are common to so many other startups, from organizational growing pains to foundational technical decisions. So I’m excited to start sharing my experiences and learnings through the lens of Engineering, starting with this post.
Let’s Talk Career Goals
Most personal and career growth conversations happen between a manager and a direct report. But should they stop there?
Here at Pave, we have incredibly talented engineers with high ambition. To help them achieve their goals, we’ve been exploring having each engineer share their individual goals with their team. Here’s why we made that decision.
The Situation
At Pave, we’ve roughly grown from five to thirty engineers in a year and a half. One of our teams wound up with four engineers that were all around the same level. They also happened to be incredibly tight-knit, high-performing, and having a lot of fun. But there was one thing missing for them: growth.
The team was so flat and collaborative that there was no clear path to taking on more responsibility, such as tech leading a feature. To solve this, we decided to have every engineer share their goals with their teammates.
The Benefits
Interestingly, it’s a win not just for the engineers, but also for the engineering and product manager.
Empowerment — Individuals feel empowered to volunteer for opportunities that match their goals.
Transparent Allocation — As a manager, you can explain why someone is being tapped to lead certain projects, removing doubts of favoritism, performance, or something else.
Growth — With more responsibility, engineers are challenged beyond their comfort zone and can demonstrate new abilities.
Common Ground — Builds empathy for teammates' weaknesses and growth areas.
Feedback — Focuses peer feedback to each other’s goals. As a manager, the peer feedback directly frames performance reviews.
Peer Support — Knowing each others’ goals, teammates can play supporting roles in teammate interactions that a manager isn’t always present for.
Makes Space — With engineers taking on more, it can actually free up time for others like EMs and PMs.
Considerations
This won’t work in every team. Here are key team traits that we had that allowed this opportunity.
Vulnerability — There must be unanimous buy-in and vulnerability to feel comfortable sharing with teammates.
Environment for mistakes —The stakes can’t be too high and someone must be experienced enough to recover from mistakes and use them for learning.
Mentorship — If people are taking on new responsibility, they’ll need guidance early and often.
How’s It Going For Pave?
We’re about to find out! Excitingly, this is hot off the press, and the team is sharing their goals this week (Feb 25). I’ll update this post as our learnings come in. In the meantime, we’re planning to measure the success in a few ways:
Number of goals accomplished by the next performance review.
Number of opportunities created for growth towards goals, per engineer.
Satisfaction in our team health check.
Satisfaction in 1:1s.
Will report back!