🧠 Community Wisdom: Designing great performance review templates, balancing oversight and autonomy with junior te…
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of ✨ Community Wisdom ✨ a subscriber-only email, delivered every Saturday, highlighting the most helpful conversations in our members-only Slack community. A big thank-you to this month’s community sponsor, Chameleon. Tired of disruptive onboarding tools? Chameleon lets you guide users with inline, non-intrusive messaging that feels like part of your product, not a band-aid for bad UX. Deliver beautifully designed nudges tailored to each user’s journey, enhancing adoption and engagement without interrupting their flow. Chameleon is giving away a one-year Reforge membership at chameleon.io/lennys—check it out! ✨ Upcoming community meetups ✨Upcoming community-organized meetups—click the city name to RSVP:
Can’t find your city and want to host one? Just DM @Riya in our Slack. It takes 10 minutes (i.e. pick a date and location), and you get to meet awesome people from our community. Learn more here. 🎙️ New podcast episodes this weekNotion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder): Apple, Spotify, and YouTube The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic): Apple, Spotify, and YouTube 💥 Top threads this week1. Designing great performance review templates
Daniel Heo-Lu: Does this client have a career ladder? I try to base this off the career ladder. Neesha Mirchandani: No—and that’s part of the challenge. Some jobs don’t have career paths. But some like that—they don’t want to worry about managing people. Here’s what ChatGPT gave me:
Manager Notes (optional): Goes on for 4 more sections… Daniel Heo-Lu: For me, the most important thing is that what is used for the performance evaluation is:
So my main question is, what has been communicated with these employees prior with regard to performance expectations? If they’ve received no prior expectations and prior feedback, I would address that first… Joni Hoadley: One thing you might find useful is a role canvas. I created one to use as a guide for (a) onboarding new hires and (b) conducting perf reviews. I think you might find this helpful to create a dialogue with your direct reports. Send me a DM if you’re interested. It’s free. 2. Balancing oversight and autonomy with junior team members
James Conway: Couple of thoughts...
These are all concepts I’ve used independently but never all together at the same time. David Jorjani: This, to me, sounds like communication style differences that go unnoticed mostly because of different personalities or cultures. At this point, we don’t know if the message was fully received and/or where the gap is. I think you are sharing more interpretations than facts. I’d suggest having a “difficult conversation” kind of conversation. When X, you/I did/said Y, and that led to Z. My hope was A. What happened here? Since you are the person of authority and she seems to be talented and driven and hopefully without agenda, it may help get to the bottom of this. Ashwin: We have a variation of PPP called PPE—Progress, Plans, Escalations. In this manner, you can check on how her plans have actually turned into progress (make sure it’s timebound) and whether she is mature enough to “look beyond the curve” and escalate to you in a timely manner. Joshua Herzig-Marx: In addition to all the great suggestions above, I’ve found it’s often difficult in high-growth tech orgs to give context around suggestions or feedback. Specifically, there’s a broad range of feedback one can give, ranging from “Here’s a random idea that popped into my head, do with it what you want” to “This is an area I consider myself an expert, and the issues we’re dealing with are existential to the company.” Dharmesh Shah developed the concept of flashtags as a simple way to convey that context (@Lane Shackleton discussed in his interview with Lenny). Doing something similar can be very helpful, especially when these are new relationships. Joni Hoadley: Hey Maya, sounds like a case of misaligned expectations rather than straight-up micromanagement. Kelly’s used to working independently and reporting directly to the CEO, so she probably sees any check-ins as interference rather than support. Meanwhile, you’re just trying to stay informed and help where needed—it’s just not landing that way. Totally get it. One thing that could really help here is creating a “How I Work” document—basically, a personal operating manual. This is something both of you could do to get ahead of potential friction and make sure you’re on the same page. It outlines how you each like to work, communicate, and give/receive feedback. HOW I WORK—What I believe about work:
My leadership style:
Communication preferences:
How I give feedback:
How I like to receive feedback:
What I appreciate in a team:
Here’s a link to a thread about personal “read.me” type of documents that I think you will find useful. At the end of the day, you both want the same thing—solid work without unnecessary friction. A little up-front alignment should smooth things out. Hope that helps! Stepa Mitaki: Hi guys. I remember there was a Community Wisdom (probably) issue discussing the idea of creating your personal “How I work / How to work with me” document to share with your team. Including the community’s experience and examples of it. I can’t find that issue via search. Could anyone help me out here to find that issue? Mounica Veggalam: Consider that Kelly might be tuned in to a particular type of listening. You intend to help, but she’s receiving that as interference, perhaps activating or triggering her. This is a case of intention (offering help) not matching the impact (interference). Even if you figure out whether it is a micromanagement or a miscommunication issue, it might be worth investigating this as an area of development for yourself so you can handle such situations with various personalities in the future. I say that not because you might be doing something wrong, or because Kelly is wrong to have that type of listening. We all have some version of that. The best way to soften people’s listening is to actively look out and be responsible for your impact. So what to do in this case? Here are a few questions I suggest sitting with:
Considering she’s a recent graduate, I suggest that there is no conversation here. This is more of a mental note to help you understand Kelly better before giving her any feedback. I would celebrate her for putting her voice in and asking what she needs from you when she feels interfered with. See if you can follow her request, or what you can do to accommodate her request. This last piece will help you shift focus on developing her instead of talking about what you or she might be doing “wrong.” Often, fresh graduates need to have their ideas and voices heard by someone. I guess that most would be figuring out how to belong to the team, get recognized for their talents, how to not screw up etc., even if they might be a little arrogant/direct about it. If you want to be a leader who develops people, you’d want to see more of what’s going on for them and guide them slowly to empower their voice in ways that others can hear them as well. Joshua Herzig-Marx: So much good advice in this thread, which points to one big challenge: all of this is deeply context-dependent. Happy to chat if that’d be helpful. Maya: All of these are really helpful, thank you, everyone. 3. Rebuilding vs. refactoring
Daniel Bartholomae: Doing total refactors at startups that have built themselves against a wall is kind of my thing, so happy to give pointers. First of all: Most AI tools are not good for creating a long-term SaaS software, only for prototyping, but that might change. And some (so far: Cursor) already are but require devs who actually know how to code to work with them. I would also still see the same patterns for a total rewrite that were relevant before. They basically boil down to:
You’ll need both a great PM and a great technical person to find the right pieces. But then these kinds of refactors can work. And I do agree that a codebase that is AI-first is a huge competitive advantage nowadays. Miroslav Pavelek: Please consider—how much is the complexity driven by technology and how much by business rules? Consider this scenario, which may be applicable in your case:
Sri Ram: Don’t think using AI will suddenly make this faster. You have to bring engineering on board with this. Looks like in your case, engineering is not on board with this. Might be your stakeholders, and you should give the business context to your engineering and influence them on why you need to restack etc. Peter Berg: Super high-level, I’d say a full rewrite from scratch is almost always a mistake. And also would say I wouldn’t really expect AI to materially accelerate development, your intuition around that stuff feels accurate to me. Do think there’s a possibility an incremental refactor could make sense. If you need a fractional eng leader to come in and give you all an unbiased assessment of how to move forward, I’m Pete, I run this company Forward, we’d be happy to help with that. Jeff Lindquist: “Our engineers are saying that AI tools can’t help us move faster”—this line immediately makes me think that you’re probably using the same words to say different things. What exactly are your expectations when you say engineers can use AI to speed things up? What exactly do the engineers mean when they say the AI tools can’t help them? Abdussamad Bello: I don’t believe rewrites will kill a business, it really depends on the skill set of the migration team, project management, testing. I have worked in a team where we’ve had to migrate several large codebases.
In your case, I would advice quickly testing out database REST API generators like DreamFactory, Kong, Hasura, Prisma and internal tools like Budibase, Retool, Superblocks for a start, so you can use the API to rebuild the UI. Here is a good read. Jack Timonen: We have been working with a couple of B2B SaaS companies that have been in the same position as you have. Short-form case studies here. Ping me if you would like to learn more or discuss with the founders directly. OP: First, thanks to those who replied. I appreciate the feedback. Jeff Lindquist— The owners of the company are seeing people whip up apps quickly using AI tools and have this feeling like “Why aren’t we doing this? We need to do this to keep up.” The engineers are saying that type of thing can’t just be done on an existing, older codebase like ours. Like, let’s say we want to add a feature that involves basic CRUD operations. A quick form lets you add a few fields of data that need to be stored in a simple relational database table, retrieved by user ID, updated if necessary, and deleted. It would be nice to be able to spin something like that up quickly with AI vs. needing to hand-code everything. It’s not complex, but with our custom design system and non-standard core platform, AI couldn’t do it “how we do it.” Does that make sense? So I think the idea is that we need to start over with a modern codebase where these tools can actually be used to speed up development. Sorry if I’m not explaining that well, but hopefully that provides some context. Sri Ram— Re: engineering being on board, I don’t think they’re against AI, but if we were to rebuild from scratch, they’d want to use our existing set of programming languages, which the owners view as outdated and not the way forward if we want to modernize. Peter— I’ll DM you. Miroslav— I appreciate the thoughts about complexity. One of the reasons starting fresh is so appealing is that our core users have really evolved over time, and there’s so much complexity in our current system that could just be tossed out if we started over. Jeff Lindquist: Yeah, so what is it about the current codebase that the tools don’t work? Are the engineers suggesting to rewrite it in order to get those benefits, or are you hearing the engineers saying that and thinking, okay, we should rewrite? I don’t really understand what about your existing setup doesn’t let you take advantage of the AI tools, though. Feels like the engineers need to give more detail than saying it’s an existing older codebase. What stack are they developing in? Frankly, AI is more suited to “older languages” because there’s more to train on, and I find AI is getting it wrong a lot for new languages that are updating frequently. Based on just this, I’m on the fence between owners’ expectations being unrealistic or that the engineers just don’t actually know how to use the AI tools. On the topic of rewriting the codebase: It’s super-interesting because, as @Peter Berg said, the general consensus is rewrites are a red herring that more often kill a business than save it. I legitimately don’t know if that’s changed now that building scaffolding is far quicker than before, though—I mean, to some extent it must have. alexa: This is kind of being glossed over, but your leadership is seeking technical evaluation from someone outside the engineering department. This approach creates certain dynamics worth considering as discussions continue. Peter Berg: I think it’s worth noting a few things:
Sebastian: “...the engineers say that this kind of thing can’t just be done on an existing, older codebase like ours.” TBH, I think AI tools like Copilot or ChatGPT might sometimes even work better with old technologies than newer ones, due to the knowledge cutoff and amount of training data there is for new frameworks. For example, most LLMs don’t produce good modern NextJS (a popular frontend framework) code, because they haven’t seen the newer approaches that are used. This can be compensated for by good integrations like the one Cursor has. It basically reads a part of your code and can then determine how the code should look. Of course, this also works with older code bases, though. On the other hand, if you want to use tools like v0 but don’t use Tailwind or shadcn/ui, then yeah, this might not work. That said, we use all the fancy new stuff, but don’t really use v0 to produce UI components. These kinds of AI tools are great to create prototypes, but using them to write production code hasn’t really worked out for us. I’d also like to point out a few things about rewriting old codebases, since I have extensive experience with this: It can be a huge effort, and not just in terms of development effort. You have to think about which features to keep, which to rework, and which to throw away. You also have to consider what to do with your existing customers. Can you migrate them to the new codebase without significant cost? Or would they be willing to pay for the migration? Can you keep them on the old code without significant effort (both from engineering and support)?A rewrite can pay off for the right reasons, but potentially using some AI tools might not be a good one. 4. Having a part-time co-founder
Christian Sino: I have this kind of setup. Too many questions. 1. Yes, it did, and it kind of still does, but expectations need to be adjusted at times 2. and 4. You need to set up clear expectations of how many hours and when they are going to be available. And based on that, you need to understand and share to the team how the progress will be. Are you comfortable going slower? Be aware that some days/weeks, they are not going to feel enough motivation/energy to work. You are going to have that, but you are still going to make some progress each week. Also, what are their intentions if things start to go well? E.g. Enough revenue, investment etc. What if things take longer than expected? They almost always take longer than expected, especially in that type of setup. Is your personal financial runway enough to anticipate that? Share that and share what you would have to do. 5. Then, after all these are laid down, you can discuss equity. Equity split can be tricky, but for sure you are taking more risk than they are. Share that and maybe set up a vested schedule for equity. Keep in mind things are going to go slower, so vesting only based on time passing by might not be an issue for them. What if their work is lower than expected? Not answers, but things to consider. Gautam Banerjee: It’s not going to work if you’re going for VC investment. No investor is going to bet on founders who don’t fully also bet on themselves. Mohnish: Thank you very much, @Christian Sino 🙂 I really appreciate your valuable insights about this, especially as someone having firsthand experience with this sort of a setup. I’ll definitely keep all your above points in mind, as I’m currently speaking to someone who cannot immediately go full-time and I’m exploring if things can work out between us to be potential co-founders in this setup, and especially points like vested equity are key things to keep in mind for them to also showcase their dedication and commitment to the startup for the long term. @Gautam Banerjee, your reasoning is very nicely put. I do know that investors normally prefer full-time team members, and with your answer I now understand this so much more better as to why, especially in the context of a fully dedicated team, thank you very much for your insights. David Jorjani: Most important is to set expectations and boundaries clearly and get comfortable having difficult conversations to adjust course. Seems like a special circumstance, and it’ll be hard to get it right the first iteration. Build “retros” into the relationship. I don’t think there can be one resource that covers everything you need to cover in this situation. 🤓 Top finds
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