Tuesday, March 22, 2016

What I need to improve - 2016 360 Peer Feedback

This morning our 360 feedbacks were delivered to all employees across Netflix.  360's are a way that we help encourage our colleagues to continue to be excellent as well as help us see personal blind spots that we'd all like to improve.  I wanted to summarize some of the common themes I received from 23 of folks across Netflix that took the time to help me understand myself better.  I am specifically focusing on "start" and "stop" areas, as those will help me improve as an engineer, team member, and leader.  I am proud of the "continue" areas and I'll make sure those areas don't turn from a weakness into a strength.


My personal tag cloud of feedback





Things I need to work on



1.  I am too verbose in my communication (documents, slides, in meetings) which can lose audiences and impact the effectiveness of team collaboration.

2.  I do not always include colleagues at the appropriate times.  I need to do a better job of bringing key peers, related teams, and potential collaborators into aspects of our projects earlier.

3.  I need to better separate tactical from strategic.  I need to be able to shift gears between both aspects of our projects better knowing when to focus on each.  Right now, my current project focus needs to switch more from tactical to strategic.

4.  I need to spend more time focusing on Open Source.  This is one of my focus areas at Netflix. My colleagues would like for me to spend more time improving our approach to OSS.

I realize some of the above items feel harsh, but the fact is my colleagues gave me this feedback to improve our excellence as a team.  Therefore, I take each of the above points seriously.  I also hope by writing them down myself and being able to refer to them through 2016, that I'll more strongly work to improve each of these items.

I imagine every leader has aspects of the above areas they have actively worked on improving.  If you have ways you have helped improve yourself in these areas, please let me know.  Books, blogs, and personal exercises are welcome.  I hope to look back in 2017 and say that I have actively improved each of the above areas.