How to Achieve Long-Term Impact Without Hurting Your Performance Review
5 tips for minimizing the risks associated with long-term research projects
Business leaders frequently advocate for big bets and long-term impact, but this often conflicts with the way they reward, incentivize, and assess employee performance. In my experience, this kind of conflict has been apparent for team members and colleagues across multiple disciplines, and it has applied at businesses of widely varying size and maturity. Although my direct knowledge and attention are primarily focused on research functions, this conflict exists across tech and beyond.
Here’s how the problem typically plays out:
Companies will tell employees they value long-term impact and want team members to chase ambitious wins, even if they take longer to achieve.
In performance reviews, companies will focus primarily on demonstrable and fully landed impact rather than more ambitious bets that are still in progress.
In trading off the personal risk/reward of long-term impact plans against the personal risk/reward of more immediate impact opportunities, team members will prioritize quick wins.
Companies ultimately under-invest in long-term impact and over-invest in smaller, iterative impact.
You could argue performance reviews need to change and reward long-term plans, but in practice this isn’t so easy. For example, it can be hard to objectively judge the value of an effort’s progress before it lands impact, and this introduces biases in how managers compare the outcomes of different people, especially if those managers aren’t closely tied into the projects in question.
So instead of discussing how performance reviews might be adapted here, I’ll highlight five things that researchers (and probably other roles) can do to leverage big, long-term wins while hedging the risks involved in performance review.
#1 Multiple eggs in multiple baskets
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a cliche, but it’s also good life and career advice. Whether you want to be the next FAANG CEO, NFL quarterback, or Nobel Prize winner, it’s important to think ambitiously. At the same time, it would be irrational to pin all of your hopes and investments on this one possible path to success.
Developing research plans and roadmaps is no different. You need to employ varied strategies and backup plans to account for all possible occurrences through a quarter or half, and it’s often a good idea to balance your progress across multiple priorities to avoid relying on a single coal in the fire (sorry for another cliche). If a product initiative is killed midway through the half, you don’t want all your efforts to crumble around you with the hope that your performance reviewers will empathize with your circumstances.
One simple approach might be to commit to one high-risk, long-term bet per half while simultaneously landing impact on a range of smaller, high-priority product team needs. It might be worth declining some quick-win priorities to make space for establishing progress with the big bet, but not all quick-win priorities since the big bet won’t fully pay off in the half and might not pay off at all.
This kind of balanced planning benefits you in several ways during a performance review. For example, you may be a senior researcher who is expected to make significant progress on major company bets. Even if you’ve fully landed impact on multiple tactical projects that product teams need, a reviewer might conclude, “all of the impact they’ve landed has been on smaller, tactical projects, and that’s not good enough”. On the other hand, if you’ve made significant progress on a major company bet during a performance review but haven’t fully landed impact on any single project, a reviewer might conclude, “I like that they’re being ambitious here, but they haven’t proven that they’re making a real difference”. A good balance across these two priorities allows you to cover both bases and prove you can think big while also landing impact.
#2 Set clear and measurable milestones on big bets
Long-term impact naturally matures over a long term, so there really is no shortcut. This might be because a significant amount of foundational or exploratory research is needed to kickstart thinking, or it might be because extensive product development is needed, or it might be because it’s a sensitive topic that requires widespread stakeholder buy-in and risk mitigation. In any case, progress and impact take time.
To make sure you’re getting the credit you deserve along the way, it’s essential to set up and socialize a clear milestone plan. For example, what do you expect to have delivered by the end of each month to prove that progress is moving as expected? Can you set targets that produce iterative or accumulating evidence of company impact rather than waiting on one big payout at the end of a large project? Are there clear pivot opportunities along the path that allow you to adjust direction based on how outcomes are evolving?
A clear plan gives your colleagues and managers confidence that you have a vision and you’re executing against it effectively. If it seems like your progress is too haphazard or whimsical, it can be difficult to defend in a performance review. Long-term impact might finalize over the long term, but it requires ongoing output and socialization along the way. Do what you can to set it up as though it’s a large number of immediate-impact projects that build on each other in delivering compounding value rather than one giant project that everyone needs to wait a year or two to appreciate.
#3 Find collaborators to share risk and broaden awareness
The value of a strong network of collaborators on a project should be obvious to everyone. It gives you more diversity in skills, wider opportunities to socialize impact, and more support or coverage when you need to take PTO or jump to another urgent priority.
There are however two other less appreciated benefits to a strong network on long-term projects:
Many of the risks involved in committing to a long-term project—the time investment, risks of project failure, unexpected changes in scope/responsibility—can be shared across collaborators rather than absorbed by a single person. For example, partners can take on specific tasks and responsibilities that free up more of your own time for lower-risk product initiatives. If the project outcomes are disappointing, you can show what multiple people learned from the mistakes and how future teams can adapt going forward. If your responsibility changes during the project, others can keep it alive to deliver final impact.
Performance reviews inevitably involve a lot of subjectivity, since reviewers need to discuss perceptions and decisions based on multiple ambiguous inputs. The wider your scope of influence and list of stakeholders on a project, the more likely that people involved in your performance review will be familiar with your work and able to defend its value. Familiarity with your work is generally a net positive for how people judge your work, so don’t be afraid to get more people invested in your project when they can add real value.
Sometimes, people fear losing credit for their project if more people are involved. In my experience, this is generally a misplaced fear, especially because the amount of reduced project risk from additional collaborators far outweighs any loss through shared credit. If you’re the lead on a project, this difference is even more extreme, because a lead will always get primary credit and will rarely be criticized for recruiting good project partners (as long as they actually do the work of a true lead!).
#4 Get buy-in as high up as possible
Similar to broadening awareness by finding the right collaborators, you can also boost awareness by getting buy-in as high up the chain as possible from skip-level managers. Getting buy-in from senior managers gives you more confidence that you’re working on a project that’s important for your company and gives you a wider perspective on which priority areas or product areas might be relevant in your planning.
Senior buy-in is a direct help for performance reviews since those managers will probably have a big say and can directly speak to the value of your efforts. Long before you complete a project or land impact, an influential manager can attest to how your long-term planning and ongoing efforts are critically important for company progress. They can also reassure people that you’re working at a good pace toward achieving that impact. It’s easier to dismiss a single direct manager’s promises about the value of your work than it is to dismiss multiple director testimonials.
This kind of high-level buy-in can also help more generally beyond performance reviews, since senior managers interact with many people across the company and have the ability to socialize your work broader than you could ever do alone. While you focus on execution, your senior stakeholders can identify new opportunities for scaling up your connection and impact.
#5 Go wide rather than long
Earlier, I said there are no shortcuts to long-term impact, and that’s true. There is however more than one way to make a big impact, and it doesn’t always require a long-term bet. Sometimes, you can identify a significant need across the company for a relatively straightforward research project that you can provide within weeks. Instead of doing multiple projects to benefit multiple product teams or areas, you can find an opportunity to do one research project that single-handedly delivers insights across multiple priority and product areas.
If you’re running research on what color a specific button within a specific feature should be, you might achieve some important tactical impact for a product team, but it probably won’t reliably extend or generalize to other teams. On the other hand, if you’re running research on why new users drop out within their first week of using a product, your insights are likely to interest colleagues on multiple product teams (e.g. different feature-specific teams, different user segment teams, etc) or multiple company departments (e.g. growth, marketing, design, etc). Of course, these are just examples; what constitutes tactical vs cross-org impact will depend entirely on your own team and company circumstances.
To be clear, there will always be some transformative company initiatives that can only be achieved with a long-term investment, and this recommendation of going wide rather than long won’t solve those. However, it can fit the bill of company-wide impact when it comes to performance reviews, and it will usually do it with lower risk since the time investment is less extreme.
Top takeaways
Long-term impact is highly sought and highly rewarded but it takes time to flourish and comes with significant risks along the way.
To mitigate the risks of long-term impact, balance your research plans with a good mix of lower-risk projects and set clear milestones.
Recruit strong collaborators on long-term projects to grow your impact and reduce your risk, and socialize your projects with senior managers and directors as far as possible.
Seek opportunities for immediate impact that spreads widely across the org rather than purely impact that compounds over the long term—both are good examples of big impact.
“Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupéry
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