Dear Product Manager,
Performance reviews are coming up and I’m feeling pretty anxious about it. Our company reorged twice this year, half the projects I started got deprioritized, and the AI initiatives we were told to “go figure out” never really materialized into anything concrete.
I spent a lot of the year jumping between different projects and priorities, trying to keep my team moving, and jumping into whatever fire was burning that week. I know I contributed, but it’s hard to point to clear wins when everything shifted so much.
How do I prep for a review when the year felt like constant pivoting instead of steady progress?
—Not Sure What to Highlight
Dear Not Sure What to Highlight,
You’re not the only one feeling this way. A lot of PMs had years that didn’t follow a straight line—reorgs, shifting priorities, AI initiatives without clear direction, and work that started and stopped before it landed. When the work looks fragmented, it’s natural to worry about what to say in a performance review. But messy years often show more about your contribution and leadership than clean ones.
Start by grounding your review in the reality of the year. Not to make excuses—just to provide the context your work lived inside.
“We had several shifts in direction this year, so I focused on helping the team adjust quickly, clarify priorities, and make informed decisions as new work emerged.”
That one sentence tells leadership what environment you were operating in and how you responded.
From there, focus on the value you delivered in the moments between the starts and stops. Impact in a year like this rarely shows up as a finished feature. Instead, it shows up in how you helped the team stay focused and productive when the inputs were unclear. Pull forward examples like:
- bringing clarity when goals or requests were vague
- helping engineering keep moving when priorities shifted — clarifying just enough for them to make progress, answering questions quickly, and protecting them from work that wasn’t ready
- identifying weak bets early and saving time
- keeping cross-functional conversations aligned
- making tradeoffs explicit so decisions could be made faster
These are core product management skills, and they matter even more in turbulent environments.
Your AI work deserves space too, even if nothing shipped. Years like this helped many PMs learn how to separate noise from real opportunity. Highlight the substance behind the scenes:
- what you explored
- what you ruled out and why
- where you identified risk
- how you helped the team focus on viable paths rather than “just because it’s AI” ideas
This is strategic product thinking, and it’s often invisible unless you name it.
It’s also worth pulling out the specific skills you strengthened because of this year—not in spite of it. Messy conditions build different muscles. Think about where you grew in areas such as:
- getting alignment faster
- clarifying the problem when solutions arrived first
- giving teams enough direction when inputs were incomplete
- communicating tradeoffs in simple, actionable terms
- helping people stay focused when everything competed for attention
These are the kinds of skills reviewers look for as PMs move into more senior roles.
Finally, before you finalize anything, check in with your manager. A short conversation can give you insight into what they saw as your strongest contributions and where they think you made the most impact. This not only strengthens your review—it can help you see your work through a different (often more generous) lens.
Performance reviews aren’t meant to reflect a perfect year. They’re meant to reflect your year—how you navigated uncertainty, supported your team, and made thoughtful decisions in a constantly changing environment. That’s real product leadership, and it deserves to be described clearly.
—The Product Manager
