A.1.2 IC expectations rubric
Summary
An Individual Contributor (IC) directly creates value through their craft. This draft assesses Output, Communication, and Judgment. A rating of 3 means fully meeting expectations: successful performance in the role. The rubric preserves the complete criteria supplied on October 2 and has not yet been adopted as policy.
Role and scope
The core question is:
How effectively do you produce excellent work?
This rubric evaluates the work a person produces as an IC. Define the agreed work, expected pace, and quality before evaluating it.
Roles can overlap. Evaluate the roles a person actually held during the review period; IC, DRI, and PC do not form a required promotion ladder.
Expectations rubric
The three dimensions are Output, Communication, and Judgment. Ratings describe the overall pattern of contribution and supporting evidence, rather than a checklist to maximize mechanically. A 4 or 5 represents meaningfully greater contribution, scope, or leverage than reliably fulfilling the expected role.
| Rating | Output | Communication | Judgment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 — Extraordinary | Repeatedly delivers major, high-quality systems or products that materially expand organizational capability. Creates tools or automation that multiply future output and handles highly ambiguous technical problems independently. | Creates exceptional clarity with very little overhead. Anticipates information needs, surfaces risks early, documents consequential decisions, and substantially reduces coordination costs. | Consistently identifies important problems or opportunities before they are assigned. Reframes problems, finds substantially higher-leverage solutions, and makes excellent product and technical tradeoffs under uncertainty. |
| 4 — Exceeds expectations | Consistently ships high-quality work faster or at greater scope than expected. Owns substantial projects end-to-end, improves underlying systems, and creates reusable leverage. | Proactively communicates progress, reasoning, blockers, results, and next steps. Anticipates questions, closes loops, and raises issues before they become problems. | Frequently improves the proposed approach. Prioritizes effectively, challenges weak assumptions, simplifies systems, and notices important downstream consequences. |
| 3 — Fully meets expectations | Reliably delivers agreed work at the expected pace and quality. Tests and debugs their own work, finishes projects, follows through on commitments, and independently owns scoped projects. | Clearly and proactively communicates what they are doing, why, current status, blockers, important decisions, results, and what comes next. Others generally do not need to chase them for information. | Understands organizational and user goals, prioritizes accordingly, makes sound product and technical tradeoffs, and independently handles most decisions within their domain. |
| 2 — Developing | Produces useful work, but speed, quality, or reliability is inconsistent. Work sometimes requires substantial rework, follow-up, or additional direction. | Communicates when prompted, but updates may be late or incomplete. Blockers sometimes surface too late, or activity is reported without enough explanation of outcomes or next steps. | Handles clearly defined decisions but struggles with ambiguity, prioritization, or system-level consequences. Frequently needs guidance when comparing alternatives. |
| 1 — Below expectations | Frequently misses commitments or produces incomplete, unreliable, or low-value work. Requires substantial supervision or repeated follow-up. | Progress is difficult to understand without asking. Important blockers, changes, or failures surface late and create uncertainty for others. | Frequently works on the wrong things, requires step-by-step direction, or makes avoidable product or technical decisions that are misaligned with organizational goals. |
Applying the draft
Share expectations before evaluating performance. Discuss observable outcomes and behavior, using examples from the review period. Hours worked, messages sent, tickets closed, lines of code, and meetings attended do not by themselves establish contribution.
Suggested weighting: 50% Output · 25% Communication · 25% Judgment
These weights come from the supplied draft. They are a suggestion, not an adopted scoring rule. Confirm whether and how to apply them before using a combined score.
Details to confirm before adoption: the review owner and process, agreed role scope and expectations, evidence to use, assessment cadence, and how differences between assessments will be discussed. The companion staff guidance should own the common review process; this page owns this role's complete rubric.
For existing coaching practices, see Feedback and coaching. The other role rubrics are:
Further Reading
The supplied framework names From Hierarchy to Intelligence, Holacracy's organizational structure, Locke and Latham's goal-setting work, and Andy Grove's High Output Management as influences. Bibliographic details, relevant passages, and the attribution of particular claims remain unverified for the handbook. These are source-note influences awaiting citation review, not verified support or assigned reading.