E.1 Expectations

Summary

Make expectations explicit before evaluating performance. Evaluate outcomes and observable behavior, discuss performance continuously, and treat a rating of 3 as successfully meeting expectations. Assess people against the roles they actually hold: Individual Contributor, Directly Responsible Individual, and Player-Coach can overlap. This framework is a draft: it hasn't been adopted, and the assessment process is not yet agreed.

E.1.1 Individual Contributor

An Individual Contributor directly creates value through their craft. The central question is: How effectively do you produce excellent work? The dimensions are Output, Communication, and Judgment.

Use A.1.2 IC expectations for the maintained rating descriptions and suggested weighting. This section explains the role; the reference page maintains the score table.

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.

Source: A.1.2 IC expectations rubric · Status: draft · Updated: 2026-10-02

E.1.2 Directly Responsible Individual

A DRI owns an outcome, especially one spanning functions, systems, or contributors. The central question is: Did you make the outcome happen? The dimensions are Outcome, Ownership, and Judgment.

A DRI needs a clear purpose, domain, accountabilities, and decision authority. Responsibility without corresponding authority prevents effective ownership. Use A.1.3 DRI expectations for the maintained rating descriptions.

Rating	Outcome	Ownership	Judgment
5 — Extraordinary	Repeatedly achieves outcomes that materially exceed the original objective or unlock substantial new organizational capacity. Finds ways to succeed despite major ambiguity or constraints.	Operates as the unquestioned owner of the domain. Anticipates dependencies, coordinates contributors, resolves ambiguity, escalates intelligently, and creates systems that make future delivery easier. Requires very little executive attention.	Consistently identifies the highest-leverage problems, reframes goals when necessary, and makes excellent decisions under substantial uncertainty. Insights from the domain improve broader organizational strategy.
4 — Exceeds expectations	Consistently delivers the intended outcome at high quality and often improves meaningfully on the original objective.	Proactively drives planning, coordination, risks, dependencies, and follow-through. Ensures nothing important falls through the cracks and brings problems with proposed solutions.	Frequently improves priorities or approaches. Makes strong independent decisions, understands downstream consequences, challenges weak assumptions, and knows when to decide versus escalate.
3 — Fully meets expectations	Reliably achieves the agreed outcome with appropriate quality and timing. Changes tactics when needed rather than mechanically completing the original task list.	Clearly owns the project or domain from beginning to end. Defines next actions, coordinates contributors, tracks progress, surfaces blockers early, and closes loops without reminders.	Understands the objective and constraints, prioritizes appropriately, considers reasonable alternatives, and makes sound day-to-day decisions independently.
2 — Developing	Produces useful work, but achieving the actual outcome is inconsistent or sometimes depends heavily on intervention from others.	Owns assigned pieces but does not consistently drive the whole outcome. Dependencies, follow-ups, or risks sometimes require manager intervention.	Makes reasonable decisions in straightforward situations but struggles with ambiguity or tradeoffs and escalates decisions that should fall within their authority.
1 — Below expectations	Activity occurs, but intended outcomes are frequently not achieved.	Behaves primarily as a recipient of tasks rather than an owner of the result. Work stalls without supervision and dependencies or unresolved problems are allowed to sit.	Requires substantial direction for routine decisions or repeatedly makes decisions that optimize the immediate task rather than the overall outcome.

Source: A.1.3 DRI expectations rubric · Status: draft · Updated: 2026-10-02

E.1.3 Player-Coach

A Player-Coach combines substantive work in their craft with developing other people. The central question is: Are people and systems becoming more capable because of you? The dimensions are Direction, Enablement, and Systems.

Consider whether people understand priorities, receive useful feedback and appropriate autonomy, and have systems that help them do effective work. Use A.1.4 Player-Coach expectations for the maintained rating descriptions and suggested weighting.

Rating	Direction	Enablement	Systems
5 — Extraordinary	Creates exceptional clarity despite major ambiguity. People deeply understand goals, constraints, priorities, and success criteria and can independently make excellent tradeoffs.	People around them rapidly increase in capability, judgment, ownership, and autonomy. Gives exceptionally useful feedback and creates high standards while making disagreement, mistakes, and bad news safe to surface.	Builds operating and technical systems that materially multiply team output. Anticipates bottlenecks, redesigns systems before they fail, allocates talent exceptionally well, and makes the organization less dependent on themselves.
4 — Exceeds expectations	Consistently establishes clear goals, priorities, owners, and definitions of success. Explains why priorities matter, resolves conflicts quickly, and protects focus.	Gives frequent, specific, timely feedback; delegates meaningful ownership; removes blockers; adapts support to the individual; and makes people noticeably more capable and independent over time.	Identifies recurring problems and fixes root causes. Creates useful processes without bureaucracy, matches people to work well, and continuously improves how the team operates.
3 — Fully meets expectations	People generally know what they own, what matters now, why it matters, and what successful completion looks like. Conflicting priorities are resolved reasonably quickly.	Holds useful 1:1s, provides timely feedback, recognizes good work, addresses problems, gives appropriate autonomy, and helps people develop their skills and judgment.	Provides adequate tools, information, processes, and staffing. Delegates appropriately and fixes obvious recurring coordination problems.
2 — Developing	Priorities or ownership are sometimes unclear. Too many things are simultaneously important, definitions of success are vague, or direction changes without enough explanation.	Feedback is irregular, vague, or late. Alternates between micromanagement and insufficient support. Solves too many problems personally and people are not clearly becoming more autonomous.	Often handles recurring problems as isolated incidents. Processes are missing, cumbersome, or inconsistent, and delegation or resource allocation creates avoidable bottlenecks.
1 — Below expectations	People frequently do not know what to prioritize, who owns what, or what success means. Conflicting instructions and delayed decisions cause substantial wasted work.	Important feedback is avoided or delivered too late. People are blocked, overly controlled, or unsupported. Speaking up, disagreeing, or reporting mistakes feels risky.	The player-coach becomes a major bottleneck. Problems repeatedly recur, responsibilities are confused, resources are missing, and team effectiveness depends on constant intervention.

Source: A.1.4 PC expectations rubric · Status: draft · Updated: 2026-10-02

E.1.4 Mixed roles and predominant role

Role	Core accountability	Dimensions
Individual Contributor	Produce excellent work	Output, Communication, Judgment
DRI	Make an outcome happen	Outcome, Ownership, Judgment
Player-Coach	Make people and systems more capable	Direction, Enablement, Systems

Someone might spend most of their week building a membership system as an IC, own member activation as a DRI, and mentor another builder as a Player-Coach. Evaluation should reflect the mix of roles they actually held during the period. IC → DRI → Player-Coach is not a managerial ladder. How to determine a predominant role, and how that designation affects assessment of the other roles, remains unresolved.

There is no combined score across roles yet.

E.1.5 Performance evaluation

Set expectations before evaluating performance. People should know what excellent performance looks like before being evaluated against it. Clear expectations direct attention and make feedback coaching against a shared standard. Share the relevant rubric during hiring and onboarding, discuss it in 1:1s, and use it consistently when assessing performance. These are recommendations, pending adoption.

Evaluate outcomes and observable behavior. Hours worked, messages sent, tickets closed, lines of code, and meetings attended can increase without producing value. Instead, consider evidence about the contribution:

What actually got accomplished?
Did someone else need to take ownership to make it happen?
Were sound decisions made under ambiguity?
Did communication reduce or increase coordination costs?
Did the work increase the organization's future capability?

The rubric is not a checklist to maximize mechanically. Ratings describe the overall pattern of contribution and its supporting evidence.

A 3 is successful performance. 3 means fully meeting expectations. Someone consistently performing at 3 is doing their job well. Ratings of 4 and especially 5 describe meaningfully greater contribution, scope, or impact; reliable delivery of the expected job should not require a higher rating to count as success.

Discuss performance continuously. Formal assessments should mostly summarize feedback already discussed. We propose feedback as events happen, brief development discussions in regular 1:1s, and more structured assessments approximately quarterly. We also propose independently completing self-assessment and manager assessment before comparing them, to make differences in expectations, evidence, and interpretation visible.

This is a proposed approach, not an established review schedule. The appropriate assessor for each role, assessment timing, and treatment of disagreements need agreement before implementation.

Separate performance from promotion. Performance asks how well someone fulfills their current roles. Promotion asks whether they consistently operate at greater scope, complexity, or impact. Excellent performance does not automatically require promotion; expanded responsibility should generally follow demonstrated ability to fulfill it. There is no promotion process or compensation formula yet.

Define roles around work. Roles describe accountabilities rather than mutually exclusive positions. One person can produce work as an Individual Contributor, own a cross-functional outcome as a DRI, and develop another contributor as a Player-Coach. Evaluate the roles actually held rather than placing everyone on a single hierarchical ladder.

E.1 Expectations ​

Summary ​

E.1.1 Individual Contributor ​

E.1.2 Directly Responsible Individual ​

E.1.3 Player-Coach ​

E.1.4 Mixed roles and predominant role ​

E.1.5 Performance evaluation ​

Further Reading ​