Grading Work and the Pursuit of Excellence
A glimpse into how we strive to make our work and the lives of our customer better.
Copy/pasted from an internal blog post originally from November 2023. Note that many of the doc links are broken to the external reader as they link to internal blog posts and documents.
At Clipboard, we pursue excellence without apology. We have a desire to be a generational company - this doesn’t happen unless we openly seek exceptionalism.
Our pursuit of exceptionalism shows through in our Company Values, which are difficult to achieve by design. We don’t want to just be fast, we want to be Unreasonably Fast. We won’t just have the difficult conversation, we want to Relish in our Discomfort. Our values require doing the hard thing often.
Within our culture, one of the things that isn’t always easy is upholding our High Standards. We rely on managers to uphold the bar while also giving grades. Hearing “this was good” isn’t nearly as helpful if you want to improve as “this was a 7/10 and here’s why”. As a team, we are always seeking improvement and exuding clarity through grades helps drive improvement.
The quality of work product sits on a gradient where there’s always room to improve. Passable work at Clipboard is excellent work at most other places. Internally, our high standards mean that a grade above a 6 isn’t just representative of passable work (or what other orgs would likely consider excellent), but it’s even better than what you’d reasonably expect (sometimes you’ll hear this referred to internally as “excellent excellent”). External blog note, on Clipboard’s scoring scale of 1-10 work at a 6/10 is considered passing and should be published broadly, below a 6 needs work prior to publishing, and above a 6 represents excellence). The bar for passable work will go up over time as our team improves, and we’re always improving.
As a company (and as individuals) we constantly strive for the 10/10 (or the 5 during quarterly performance reviews). We may never get there and we should always be able to imagine a better world - AirBnB’s 11 Star Experience is a great example of how you can imagine something being better than what you view as excellent today. We should always be able to imagine a better world for our customers and the same goes for our work - we crave improvement as we pursue excellence.
Judgment and Grading
Managing at Clipboard is a high judgment position. Grading most work is squishy: the difference between 6 and an 8 can be difficult to ascertain but carries weight, meeting expectations is not the same as exceeding expectations. Managers are managers for a reason, we expect them to have good judgment and to be able to communicate that with grades and reasoning, just like we expect them to uphold our high standards. When work is excellent we don’t just say “this work meets the bar” and give a 6/10, we should deliver a grade above a 6 to express the level of excellence of the work.
Work below the bar is not just a reflection of the work itself but also a reflection of the work product of the manager. An excellent manager will push the quality of work within their team / org up the scale. Passing work is the same - the manager should be able to communicate how the work could be pushed to a higher score in almost every case, which will help raise the bar for that work even though it was already passing.
Sometimes you hear that there’s a perception that giving lower grades is better - this is false. If a manager is delivering a grade below an 8 the manager should be able to deliver specific feedback to help drive improvement. There’s a component of judgment around an 8 and 9 as well. If the work is excellent, managers shouldn’t shy away from delivering the high grade. A 10 might never be attained (for certain types of work, see the appendix). The fact that we may never deliver the perfect piece of work doesn’t mean the pursuit is without virtue.
Appendix:
We have a few different grading scales and each serves a unique purpose (we haven’t felt the need to standardize):
Work: 1-10 scale
Quarterly Reviews: 1-5 scale
See the scoring system here
Interviews: 1-4 scale
1: Strong No, 2 No, 3 Yes, 4 Strong Yes
Some work is fuzzier than others. You can think of two sports - golf vs bowling. In bowling there’s a finite ceiling on the work: you can only bowl a 300 (12 strikes) in a game. Golf is a bit different - there’s a joke in golf that people will say “I left a few shots out there” even when they play their best round of golf in their life because there’s always something that could have been a bit better (“I almost made a hole in one on that hole, if I teed the ball up an inch to the left it would have gone in and I would have been a shot better”). Our work usually resembles golf more than it does bowling - there’s always something that we can do to make our work / the lives of our customers better, and we should strive for that world.