Judge technical managers on more than delivery
Software manager performance reviews should consider the full job: technical judgment, team health, delivery reliability, communication, and people development. A manager who ships quickly but leaves the team unclear or overloaded is not creating sustainable performance. The review should show how their leadership choices shape both the system and the people building it.
Use evidence from project outcomes, team feedback, incident learnings, hiring decisions, planning quality, and one-on-one conversations. Look for patterns over time instead of one dramatic launch or outage. A fair review explains what changed because of the manager’s leadership and which capabilities they should strengthen next.
Examples you can adapt
Useful examples focus on observable behavior: makes trade-off decisions clear under changing constraints; creates room for senior engineers to lead; turns incidents into learning opportunities; and communicates delivery risks early. Pair each observation with context and impact, then agree on one or two development priorities rather than diluting the conversation with a long, generic list.
Give technical managers better review support
Baxo gives software leaders a consistent place to collect feedback, prepare reviews with AI assistance, and keep development priorities visible after the formal conversation. That structure helps managers evaluate leadership and team impact alongside delivery instead of defaulting to project output alone.
Use pulse surveys to surface team friction earlier and Shoutouts to recognize the leadership behaviors you want repeated. Together, these signals make the eventual review more balanced, more evidence-based, and more connected to how the engineering team actually experiences management.
