Should we capture when someone hasn't had the opportunity to display a skill?

[njbennett]

Sometimes when I'm collecting feedback the reviewer will note that "we don't really do that on this team" or "they haven't really had an opportunity to do that." The inception-related questions often get this response, as well as the story and acceptance criteria writing questions.

I might like to be able to mark "not observable" on a skill and then visualize on the heatmap if a certain percentage skills had that response in an area, but I don't know if the system is already designed to take this into account somehow.

How should we take it into account with leveling if someone appears weak in an area because there team doesn't have many opportunities to exercise the relevant skills?

[rainmaker]

Hi Nat,

Thanks for bringing this up! Overall, this is something that we want managers to track on their own, without the tooling explicitly surfacing it. I agree that it's an important distinction to bring up and address during leveling conversations, in order to put the heat-map in context for the rest of the room. And of course, if possible, we'd want managers to respond to these gaps by finding allocations or opportunities that help pivots practice those skills.

To look at it another way, it seems like "didn't have the opportunity" or "team doesn't need this" is one of the primary reasons to skip over an item on the form. If the situation is more "the team needs this but the person doesn't do it", then I'd want a clearer signal like "Low impact", a frequency selection like "Only when asked", or a story with more context. So in a way, a gap in # of observations for a certain skill says "This person hasn't had the opportunity to do this thing". The signal is already built in with the option to skip a row.

In the future, we'd love to improve a manager's ability annotate each item as they collect feedback. Then, notes like "team doesn't need this" or "hasn't done an inception yet" could also be added without requiring a new column on the form.

Does this address your concern? I know that the review process continued after you opened this issue, so maybe your experience in conversations has changed/reinforced your thoughts on this.