Personio
Performance overhaul
Growth cycles, timelines, and role-aware navigation — scope-based architecture for Personio’s densest surface.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
3 months
Year
2024
Context
Personio’s top revenue driver needed a rethink
During H2 2023 Personio shifted company goals toward the mid-market segment in the UK&I and international markets. The mandate was clear: overhaul the core platform and key product experiences, driving customer love by dedicating resources to enhancing the user experience across the board.
Performance — encompassing Cycles, Feedback, Goals, and Training — was Personio’s top revenue driver in this expansion. Each of these experiences had been built as its own navigational silo, optimized in isolation. The rapid growth of the offering created a need to step back and evaluate how these products connect with each other and with adjacent areas like Compensation and Analytics.
Challenge
A tool that records data but can’t drive a process
The existing experience was narrowly focused on the “review” phase of performance management. It didn’t reflect how HR managers actually drive their processes, making it challenging to launch, execute, and connect key activities like goal setting, continuous feedback, and development planning.
Performance & Development is a company’s culture. It’s the system by which leaders codify what skills and behaviors they reward. Every part of the process design encourages a set of behaviors — and bad process means bad outcomes: good people leave, struggling people don’t improve, and business goals suffer.
The current tooling helped people record performance data, but not understand it or drive a process.
Research
17 card-sorting sessions across Europe
To understand workflows used within the performance space, I ran 17 moderated card sorting sessions with ICP non-customer HR Managers across Europe — 7 in the UK & Ireland, 6 in Germany, and one each in Finland, Spain, Switzerland, and Austria.
We visualized the rough journeys and interconnection of how each organization structures performance and adjacent topics such as engagement and compensation. From there, we mapped the connections between topics, relationships, and time, drafting a single journey to represent the performance experience.
Definition
Defining the ICP’s mental model
Across every session a consistent pattern emerged: HR managers think about performance management in four phases — Planning, Monitoring, Reviewing, and Rewarding — each with its own set of activities that feed into the next.
“A cycle is not a project with a clear start and end. The outputs you get along the way influence and shape the process ahead. It is always cyclical.”
— Martha, HR Manager — Research participant
Opportunity
Enable customers to extend their processes naturally
The opportunity was to align the product with the mental model we had uncovered: let customers naturally extend their performance processes, aligning seamlessly with their existing workflows instead of forcing them into a review-centric funnel.
Guiding principles
Six principles to shape every decision
Sensible defaults
Kickstart performance processes by automating for sensible defaults, reducing manual tasks and driving bottom-up improvement.
Automate the admin
HR and senior leaders focus on strategy, not chasing tasks.
Bring the context in
Provide clear context to support feedback and team monitoring.
Deep customization
Defaults and automation should not hinder adoption by complex orgs — scale with the company.
Writing & reading for everyone
Feedback tools adapt to different styles, ensuring better outcomes.
Bottom-up improvement
When supervisors’ jobs get easier, leaders’ and HR’s do too.
Solution
Scope-based architecture
Performance is Personio’s densest application — needs shift in priority depending on your role, scope, and the stage of the journey you’re in. All actors are employees first; some are also supervisors, people leaders, or specialized people partners.
Inspired by the cyclical nature of the performance space, I designed a scope-based architecture where the interface scales progressively with your responsibilities. Individual contributors see what matters to their career. Managers gain a team layer. Org leaders see across their organization. HR managers get the full management surface.
Individual Contributor
Jeremy Steadbetter — “How do I manage my career?”
Manager
Heidi Müller — “How do I manage my team?”
Org Leader
Felicia Garcia — “How do I manage my org’s performance?”
HR Manager
Phillip Lee — “How do I manage our performance process?”
Solution
Building the experience
The redesigned Performance surface brings cycle information, tasks, key dates, progression tracking, and feedback requests into a unified overview that adapts to the user’s role. The timeline-based layout reflects the cyclical mental model that emerged from research.
Solution
Feedback as a continuous loop
Rather than treating feedback as a one-time form during review season, the redesign positions it as a continuous loop across Planning, Monitoring, and Reviewing. ICs can request and give feedback at any point; managers can track feedback artifacts and use them to support fair evaluations; the system closes the loop by surfacing context when it matters.
Impact
Measurable outcomes
112%
Net Revenue Retention, Q2–Q3 2024
1,430+
Participants in the redesigned cycle experience
4
Adjacent product areas adopted the scope-based architecture (Analytics, Payroll, Compensation, Planning)
10
Product areas adopted the attributes filtering pattern born from this work
Broader influence
Patterns that scaled across the platform
Beyond Performance itself, two foundational patterns born from this project were adopted across the Personio platform: the scope-based architecture — used by Analytics & Reporting, Payroll, Compensation, and Planning — and the attributes filtering pattern, which scaled to 10 product areas including Surveys, Documents, Time & Attendance, Organisation, Recruiting, and Inbox.