The system that measures your momentum

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Six Startup Scaling Strategies For Navigating Rapid Growth (Forbes)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Balancing Mental Health for Founders: The Foundation (builtin)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• A Googler’s guide to getting things done (The Verge)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Tools for startups: A comprehensive review of 20+ software in 2024 (Proofhub)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Top five hiring trends in 2025: New data insights (LHH)

👀 ICYMI

• Training experiences that scale you and your company (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

📊 Your company’s PMS (not that kind)

Whether you’re a team of 30 or 300, the right performance management system is so crucial for creating alignment and growth in employee performance across your company.

Setting goals, providing feedback, and tracking progress, as rudimentary as they sound, are all key elements that will always be important no matter what stage of growth your company is at.  Without having a clear understanding of the health of your company, you risk avoidable outcomes like losing top talent, teams drifting out of alignment, or you as a founder having to be deeper on day-to-day management than necessary.

And as much as you want to know what’s going on with the people who run your business, they typically want to know just as much too.  A good system will not only give you peace of mind, it will also provide the transparency and clarity that employees typically want to see from their job performance.

Your company is only as strong as its people and your performance management system is a key element in its foundation.

What are they good for? Absolutely everything.

Like most things within your company, what they looked like when you were a small team that could fit around a conference table tend to look very different when the team can take up a whole floor (or more).  The “how” you do things may change because of team size but the “why” probably won’t dramatically change all that much.

Regardless of where you are within your scaling journey, a good performance management system will always be helpful.

Goal alignment

Rowing the boat in the same direction is always a critical component of building and scaling a successful company.

Within an effective performance management system, the company’s goals are aligned to the employee’s work.  As the company evolves, the goals may shift to connect from individuals to teams to departments and beyond, but the “why” will remain consistent.

Keeping good people around

Employees just want to know that they’re doing a good job.  They also want to know what they need to improve on.

When you hire good people, it’s really important to keep them engaged.  A good system tracking performance creates transparency for employees to know where they stand with their work.

When employees know where they stand, it’s much easier to create opportunities for their own personal growth, keeping them motivated and engaged.

Forecast future leaders

Building off of keeping top talent, a good performance management system will also enable you to bucket your top talent based on who has potential to take on leadership roles.

The byproduct of a good system always creates an internal pipeline of your top talent, with their performance metrics being your guide on where to place them within your company.

Numbers don’t lie

As you’re scaling, scorecards and dashboards become so important to track data across all of your employees.  A great system provides real time access and just clear visibility on the state of the business.

For leaders, dashboards are perfect to glance at, see how the team is performing, where they are with their metrics, and generally visualize signals for potential issues before they materialize.  And on the flip side, a dashboard creates accountability for the team and employees who can also see the data and where they rank against company goals.

Dashboards and an overall transparent system that gives you clean performance data are effective no matter how big or small your company is.

🦅 A system to set you free

As your company hits scale, there’s this moment in time where, as the founder and leader, people will just not be able to access you as much as they (or you) would like.

This isn’t a moment you can necessarily predict but it is one that you can be ready for well in advance.

A culture of rich feedback

One of the simplest things you can do at your company early on, to later reap the reward, is to encourage feedback from employees.  The earlier you embed the notion of debriefing or “retros” after a project, the more likely you’ll see this expand when you can’t be a part of projects or meetings.

Building the habit of asking and answering “how did we do today” will help you see the byproduct of how your employees and teams operate, to the point where the feedback will make its way back to you, even when you don’t ask for it.

Don’t overcomplicate your system

There’s a common phrase in the data world: “garbage in, garbage out”.  If your system is set up to be complex, making it difficult to track data, you’re only setting yourself up to receive data that you may not always trust.

At Spotify, management and HR focuses less on the tools, and more on the experience of employee development.

What does this mean?

• Employee 1 on 1’s are scheduled based on the need to have them, with the agenda set based on whatever management and the employee feel is necessary to discuss

• Performance management is lightweight, creating flexibility for employee development while also creating a layer of trust and accountability between management and employees

• Developmental talks are only done twice a year and have a 70/20/10 rule where 70% of the time is spent discussing the employee’s future, 20% is spent on the present, and 10% is spent on the past

OKRs as your north star

As a founder, you want to be able to have your people make decisions that are best for the company without you being in the room.  Objectives and key results (OKRs) will help you do this.  You set the OKR, the team uses that as their guiding light to go and execute.

Once you have set the OKR, you now have a set of performance metrics you can track against where you have a deep familiarity of what the work, even if you aren’t close or directly managing what needs to be done.

On the flip side, your employees know what they will be measured against and therefore you both share the same definition for what success looks from the OKR(s) you put together, reducing the amount of time you have to spend on goal setting with teams.

As much as performance management systems can provide the opening data you need to truly scale your company, they can just as easily fail.  From unclear objectives, poor communication, complexity of the system to just flat out resistance to change, if your system isn’t regularly used, it will very quickly become obsolete.

Don’t be afraid to refine and adjust the system needed.  Build out your system to be adaptable and agile to your company’s operations, no matter what stage you’re at - this is how you want to track performance. Make performance management meaningful for your world.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Standardize a goals & metrics dashboard that teams can refer back to

• Scale Yourself → Do an audit on your employee’s OKRs and redefine as needed

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

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