How Snowflake rebuilt performance reviews without burning out its managers

Hi Reader,

Back in 2011, I canceled the annual performance reviews in my organization. They were painful for everyone, managers and employees, and they weren't adding much. Things moved so fast that by the time a manager and an employee sat down to talk, the goals were already out of date.

So we replaced the annual review with biweekly conversations between managers and their teams. A couple of years later, Deloitte wrote about it in its annual trends report as continuous performance management.

So I was interested to hear how David Gonzalez, Head of People Performance & Growth at Snowflake, rebuilt performance management for a company coming out of hypergrowth. We talked about it on this week's Built by People Leaders.

The problem David had to solve is one you probably know. Quarterly reviews load managers up with forms, ratings, and calibration when they're already stretched. So companies do them less often — and lose the one fixed moment a manager had for a real coaching and career talk. Take the reviews away, and that conversation goes too.

The Coaching Compass

The move is to keep the formal review light and add one thing in the quarters in between: a single fast read on each person — are they tracking ahead, on track, or off track?

That's the approach. It isn't a rating, and it never goes in a file. It's a signal — a compass — that points to where a conversation is needed. An "off track" or an "ahead" is the cue to sit down that same week for a coaching and career talk. The light quarters carry the coaching; the formal cycle carries the rating.

Why it works

Two reasons.

First, it separates the signal from the paperwork. You don't need a full rating cycle to notice that someone is drifting or pulling ahead — three states are enough to start the right conversation. Managers get a rhythm instead of a form.

Second, a trend shows up before a problem does. Someone flagged "off track" in a two-minute read gives you weeks to coach. Wait for the annual review and the same drift arrives as a resignation you can no longer reverse.

Try it this week

Take your team and, for each person, mark one of three against what their role needs this quarter: tracking ahead, on track, or off track.

Then, for anyone who lands on "ahead" or "off track," book twenty minutes this week for a coaching conversation. You can open it with:

"Here's the trend I'm seeing this quarter, and I wanted to talk about it early, while we can still do something with it. What's getting in your way — and what would the next stretch look like for you?"

You'll have started three real conversations before most companies have scheduled their next review cycle.

One line worth keeping

David's name for the signal captures the whole idea: "a coaching compass." A rating tells you where someone landed. A compass tells you where to go next.

The full episode has the rest of the architecture David built as Snowflake came out of hypergrowth: the four principles he designed everything around — clarity, accountability, advancement, and rewards — why he bakes the "how" of performance inside the rating instead of alongside it (where it always loses to the "what"), and how a fifty-person company with almost no data can still make sharp, data-driven people decisions. You can listen on your favorite platform.