Performance Development

The Problem

Nike's annual performance rating process was not working. Employees rarely talked with their managers about their actual performance. Development was not treated as a priority. Year-end ratings created negative emotions and demotivated people instead of helping them improve.

The Work

This was not a digital product. It was a service: how a manager and an employee talk to each other about performance, work, and growth. I helped lead the redesign from research through prototype testing. We benchmarked what other companies were doing, mapped the current manager and employee journey to find the real pain points, ran workshops with stakeholders on specific pieces like goal setting, and built a framework for the tradeoffs a full redesign would require.

Then we tested it like a product, not a policy. Five hypotheses, each with its own prototype: a printed conversation guide tested through role-play sessions with 20 manager and employee pairs across four regions, a two-month pilot with whole teams testing whether more frequent conversations actually made people feel more connected and valued, and an A/B test on the hardest question of all, whether people would have these conversations without a mandate forcing them to. Half the test teams got the tools with a required cadence. Half got the same tools with no mandate at all. HR would enable it, not police it.

Impact

The design criteria behind every test were written from three perspectives at once: what a manager needs to lead well, what an individual needs to grow, and what Nike needs to stay focused on its people. Testing a conversation the same way you would test a product, with hypotheses, control groups, and real people role-playing the hard parts, is what made this a service design project and not a policy memo.