Case study · Rippling Performance Management
Reviews and raises, one connected cycle.
I designed Rippling's performance suite from zero — turning one of HR's most tangled, multi-stakeholder workflows into a single connected system.
Rippling runs a company's people ops in one place — payroll, benefits, devices, apps. I led design on its newest addition, Performance Management, and owned it 0→1, end to end: the entire review cycle, for five kinds of stakeholder, with a PM, a researcher, and five engineers.
Goals, reviews, calibration, compensation, a final packet — each with its own rules and permissions, and no two companies running it the same way. The design problem was never a single screen. It was making all of it feel like one thing.
The two stages this study zooms into
Everyone still runs reviews in spreadsheets.
Ask how companies calibrate ratings or hand out raises today and it's the same answer: a pile of spreadsheets — error-prone, painful to permission, messier with every department. I mapped how teams actually run these cycles, and one pattern cut across all of it: the pain wasn't any single step. It was the seams between them — every export, re-import, and hand-off.
So the fix wasn't a screen. It was the seams.
Every stage lives in one system and feeds the next — no point where you export data out of Rippling to finish the job somewhere else. I designed the substrate that keeps the whole cycle connected, then designed the two features that show what it unlocks.
Calibration, made visual.
Calibration is where leaders pressure-test every rating to keep them fair across managers — a room full of stakeholders, a lot of sensitive data, and no two companies doing it the same way. I designed the whole flow end to end; here are the decisions that mattered most.
Who it's for
HR admins / Head of People
Own the whole cycle — set up the calibration stage and keep conversations moving.
Department leads + HR business partners
Own the worksheets — walking every rating on their team, keeping them fair across managers.
Two views of the same truth.
The same data, two ways: a familiar table, and a 9-box grid for reading a team at a glance. Each box carries its headcount and percentage — so against the company's target distribution, you get an instant gut-check.
Context, one click away.
Calibration usually involves people beyond the direct manager — HR business partners, a newly-transitioned lead. So any employee's history, and the reviews they've received and given, are one click away, right inside the conversation.
Every company calibrates differently.
No two companies distribute worksheets, seat participants, or fill in the fields the same way. The feature is built to absorb those edge cases — configurability first, so it bends to how a team already works instead of forcing a single mold.
Sensitive data, gate-kept.
Worksheets carry private information, and sharing causes real anxiety — when a viewer's level is lower than the person on the sheet, or they're a subject on it. So sharing runs through a gatekeeping layer that keeps the wrong eyes off the wrong rows.
A clean hand-off.
At the end, a summary confirmation lets the cycle admin review everything once more before closing the stage — and the data flows straight into the next one. Nothing gets exported and re-imported; the whole process stays connected end to end.
Then raises, in the same flow.
Compensation plugs straight into the same cycle — the natural next step after calibration. Same principle: reuse Rippling's underlying building blocks so it does things point tools can't.
Who it's for
HR admins / Compensation lead
Set up and run the compensation review stage — sometimes the comp lead steps in.
Department leads / Managers
Given a budget and a guidance number, and distribute it across their team.
Employees
Not in the process — but they receive their changes in the final review packet.
A worksheet that does the math.
Managers get a worksheet with the budget stated up top, counting down as they work. Each comp type has a $ and a % column that mirror each other — type one, the other fills in — because people think about raises in different units.
Eligibility, per comp type.
An eligibility "superbox" lets admins say who qualifies for each comp type — only sales is eligible for on-target commissions, say. A genuine differentiator, built by reusing Rippling's hub capabilities and its employee-data connector.
Guidance that auto-allocates.
A built-in comp matrix lets cycle admins enter guidance for each comp type. Depending on how worksheets are grouped in setup, budget distributes automatically by those percentages — a lot of automation, far less calculation. Admins can still tweak the numbers after the fact.
Review as a chain, not a merge.
Today, people merge everyone's spreadsheets into one master file to review — cumbersome and blind to multiple reviewers. Reusing Rippling's approvals framework, comp reviews run through an approval chain where several stakeholders sign off in sequence.
Policies that flag themselves.
A custom policy framework makes the process smarter: when a scenario is met, Rippling acts. If an employee gets more than a 30% base increase, the system flags it for review — instead of anyone hunting for it row by row.
The packet employees actually see.
Everything lands in the review packet at the end of the cycle. A card up top gives the quick summary and the main changes; below it, the full breakdown of their new compensation — the connected cycle finally made personal.
Live, and one of the fastest-growing.
Built from zero, Performance Management launched in August 2023 and found product-market fit immediately. Calibration and compensation both shipped and are on the market today. See it live on Rippling.
in ARR in its first year — one of the fastest-growing products in Rippling's suite.