The moment of truth came during a customer call last month.
Sarah, an HR director at a 200-person manufacturing company, was walking me through her team’s experience with Big 5 Performance. “Doug,” she said, “your platform has transformed how we think about employee development. But honestly? My managers still groan when it’s time to log in.”
That conversation kept me awake that night. Not because Sarah was wrong—but because she was absolutely right.
Seven years ago, we launched Big 5 Performance with a simple but ambitious mission: make monthly performance management effortless for growing businesses. We wanted to eliminate the dreaded annual review cycle and replace it with meaningful, ongoing conversations that actually develop people. We wanted managers and supervisors to be more interactive with their team.
The results have been incredible. Over 3,500 employees now use our platform. We’ve facilitated thousands of performance conversations. We’ve helped managers identify high performers, support struggling team members, and build cultures of continuous Growth.
But here’s what we’ve learned from every single one of those companies: You’ve outgrown what we initially built.
Your teams are more diverse than when we started. Your feedback needs are more sophisticated. Your expectations for user experience have rightfully skyrocketed. And most importantly, your managers—the people who make or break any performance system—deserve tools they actually want to use, not just tolerate.
We could have taken the easy path: incremental updates, feature patches, gradual improvements. Instead, we made a decision that frankly scared us: We’re rebuilding Big 5 Performance from the ground up.
The Technology landscape has transformed dramatically since 2018. What felt cutting-edge then feels clunky now. More importantly, we’ve learned things about performance management that we simply didn’t know when we started.
We’ve learned that managers don’t want more data—they want better insights. They don’t need seventeen different reports; they need one dashboard that tells them exactly what action to take next.
We’ve learned that employees don’t want more feedback—they want more meaningful feedback. They don’t need daily check-ins; they need conversations that actually connect their daily work to their career growth.
We’ve learned that HR leaders don’t want more features—they want more adoption. The most sophisticated performance management system in the world is worthless if managers won’t use it consistently.
We know we need to adopt an AI layer to expand and enhance the feedback process. But nobody wants to talk to a bot. We need meaningful insights that managers can use to share more empowering and useful feedback, custom tailored to the individual employee. We believe AI can definitely help us do that.
These insights can’t be addressed with simple updates to our current platform. They require reimagining how performance management software should work in 2025 and beyond.
But here’s where our approach gets radically different from every other software company you’ve worked with: We’re not disappearing into a development cave for 18 months.
We’re building Big 5 Performance 2.0 WITH you, in real-time, with complete transparency.
Why? Because the best performance management tool isn’t the one we think you need—it’s the one you actually use every day. And the only way to build that tool is to involve you in every major decision.
This isn’t a marketing gimmick or a token gesture toward “user feedback.” This is a fundamental shift in how we develop software. You’re not just our customers—you’re our co-creators.
Your Emotional Experience: How does our current interface make you feel when you open it? Excited? Overwhelmed? Bored? Frustrated? We want to understand the emotional journey of using performance management tools because Emotions drive behavior, and behavior drives results.
Your Functional Needs: What’s the one feature you wish existed but doesn’t? What takes too many clicks? What information do you need that’s buried three screens deep? What would make your Monday morning performance review prep take five minutes instead of thirty?
Your Manager Reality: If you could sit down with every manager in your organization and redesign our dashboard together, what would you prioritize? What would make them actually want to open Big 5 Performance instead of avoiding it until the last possible moment?
Your Employee Perspective: How can we make performance conversations feel less like evaluations and more like career development sessions? What would help employees see feedback as a gift rather than a judgment?
Your Strategic Vision: Where do you see performance management heading in the next five years? What trends are you seeing in your industry? What challenges are emerging that current tools don’t address?
Every suggestion won’t make it into the final product—that’s not realistic. But every voice will be heard, and every decision will be explained.
Here’s what we’re committing to:
Monthly Progress Updates: Detailed blog posts showing exactly what we’ve built, what we’ve learned from your feedback, and what we’re tackling next.
Quarterly Beta Releases: Early access to new features for community members who want to test and refine before general release.
Open Development Roadmap: A public dashboard showing our development priorities, timeline, and how community feedback is influencing our decisions.
Direct Access: Regular video calls where you can ask questions, share concerns, and influence our direction in real-time.
Complete Honesty: When we make mistakes (and we will), when we change direction (and we might), when we disagree with popular feedback (and sometimes we must), we’ll explain our reasoning openly.
We’re not just rebuilding software—we’re reimagining what’s possible when performance management actually works.
Success means managers who look forward to performance conversations instead of dreading them. Success means employees who see feedback as career acceleration instead of criticism. Success means HR leaders who can demonstrate clear ROI from their performance management investment.
But most importantly, success means workplaces where people genuinely grow, develop, and thrive—not just survive until the next review cycle.
This is bigger than a software upgrade. This is an opportunity to fundamentally change how businesses develop their people. This is your chance to influence a tool that thousands of managers and employees will use every day.
We’re looking for companies that aren’t just willing to give feedback, but excited to help shape the future of performance management. We want partners who understand that the best solutions come from collaboration, not isolation.
Ready to help us build the performance management platform you actually want to use?
Join our Co-Creation Community today. Share your experiences, influence our decisions, and help us create something that doesn’t just manage performance—but transforms it.
Because the future of workplace development shouldn’t be built in a vacuum. It should be built by the people who live it every day.
Join the Big 5 Performance Co-Creation Community and start influencing our development roadmap today.
Doug Thorpe is the founder of HeadwayExec and provider of Big 5 Performance. He’s spent over two decades helping businesses transform their approach to leadership and employee development.
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