[jimduk]

Did this in a shortlived startup 20 yrs ago. Other cofounder was the ideas guy. Pitch was to roll up granular, factual project achievements up into reporting data , and cascade objectives down. This avoids the red/amber/green fictional layer between PMs and sponsors.

Learned two interesting things

- if your tool mandates a philosophy or process, you massively shrink your market

- real pms , sponsors and engineer s buffer their risk by selectively disclosing information. They don't want a permanent record of open, granular outcome information unless they are in a very mature company.

[drc500free]

Two really insightful learnings, especially that second one. A lot of meetings are pageantry, with decisions made through backchannels and off-the-record pre-meetings. Moving from a meeting to an online system doesn't remove that need.

I worked on an HR system recently, and "continual feedback" is all the rage. Folks have realized that those annual reviews and PIPs are completely divorced from reality - if we gave people continuous, incremental feedback they could course correct much more regularly. That ought to reduce the emotional shock of a PIP or a bad review, and also the time lost before the employee improves.

So performance review systems have started adding the ability to officially record weekly 1:1 meeting notes, and then getting confused that no one is using this oft-requested feature. Of course any honest feedback is purely verbal, or stored in shared documents kept as far away from HR as possible. The very fact that it's an Official HR Record makes it completely useless for purposes of getting truly honest feedback in there.