The Challenge
NexGen SaaS, a B2B analytics platform company based in Denver, had grown from 120 employees to 850 in just three years. The rapid scaling was a success story by any startup metric — revenue had tripled, the customer base had expanded into seven new verticals, and the engineering team had shipped four major product releases in 18 months. But beneath the growth numbers, a serious people problem was developing.
Annual attrition had climbed to 28%, well above the industry average of 18% for SaaS companies of similar size. Exit interviews revealed a consistent pattern: departing employees cited a lack of career clarity, infrequent feedback, and the feeling that performance evaluations were arbitrary and disconnected from daily work. The company's review process — an annual cycle using Google Docs and a shared spreadsheet for tracking — had been designed when NexGen had 120 people and three managers. At 850 employees with 72 managers across four offices and a significant remote workforce, it had become a bottleneck that frustrated everyone involved.
The numbers told the story. In the most recent annual review cycle, only 61% of reviews were completed on time. Managers spent an average of 4.5 hours per direct report preparing reviews, often struggling to recall specific contributions from months earlier. Employees rated the review process 2.1 out of 5 on the post-review satisfaction survey. Perhaps most concerning, the company's highest performers — the top 15% by revenue impact and peer recognition — were leaving at a higher rate (33%) than the overall population, suggesting that the people NexGen could least afford to lose were the most frustrated by the lack of growth infrastructure.
The VP of People, Jason Park, recognized that NexGen had outgrown its informal performance management approach. The company needed a system that could scale with continued growth, provide managers with tools to have meaningful conversations, and create a transparent connection between individual contribution and career progression.
The Solution
After evaluating several performance management platforms, NexGen selected Workisy for three capabilities that directly addressed their pain points: AI-powered continuous feedback, real-time goal tracking with OKR alignment, and people analytics that could surface retention risks before they became resignation letters.
The implementation began with a collaborative design phase. Workisy's customer success team spent two weeks on-site with NexGen's People team and a cross-functional advisory group of eight managers and twelve individual contributors. Together, they mapped NexGen's existing career levels, defined competency frameworks for each role family (engineering, product, sales, customer success, and G&A), and designed the check-in cadence and review workflow that would replace the annual cycle.
The core of the new system was a shift from annual reviews to a continuous feedback model built on three pillars:
Biweekly check-ins. Managers and direct reports would meet every two weeks for structured 20-minute conversations covering goal progress, blockers, and development. Workisy's platform provided a lightweight check-in template that prompted managers to cover three areas: wins since the last check-in, priorities for the next two weeks, and one development-focused question. The template was intentionally simple — NexGen wanted to lower the barrier to consistent conversations, not create another documentation burden.
Quarterly reviews as summaries. Formal reviews would happen quarterly rather than annually, but they would synthesize the continuous feedback rather than attempt to reconstruct the past from memory. Workisy's AI-generated review drafts pulled from check-in notes, goal progress data, peer feedback, and engagement signals to create a starting point that managers could edit and personalize. This reduced manager preparation time from 4.5 hours to approximately 45 minutes per direct report.
Real-time peer recognition and feedback. Any employee could give structured recognition or developmental feedback to any colleague through the platform, tagged to specific competencies and visible (with permission) to the recipient's manager. This created a rich data set of contributions that would otherwise go unrecognized in a top-down-only evaluation model.
Goal alignment was implemented using a cascaded OKR framework. Company-level objectives set by the executive team flowed into team-level OKRs, which informed individual OKRs. Every employee could see how their work connected to the company's strategic priorities — a level of transparency that NexGen had never achieved with its previous approach.
The Implementation
The rollout followed a phased approach over eight weeks:
Weeks 1-2: Manager training. All 72 managers completed a three-hour workshop covering the new check-in framework, how to use AI-generated review drafts effectively, how to set measurable OKRs, and how to deliver developmental feedback. NexGen deliberately over-invested in manager training based on the recognition that the platform was only as effective as the conversations it enabled.
Weeks 3-4: Pilot with two teams. The engineering and customer success teams — chosen because they had the highest and lowest attrition rates respectively — ran the new system for two full check-in cycles. Feedback from the pilot informed several adjustments: the check-in template was simplified further, the peer feedback notification cadence was reduced to avoid alert fatigue, and a "skip-level check-in" option was added after employees requested direct access to senior leaders.
Weeks 5-6: Company-wide launch. The platform was rolled out to all 850 employees with a company-wide kickoff that included a live demo, a Q&A session with the pilot teams, and a dedicated Slack channel for support questions. Jason Park sent a candid message acknowledging that the old system was not working and explaining the specific problems the new approach was designed to solve. The transparency built credibility.
Weeks 7-8: Analytics activation. Workisy's people analytics module was activated with dashboards for the People team and executive leadership. Real-time visibility into check-in completion rates, OKR progress, engagement trends, and early attrition risk signals gave the People team actionable intelligence for the first time.
The Results
Six months after full deployment, the impact was measurable across every metric NexGen had been tracking:
Attrition dropped from 28% to 18.5% (annualized), a 34% reduction. The most significant improvement was among high performers: attrition in the top 15% fell from 33% to 14%, meaning NexGen was retaining nearly all of the employees whose departure would be most damaging. Exit interview themes shifted from "lack of career clarity" and "no feedback" to factors less within the company's control — relocation, career pivots, and compensation offers from late-stage companies that NexGen could not match.
Review completion reached 96%. Under the old annual system, 61% completion was the norm. The combination of shorter quarterly cycles, AI-generated drafts that reduced preparation burden, and visible tracking that created light accountability drove near-universal completion. The 4% who missed deadlines were primarily new managers who needed additional support, which the People team provided through one-on-one coaching.
Promotion velocity increased 45%. The median time from eligibility to promotion for employees who met their competency criteria dropped from 14 months to 7.7 months. The continuous feedback and transparent competency framework meant that managers and employees could identify when promotion criteria were met in real time rather than waiting for an annual review to surface the conversation.
Manager review preparation time fell from 4.5 hours to 45 minutes. The AI-generated review drafts, populated with check-in history, goal data, peer feedback, and engagement signals, eliminated the blank-page problem that made annual reviews so time-consuming. Managers consistently reported that the drafts captured 70% to 80% of what they would have written, leaving them to add personal context and specific examples.
Employee satisfaction with the review process rose from 2.1 to 4.3 out of 5. The post-review survey showed the most dramatic improvement in two areas: "I understand how my performance is evaluated" (from 2.4 to 4.5) and "My manager provides regular, useful feedback" (from 1.9 to 4.4).
The People Analytics dashboard revealed additional insights that informed ongoing strategy. The team identified that employees who received peer recognition at least twice per month had 60% lower attrition risk than those who received none — a finding that led to a targeted recognition campaign for teams with low peer feedback activity. They also discovered a correlation between OKR alignment clarity and engagement scores: teams where every member could articulate how their OKRs connected to company objectives scored 22% higher on engagement than teams without that clarity.
What's Next
NexGen is expanding its use of Workisy in three directions. First, the People Analytics team is building a succession planning model using the competency and performance data accumulated over the first six months to identify high-potential employees and create development pathways for critical roles. Second, the company is integrating Workisy's Learning & Development module to connect performance feedback directly to skill-building resources — when a review identifies a development area, the system will recommend relevant courses, mentors, and stretch assignments. Third, NexGen plans to extend the continuous feedback model to its contractor workforce of 120 people, who currently operate outside the performance management system entirely.
Client Quote
"We were losing our best people because we had a startup's performance process running on enterprise-scale complexity. Workisy did not just give us better software — it gave us a framework for having the conversations that make people want to stay and grow here. The AI-generated reviews alone saved our managers hundreds of hours, but the real value is that our people finally feel seen. When your highest performers stop leaving, everything else gets easier."
Jason Park, VP of People, NexGen SaaS