Performance Reviews, but Lovable?

I can hardly believe it, but I wrote this article almost a year ago and never published it. (I like to write my thoughts down while they’re fresh, and at most I let them mature a little, but it has never been this long.) Before the 2026 Service Design Day in Budapest arrives, I figured it was time. I’ve left it to gather dust for far too long.

In 2025, I heard Júlia Csernus give a talk on the topic. The room was full of people with a strong business mindset. After the session, one thought wouldn’t leave me alone: the performance review is one of the most designed and yet least designed services in companies.

Designed, because it comes with a form, a scale, a deadline, and a couple of separate systems. Not designed, because rarely does anyone ask how the whole thing feels to the person going through it.

The „user” is a human here too

Looking at it as a service designer, a performance review is a service like any other. It has actors (the person being reviewed, their manager, HR, sometimes the manager’s manager), frontstage moments (the conversation itself), and a backstage (calibration, spreadsheets, approval rounds). Most of the time, all employees see of it is „here comes the eighth email asking me to fill in a field I already filled in last year.”

Where „lovable” meets „measurable”

From a business perspective, the question is completely fair: it sounds nice, but can we measure it, and does it deliver results? The good news is that we don’t have to choose. What is understandable, predictable, and feels fair also means less unnecessary work, fewer disputes, and fewer after-the-fact explanations for the organization.

A few questions service design can help answer right at the start:

• Does the employee know what will happen, when, and what the point of it all is?

• Are we asking them the same thing several times, in several forms?

• Do managers understand the criteria, or does everyone interpret them their own way?

• What happens when things don’t follow the happy path (a dispute, a change of manager, a long absence)?

Where to start on Monday morning

You don’t need a new HR system or a six-month transformation. You can start with a few small things right now.

1. Map the employee’s journey, not the process.
2. Open a Miro or FigJam board and write down what happens to the employee before, during, and after the review period. Not just the conversation, but the email, the deadline, and that moment when they realize they can’t find last year’s self-assessment anywhere. It’s a mini customer journey, just for employees.
3. Ask them before you redesign anything. Three short conversations, with an employee, a manager, and someone from HR, are worth more than a theoretical workshop. Just one question: „Tell me about your last review. What was the hardest part?” Chances are the same pain points will come up again and again.
4. Write down why everything is there. Go through every field of the form and ask: who uses this information, and for what? If there’s no answer behind a field, consider removing it. Everyone will be grateful, and data quality will improve too.
5. Tell people in advance what will happen. A one-page overview is enough: the order of the steps, when they happen, who does what, and what the outcome is. With customers, we call this „managing expectations.” With employees, it’s simply „at least I won’t have to guess.
6. Prepare for the not-so-happy path. What if the manager changed during the year? What if someone was away for an extended period? What if the manager and the employee see the year completely differently? These situations need simple answers prepared in advance, not improvisation after the fact.
7. Give managers a conversation guide, not a policy. Three or four good questions, a couple of example sentences, and a short list of things to avoid will help more than an eight-page guideline. Does anyone actually read the policy? (No. Well, with all due respect to the exceptions.)
8. Test it small. Try the new approach with one team, see where it gets stuck, then refine. It’s the same logic as a prototype: a small circle where, if something breaks, the whole company doesn’t see it.
9. Measure something human too. Alongside deadlines met and completion rates, ask whether it was understandable, whether it felt fair, and whether people know what the next step is. Three questions, a five-point scale, two minutes.

The takeaway

A performance review becomes lovable when people understand it, see its value, and don’t feel like objects of a policy. Not when the spreadsheet gets prettier.

And yes, before anyone asks: by „lovable” I don’t mean that everyone adores it. If colleagues don’t sigh at the sight of the calendar invite, we’ve already won. 🙂

What was your best (or strangest) performance review experience? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

Performance Reviews, but Lovable? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.