Inside Pando’s Pivot: How Barbra Gago Transformed Traditional Performance Reviews into a Career Development Platform
The greatest business opportunities often emerge from systems that haven’t evolved with the times. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barbra Gago, founder of Pando, shared how she spotted a critical flaw in corporate performance management that led her to build a platform reimagining career development for modern companies.
The Problem with Performance Reviews
After years of working as a marketing leader at high-growth companies like Miro, Culture Amp, and Greenhouse, Barbra noticed a striking parallel between outdated software development practices and how companies managed employee performance.
“I think that performance reviews, similarly to how we used to do development, is very much a waterfall process that for some employees and some companies only happens once a year,” Barbra explains. “And that’s a really bad process if you want people to develop and grow and you want to have an impact on their development as they go.”
From Recognition to Action
Rather than just identifying the problem, Barbra took action. Having observed the transformation of software development from waterfall to agile methodologies, she saw an opportunity to bring similar principles to employee development. The result was Pando’s concept of “just-in-time promotion” – a radical departure from traditional annual reviews.
The approach resonated particularly well with distributed companies like Oyster, which Barbra describes as “our big brother, our big sister.” With employees spread across 80 countries, Oyster needed a system that could “create a structure and transparency that gives everybody clarity no matter where they are.”
Building for Continuous Development
The key innovation was breaking down performance evaluation into specific, measurable skills. “If you’re an engineer, it might be frameworks and foundations or code delivery or how you’re working cross functionally,” Barbra notes. This granular approach allows for more frequent, contextual feedback tied to clearly defined levels.
The timing of the launch proved both challenging and opportune. “Obviously, last year and the year before, everything is rallying. Everybody’s hiring, everybody’s spending ungodly amounts of money to recruit people. And it was an employee market,” Barbra recalls. During this period, career progression was seen as a “luxury thing” that employees actively demanded.
Adapting to Market Changes
But markets shift, and Pando’s strategy evolved accordingly. While maintaining their vision of continuous development, they adapted their positioning to address immediate market needs. As Barbra explains, they’re “still advocating for this and still kind of building the foundation and laying the foundation for that, but also now positioning slightly more in the traditional performance review space.”
The Future of Performance Management
Looking ahead, Barbra believes the transformation of performance management is inevitable. “Performance reviews will completely dissolve,” she predicts. Her vision extends beyond just improving the current system – she aims to create a standardized ecosystem of career progression that follows employees throughout their careers.
“I really want to build kind of the ecosystem where levels are sort of a bit more standardized and calibrated so you can go from company to company with that kind of context,” she explains. This would include validation of work accomplished and skills developed, creating a portable professional identity that transcends individual employers.
Pando’s journey from identifying a broken system to building its replacement offers valuable lessons for founders. It demonstrates how deep industry experience can reveal opportunities for innovation, and how positioning can evolve with market conditions while maintaining a consistent long-term vision. Most importantly, it shows how solving a fundamental problem in a new way can create the foundation for transformative change in an industry.