Pando’s Enterprise Strategy: Selling Career Development Tools to Remote-First Companies

Remote work has fundamentally changed how companies develop and retain talent. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barbra Gago, founder of Pando, revealed how they’re addressing this challenge through their work with Oyster, a global employment platform operating across 80 countries.

The Remote Work Challenge

The shift to remote work exposed a fundamental flaw in traditional performance management: it wasn’t built for distributed teams. When team members and managers have never met in person, how do you ensure fair, consistent career development?

“Obviously, a lot of their employees and team members have never met each other. You might have never met your manager,” Barbra explains. This physical distance creates a need for greater structure and transparency in performance management.

The Oyster Partnership

Pando’s relationship with Oyster illustrates how career development platforms can bridge this gap. As Barbra notes, “I feel like Pando is actually like Oyster’s kid sister… We’re both in the people space. And I think philosophically there’s a lot of alignment.”

This alignment centers on a shared vision of how employee performance should be managed. Mark, Oyster’s chief workplace officer, who previously led people operations at Envision, has been instrumental in implementing Pando’s approach across their organization.

A New Model for Remote Performance Management

The traditional annual review process doesn’t work for distributed teams. Instead, Barbra explains, they’ve implemented a system that’s more like athletic coaching: “If you’re a professional athlete, you’re getting coached and you’re getting critiqued and you’re getting feedback after every match that you play, probably after your training sessions even.”

This continuous feedback model is particularly crucial for remote teams where casual office interactions don’t exist. “Pando creates a structure and transparency that gives everybody clarity no matter where they are,” Barbra notes.

Skills-Based Evaluation

At the heart of Pando’s approach is a focus on specific competencies rather than general performance reviews. For engineers, this might mean evaluating “frameworks and foundations or code delivery or how you’re working cross functionally.” This granular approach allows for fair, equitable feedback that’s defined by level and can be delivered consistently across a distributed workforce.

The Calibration Model

Oyster has implemented what Barbra describes as “kind of like an in the middle model where they do every six months. It’s more like a calibration, and you need to have been assessed across your dimensions over the last six months at some point, and then you can level up.”

This approach maintains some structure while moving away from traditional annual reviews. The goal, Barbra notes, is to become “fully continuous. So we’re working with them on that.”

Looking Ahead

The future of remote work performance management, according to Barbra, involves creating standardized systems that can work across companies. “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 vision is particularly relevant for distributed workforces, where employees might never meet their colleagues or managers in person. By creating clear, standardized frameworks for evaluation and progression, companies can ensure fair and transparent career development regardless of physical location.

Pando’s work with Oyster demonstrates how career development platforms need to evolve to serve remote-first companies. The key is creating structure and transparency that can bridge the physical distance between team members, while maintaining the flexibility and continuous feedback that modern workforces need.