The Story of Pando: Reimagining Career Development for the Modern Workforce

Sometimes the most powerful insights come from observing broken systems up close. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barbra Gago shared how her experience as a marketing leader at high-growth companies like Miro, Culture Amp, and Greenhouse shaped her vision for transforming how companies approach employee development.

From Marketing Leader to Founder

Unlike most tech founders who come from engineering or product backgrounds, Barbra’s path to entrepreneurship was paved with marketing expertise. “I’ve been a serial early stage operator throughout my career,” she explains. “I’ve been in pretty much b2b tech the whole time, joining companies pre series a and working to build the initial foundation for scaling up and usually sticking around until maybe series c and two 3400 employees.”

This experience gave her a unique perspective on both company building and people development. Working at companies like Greenhouse and Culture Amp, she gained deep insights into the people space and recruiting processes. But it was her hands-on experience with traditional performance management systems that revealed a fundamental problem.

Identifying the Problem

The issue was clear: performance reviews were stuck in the past. Just as software development had evolved from waterfall to agile methodologies, employee development needed a similar transformation. “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 notes. “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.”

Building the Solution

This realization led to the creation of Pando, a career progression platform built around the concept of “just-in-time promotion.” The platform maintains familiar elements like feedback, goals, and evaluations, but structures them in a way that makes employee performance “agile and predictable.”

The company’s approach is already gaining traction with forward-thinking organizations. Take Oyster, a global employment platform, which Barbra describes as “our big brother, our big sister.” Their implementation of Pando demonstrates how the platform can create structure and transparency in distributed workforces across 80 countries.

A Human-Centered Approach

What sets Pando apart is its focus on specific skills and competencies rather than general performance reviews. “If you’re an engineer, it might be frameworks and foundations or code delivery or how you’re working cross functionally,” Barbra explains. This granular approach allows for more fair and contextual feedback, evaluated against clearly defined levels.

The Vision for the Future

Looking ahead, Barbra envisions a complete transformation of how companies approach employee development. “Performance reviews will completely dissolve,” she predicts. As remote work becomes more prevalent and compensation becomes more transparent, career development will become more transactional and skill-focused.

Her ultimate goal? “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, but also have more validation around the work that you’ve done and the skills that you’ve built and what that looks like.”

This vision extends beyond just tracking performance to creating a portable professional identity that follows employees throughout their careers. The platform could become a universal standard for skills validation and career progression, much like LinkedIn became for professional networking.

In a world where talent development is increasingly critical to company success, Pando’s approach to making employee performance “agile and predictable” could reshape how organizations think about career development. By focusing on continuous growth rather than annual reviews, they’re not just building a new product – they’re trying to fundamentally change how companies help their people grow.