Performance Reviews for a 30-Person Team: A Lightweight System

At 10 people, everyone knows how everyone is doing. At 30, that shared awareness fades: managers have appeared, raises need a clear basis, and a new hire may need support nobody has spotted yet. This is when teams add a review process, and the risk is overbuilding it by copying a big-company ritual that takes managers a full quarter to run.

Here's a system sized for 20–100 people: enough structure to be fair, little enough to actually happen.

Decide what the review is for

A review can serve three purposes: development (what should this person work on), compensation (what should they be paid), and documentation (a record if things go wrong). Keep the three apart. When one conversation tries to serve all of them, the person hearing "here's your growth feedback" is really listening for "so what's my raise?"

The clean split for a 30-person team:

• Development conversations: twice a year, structured, written down.
• Compensation decisions: once a year, after the review cycle closes, informed by it but communicated separately.
• Documentation: comes from the first two automatically when they're written down, which is the real case for written reviews.

Cadence: semi-annual, with 1:1s carrying the load

Annual-only reviews fall short at small scale: a year is several product eras at a startup, and feedback delivered eleven months late is trivia. Quarterly formal reviews overwhelm working managers. The workable pattern:

• Every 6 months: a written review cycle (self-review + manager review).
• Every 1–2 weeks: 1:1s where real feedback happens continuously. The written review should summarize what was already said in 1:1s. If a review ever contains a surprise, the 1:1s missed something.
• Peer input once a year, on the cycle where comp is decided, so the picture isn't one manager's opinion alone.

The template: four questions, one page

For each person, the manager and the individual both answer:

1. What were the goals, and what happened? Tie this to whatever goal system you use (OKRs or otherwise). Outcomes, not activity.
2. What's one thing this person does that the team should get more of? Specific strengths, with examples.
3. What's the single highest-leverage improvement? One, not five. A review with seven development areas produces zero development.
4. What does the next six months look like? Scope change, skill focus, or explicit "keep doing exactly this."

Concrete examples separate useful reviews from horoscope-grade ones. The STAR structure (situation, task, action, result) is the simplest way to force specificity. Instead of "great ownership", write "when the payroll integration broke the week before the run, she found the root cause, coordinated the fix, and we paid on time."

Calibration: thirty minutes that keeps it fair

Once both sides have written, managers (at 30 people, that's likely 3–5 of them) meet once and read across the ratings: is one manager grading systematically harder? Are the two people doing similar jobs rated a level apart for the same performance? At this scale calibration is one meeting, and it keeps pay decisions consistent before small gaps grow into pay-equity issues.

Where the hours go, and what AI changes

The bottleneck in every review cycle is the same: managers staring at blank text boxes, trying to reconstruct six months from memory. That reconstruction step is exactly what software should do. A manager's raw material already exists (goal progress, 1:1 notes, peer feedback, recognition); it's just scattered.

Goal progress, people metrics and weekly insights in one place, ready before review season starts.

This is how Sparko's performance module approaches it: review cycles with self and manager stages, 360 rounds from Growth, and AI that drafts a review from the record (the person's OKR progress and feedback) in STAR format. The manager edits the draft, owns it and approves it. Review cycles and AI drafting start on Core from $5 per active employee per month, with drafts drawn from Core's shared monthly AI allowance and unmetered from Growth.

The one-page summary

• Split development from compensation, with a separate conversation for each.
• Written, semi-annual, fed by continuous 1:1s. No surprises.
• Four questions, one page, STAR-specific examples.
• One calibration meeting per cycle, however small the company.
• Let software assemble the record so managers spend their time on judgment instead of recall.

A 30-person company doesn't need a big company's process. It needs the smallest process that is still fair, run consistently enough that everyone knows where they stand.