Quick tour: your first 15 minutes

This is a 15-minute, hands-on walkthrough for a brand-new manager. By the end, you will have signed in, captured your first observation, started a conversation with one of your direct reports, and seen where summaries live. If you are on the Agentic plan, you will also have opened Henry and asked your first question.

Who can use this: Managers and org admins. The walkthrough assumes you have at least one direct report already mapped in the org chart. If you do not, ask your org admin to add you as a manager first, or follow the admin guide to set up your team.

If you are an employee with no direct reports, the employee guide is a better starting point.

Before you begin

You will need:

• An invitation email from Performance Blocks, or your organization's sign-in URL.
• At least one direct report in the system.
• Five to fifteen minutes.

If you are not sure whether you are on the Team or Agentic plan, check Settings → Billing after you sign in. Steps that are Agentic-only are marked.

Step 1 — Sign in

1. Open the invitation email and click Accept invite, or go to your organization's sign-in URL.
2. If your organization uses SSO (Agentic only), you will be redirected to your identity provider. Otherwise, set a password on first sign-in and verify your email.
3. You will land on the Dashboard.

That is the only setup step. There is nothing to install — Performance Blocks is a web app. Optional integrations (Slack, Teams, Chrome) can be added later from Settings → Integrations.

Step 2 — Get oriented on the dashboard

Take 60 seconds to look around. The dashboard is organized into four areas:

• Recent activity — observations, conversation replies, and 360 responses from the last week.
• Pending for you — anything waiting on you, like a draft summary, an unanswered conversation, or a 360 cycle that needs to close.
• Your team — a row per direct report showing their last activity and any open items.
• Quick actions — shortcuts to capture an observation, start a conversation, or open Henry.

The left navigation has the same items the dashboard shows, plus Conversations, Objectives, 360 feedback, Summaries, and (for org admins) Settings.

If you are on the Agentic plan, you will also see a Henry button at the top right of the screen — that opens the panel.

Step 3 — Capture your first observation

This is the single most valuable habit in Performance Blocks. The faster you build it, the more useful the rest of the product becomes.

Pick a direct report. Think of one specific thing they did in the last week — a moment, not a vague impression. It can be small. The exercise is to make capturing one observation feel routine.

Manually

1. From the dashboard, click Capture observation in the quick actions area, or click + Observation from any team member's row.
2. Select the employee from the dropdown.
3. Choose a type: Strength or Opportunity.
4. Fill in the four fields:
   • Observation — what you saw, in one or two sentences.
   • Impact — why it mattered.
   • Recommended action — what should happen next.
   • Attributes — pick one or more competencies that fit. Your org admin defines the list.
5. Set the observation date to when the behavior happened (defaults to today).
6. Choose visibility: keep it as a draft for yourself, or share it with the employee.
7. Click Save.

The observation now lives on the employee's profile and counts toward their next summary.

With Henry (Agentic plan)

If Henry is available, you can shortcut steps 3 through 6:

1. Open the Henry panel.
2. Type something like "Capture an observation about Alex — they unblocked the launch by personally reviewing the integration code over the weekend."
3. Henry walks you through a guided flow: it asks you to confirm the employee, suggests a type, drafts the four fields, and pre-selects attributes. Edit anything that does not look right.
4. Confirm to save.

Either path produces the same observation. Henry simply removes typing.

Step 4 — Open Henry and ask a question

Plan availability: Henry is available on the Agentic plan only. If you are on the Team plan, skip to step 5.

1. Click the Henry button at the top right.
2. The panel slides out from the right edge of the screen.
3. Type a question. Good first questions:
   • "What did Alex work on this quarter?"
   • "Show me Strengths I have logged for my team in the last 30 days."
   • "Draft a summary for Alex covering the last quarter."
4. Henry replies in the panel. Where Henry references underlying data — observations, objectives, feedback — those references are clickable.

Henry persists across pages. You can keep the panel open while you click around the app, and the conversation history stays with you. Closing the panel does not lose the conversation.

If you have questions about how Henry uses your data, see the Henry agent guide.

Step 5 — Start a 1:1 conversation

Conversations are async messaging threads with one direct report. Use them for follow-ups, agenda items, and ongoing dialog between meetings.

1. Click Conversations in the left navigation.
2. Click New conversation.
3. Pick a direct report.
4. Add a title — something concrete, like "Quarterly check-in" or "Follow-up: launch retro."
5. Write the first message. Keep it short. A useful first message is often a single agenda item or a single observation you want to discuss.
6. Click Send.

The employee gets notified and can reply from their employee portal, from email, or from Slack/Teams if those integrations are connected.

You do not need a conversation to share an observation — observations stand on their own. Use a conversation when there is something to discuss back and forth.

Step 6 — See where summaries live

You will not write a summary on day one, but it is worth knowing where they are.

1. Click Summaries in the left navigation.
2. You will see two tabs: Individual and Team. Org admins on the Agentic plan also see Skip-level.
3. Click + New summary.
4. Choose an employee and a time window.
5. You will see a draft view with three sections: a write-up area, a panel of underlying observations, and a panel of objectives and 360 responses.

If you are on the Agentic plan, click Generate with Henry to produce a draft. Edit it, then save as a draft. You can come back to it later. When you are ready, Submit for review sends it to your org admin's review queue.

If you are on the Team plan, write the draft yourself using the underlying observations as source material. Save and edit over time.

The point of step 6 is exposure — you do not have to finish a summary now. Just confirm you can find the surface.

Step 7 — Set yourself up for the long haul

Two small choices now save a lot of friction later.

Notifications

Open Settings → Notifications and set the channels you want for each event type. Recommended starting point:

• Observation shared with you — in-app + email.
• Conversation reply — in-app + email.
• 360 request received — in-app + email.
• Summary awaiting review (admins only) — in-app + email.

If you connect Slack or Teams later, you can route specific events to those channels instead of email.

Integrations

Open Settings → Integrations. The most common day-one connection is Slack or Microsoft Teams — it lets you capture observations and reply to conversations without leaving chat. If you spend most of your day in a browser, the Chrome extension is also worth installing — it lets you capture an observation from any tab.

All of these are optional. Performance Blocks works fully without them.

What "good" looks like after a week

If the walkthrough above clicks, here is what your first week typically looks like as a new manager:

• 5 to 10 observations captured across your team — a mix of Strengths and Opportunities.
• 1 conversation open with each direct report.
• Notifications dialed in so nothing surprises you.
• A draft summary started for at least one employee.
• (Agentic) Henry used a few times to draft observations and ask team questions.

You do not need to do all of this in 15 minutes. The point of the quick tour is to know where each thing lives so the habits build on their own.

Next steps

Pick the next article based on what you want to dig into.

• Capturing observations well — Manager guide → Creating observations.
• Running effective 1:1s — Manager guide → Conversations.
• Writing summaries — Manager guide → Summaries.
• Getting more out of Henry — Henry agent guide.
• Setting up your team and attributes (admins) — Admin guide.
• Connecting Slack, Teams, or Chrome — Integrations.

If you remember one thing from this tour, make it this: capture the observation when it happens. Everything else in Performance Blocks gets easier when that habit is in place.