Welcome to Performance Blocks

Performance Blocks is a continuous performance management platform for modern teams. It replaces the annual review scramble with a steady rhythm of small, structured notes — captured in the moment, organized by person, and synthesized into summaries you can actually defend in a calibration meeting.

This article gives you the 30,000-foot view: what the product does, why it exists, who uses it, and where to go next based on your role.

The problem we solve

Most performance feedback breaks down for three predictable reasons.

• Recency bias. When it is time to write a review, you remember the last six weeks vividly and the previous six months as a blur. The strongest contributors get rated against their most recent stumble; quieter performers fade from the picture entirely.
• Scattered notes. Useful observations live in Slack DMs, the margins of meeting docs, your inbox, and your head. None of it is searchable, none of it is structured, and none of it is shared with the employee.
• Last-minute prep. Reviews land on your calendar with three days' notice. You skim a year of work, write something that sounds reasonable, and submit it. The employee reads it once and files it away. Nobody learns anything.

Performance Blocks fixes the workflow underneath the review, not just the review itself. The bet is simple: if you capture small, well-structured notes as work happens, the synthesis at review time becomes mechanical instead of stressful — and the feedback employees receive in the meantime actually changes their behavior.

What Performance Blocks does

The product is built around five core surfaces. You will hear them referenced throughout the docs, so it is worth knowing what each one is for.

Observations

An observation — sometimes called a performance block — is one piece of structured feedback about one employee. Each observation captures:

• A type: Strength or Opportunity.
• The observation text itself: what you saw.
• The impact: why it mattered.
• A recommended action: what should happen next.
• One or more attributes: the competencies or skills it relates to.
• An observation date: when the underlying behavior occurred.

Observations are the atomic unit of the platform. Everything else is built on top of them.

Summaries

A summary is a synthesized performance write-up for one employee, drawing on their observations, objectives, and 360 feedback over a chosen time window. Summaries are how you turn a stream of notes into something you can share with the employee, present in a calibration, or hand to an org admin for approval.

There are three flavors:

• Individual summary — one employee, owned by their manager.
• Team summary — aggregated across a manager's direct reports.
• Skip-level summary — one level deeper, available on the Agentic plan.

Conversations

A conversation (or 1:1) is an asynchronous messaging thread between a manager and one of their direct reports. Conversations are where ongoing dialog happens between formal review cycles — agenda items, follow-ups on observations, discussion of objectives, anything that does not need a meeting.

Objectives

Objectives are goals scoped at three levels: org-wide, manager (a team's shared goals), or employee (an individual's commitments). Objectives feed into summaries so that what a person was supposed to do shows up alongside what they actually did.

360 Feedback

A 360 feedback cycle solicits structured peer feedback for an employee from a chosen group of colleagues. The responses become inputs to that employee's next summary.

How the pieces fit together

The mental model is a flow:

1. Managers and peers capture observations as work happens.
2. Objectives define what each person is working toward.
3. 360 feedback cycles add peer perspective at key moments.
4. Managers write summaries that synthesize all of the above for a given time window.
5. Conversations keep the dialog going between formal touchpoints.
6. Org admins approve and export summaries through the review queue.

If you do steps 1 through 3 consistently, step 4 stops being painful.

Where Henry fits in

Henry is the AI assistant built into Performance Blocks. Henry lives in a right-side panel inside the web app and also reaches you through Slack, Microsoft Teams, a Chrome extension, and email. Henry can:

• Draft observations from a quick description of what happened.
• Generate summaries grounded in the employee's observations, objectives, and feedback.
• Answer questions about your team using your data and any documents you have uploaded.
• Walk you through structured tasks (starting a 1:1, kicking off a 360 cycle, writing a summary) using guided flows.

Plan availability: Henry is available on the Agentic plan. Team plan customers can capture observations, run conversations, and write summaries by hand — Henry simply automates and accelerates that work. You can upgrade in Settings → Billing.

If you are on the Team plan, you can ignore every mention of Henry in these docs and the product still works end-to-end. If you are on Agentic, Henry is the fastest way to get value out of everything else.

Who uses Performance Blocks

The product is designed around three roles. Most organizations have all three.

Managers (the primary users)

Managers do most of the day-to-day work in Performance Blocks: capturing observations, running 1:1s, writing summaries, tracking objectives. The dashboard, the navigation, and most of the workflows are tuned for the manager case.

If you manage even one person, start with the manager docs.

Employees

Employees have a self-service portal where they can:

• See observations their manager has shared with them.
• Read and reply to conversations.
• View their objectives and current summary.
• Respond to 360 feedback requests.
• Optionally use Henry to ask questions about their own performance (Agentic plan).

Employees never see other employees' data unless their manager explicitly shares it.

Org admins

Org admins configure the organization: people, teams, roles, attributes, integrations, billing, and (on Agentic) SSO and HRIS sync. They also operate the review queue — the place where summaries land for approval before they are finalized.

A single user can hold more than one role. It is common for a manager to also be an employee of someone else, and an org admin is almost always also a manager.

What to read next

Pick the path that matches your role.

• New manager? Start with Key concepts and then Quick tour: your first 15 minutes.
• New employee? Read Key concepts and then jump to the employee guide.
• New org admin? Read Roles and access, then the admin guide.
• Curious about Henry? Read Key concepts for the high-level picture, then the Henry agent guide.
• Setting up integrations or SSO? Head to Integrations and Security and IT.

You do not need to read everything at once. The docs are designed so that each role can get productive in under an hour and learn the rest as it becomes relevant.

A note on plans

Performance Blocks comes in two tiers:

• Team — observations, conversations, summaries, objectives, attributes, 360 feedback, and the employee portal.
• Agentic — everything in Team, plus the Henry agent across all surfaces, SSO, HRIS sync, API keys, the knowledge base for Henry's RAG context, Henry analytics, and skip-level summaries.

Throughout these docs, any feature that requires Agentic is called out with a plan availability callout near the top of the article. If you are unsure which plan you are on, check Settings → Billing.