The most valuable private tech company out of Europe right now published its performance management playbook. And IMO every entrepreneur should read it.
There’s a lot out there about what Revolut has accomplished ($428m in net profit last year, with $2.2bn in revenue and a global customer base of 45 million for starters).
There’s a lot less written about how the Revolut team achieved this level of success. Which makes Nik Storonsky’s “Driving High Performance” playbook so valuable. It was co-written by Nik and the team at QuantumLight and somehow manages to condense nearly a decade of Nik’s best practices from growing Revolut into a 30-minutes read.
What I find most notable about Nik’s playbook:
🥷 𝐀 𝐝𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐇𝐑 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐄𝐎
Nik believes performance management is a science, not an art. It can be standardized and it should be a top CEO priority.
At Revolut, this looks like a team of smart operators that can build the process for performance management and constantly fine-tune evaluations and incentives.
🧮 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬
Performance is delivered over three dimensions — deliverables, skills and culture — and scorecards are used to describe ideal behavior. Assessment is standardized through yes/no answers.
For each seniority level, the performance team sets a bar for expectations and goes through a quarterly process to gather performance reviews, calculate grades, calibrate results, and share those results with managers to deliver feedback. There’s no exception to this process, no matter how junior or senior someone is.
The result of such a mathematical approach? Employees get evaluated on outcomes, not intuition. Which means they spend less time focused on positioning themselves positively and more time improving their metrics.
🥇 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬
When everything that matters gets measured across functions, both A-players and under-performers are easy to spot. Revolut doesn’t shy away from giving its top 15-25 percent of employees disproportionate compensation. On the other side of the performance coin, they focus on exiting the bottom 0-10% of performers as quickly as possible.
At a time when all the talk is about founder mode, here is a concrete, actionable playbook for maintaining peak performance at a large scale. Is Nik’s approach for everyone? No. Can it lead to incredible results for founders that adapt this model to their own culture? Absolutely.
Nik Storonsky and QuantumLight, thanks for sharing your secrets - hopefully it will inspire and help a lot of entrepreneurs.
