Case Study: Service Design for Performance Management · ServiceNow Global People · 2021–2023

Leadership knew performance management was broken. They didn't know what to fix, in what order, or what good would look like on the other side.

THE SITUATION

ServiceNow's VP of Performance and Development came in with a shared conviction among HR executives: the existing system wasn't working. Employees felt the process was opaque and disconnected from pay. Managers weren't having real development conversations. Goal cadences didn't match the actual pace of the business. Feedback culture was actively discouraging growth. The instinct was to redesign. The problem was where to start and what to prioritize.

One sentence. Business-level problem. What would go wrong if this wasn't solved?

MY APPROACH

Make the complexity visible before trying to simplify it. I started by focusing on what problems we were trying to solve. I designed a structured discovery process with 100+ leaders and employees over two years to map the full performance experience, revealing where it broke down, why, and for whom. Journey maps and service blueprints made the interdependencies legible to the VP and her team for the first time. Real data revealed the severity and frequency of problems, making prioritization easy. Cross-functional design sprints generated solution concepts that were immediately usable by IT partners, who we included in the process.

INSIGHTS AND FACTORS

One size would not fit all. The two largest orgs, Sales and Product, had vastly different needs regarding goal-setting and performance measurement.
Manager behavior was a key driver of team culture, clarity, and motivation. Managers needed to be heard and enabled fully to set the proper tone and expectations with their team. This applied equally to processes and tools.
Digital components were great for reference and tracking, but needed to support the human to human interactions. Rich conversations, willingness to give and receive tough feedback, partnership in goal-setting all needed to happen outside the system.

2–3 bullets. What did you understand that wasn't obvious?

My Specific Contribution

I designed and led the end-to-end service design process: employee and manager research, leader workshop, journey mapping, service blueprinting, design sprints, and concept prototyping. I partnered directly with the VP of Performance and Development throughout. The handoff to her team was a prioritized problem set and validated solution concepts ready for scoping by IT.

The Outcomes

Before	After Discovery Process
Executive instinct where to start	Evidence-based priorities ranked by employee impact
Isolated fixes point solutions	System view interdependencies mapped
Vague redesign brief direction unclear	Validated concepts ready for IT scoping

What Changed

100+ collaborators

Leaders, managers, employees, and HR stakeholders engaged across 2 years of research, sprints, and co-design.

72 ideas and concepts

The cross-functional leader workshop started with employee and manager data and led to 72 ideas the team triaged and prioritized.

30k employees impacted

Solutions that originated through this journey were launched incrementally to the full ServiceNow global workforce.