How PitchBook Turned Performance Management Into a Driver of Clarity, Capability, and Business Impact

From Checking the Box to Driving Impact

For PitchBook, performance management needed to do more than capture whether a review cycle was complete. They wanted it to help employees understand expectations, give managers a more consistent way to lead, and build the capabilities the business needs for the future.

In November 2024, PitchBook refocused their performance and talent processes around clear expectations, continuous feedback, and skill-based development. Additionally, they set out to examine the impacts of those processes.

The change was intentional and incremental. Instead of launching a sweeping transformation all at once, the team built practical guides, clarified ownership between managers and employees, and connected talent activities to other moments in the employee lifecycle. The goal was to make performance and development feel less like standalone HR events and more like part of how work gets done every day.

That approach reflects PitchBook’s culture. Company values are woven into how PitchBook hires, evaluates talent, and measures performance. Employees are not only evaluated on the goals they achieve, but also on how they show up while achieving them.

Over the past year, there's evidence that improvements to the company’s talent programs are driving real business impact. In a comparison of revenue-generating teams across offices, those that met review expectations outperformed those that didn't in quota attainment — suggesting that consistent, specific performance conversations are indicators of success in the role.

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Making the “How” of Work Visible

One of PitchBook’s most important shifts was making performance conversations more specific.

Rather than asking employees and managers to focus only on outputs, PitchBook redesigned its review templates to include values and competencies. That gave people a shared language with which to discuss the “what” and the “how” of performance: what someone achieved, and how they collaborated, communicated, influenced others, supported teammates, or drove change along the way.

As Zach explained, alongside Kara Hannigan, Sr. Director, People Development, it is easy to list an accomplishment. It is harder, and often more valuable, to talk about the behaviors that shaped the outcome. An employee may have delivered a major project, published key research, or hit an important goal, but PitchBook also wanted managers to recognize whether that person brought others along, contributed to the culture, and demonstrated the competencies needed for long-term success.

By building that distinction directly into Lattice, PitchBook made values and competencies easier to apply. Managers and employees had clearer prompts, better language, and a more consistent structure for discussing strengths, growth areas, and future opportunities.

That mattered especially for career development and promotion conversations. When employees could see how values and competencies connected to growth, performance conversations became less ambiguous and more actionable.

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Giving Managers a Clearer System for Better Feedback

PitchBook also recognized that stronger performance processes depend on managers. A review template may create structure, but managers bring that structure to life through feedback, coaching, and day-to-day conversations.

To support that, PitchBook clarified expectations for both managers and employees. The company built guides that defined each person’s role in performance and development, helping managers lead with more consistency and helping employees take ownership of their growth.

Lattice became the system that connected those expectations across the employee experience. All the reviews, feedback, 1:1s, OKRs, and growth plans became part of a broader performance rhythm rather than separate activities, and calibration reinforced clarity. 

That connected view helped managers work with more context. Managers using Lattice across modules could more easily identify themes around strengths and growth areas, prepare for quarterly conversations, and connect recent feedback to goals and development, leading to stronger alignment throughout the year, with review ratings closely tracking end-of-year ratings. For employees, that meant fewer surprises and a clearer sense of where they stood before year-end ratings were issued.

Managers began to evangelize the platform among themselves, especially as Lattice’s AI Agent capabilities made it easier to synthesize performance insights across the system.

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From Talent Placement to Talent Development

PitchBook’s redesign of their Talent Review process not only created better conversations but also made it significantly easier to run.

Before Lattice, launching Talent Reviews took the team roughly a week. With Lattice, that same launch process was reduced to a fraction of the time, giving the People team more capacity to focus on the quality and outcomes of talent conversations rather than the administrative work required to coordinate them.

That operational improvement mattered because it helped PitchBook move Talent Review from a process centered on nine-box placement to one focused on actionable development outcomes. Leaders calibrating talent and aligning on actions, including growth plans in Lattice, supported follow-through on employee development that the standalone, manual Talent Reviews did not. Leaders began requesting additional calibration sessions voluntarily, signaling that the process was creating value beyond the required workflow.

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Measuring Review Quality, Not Just Review Completion

PitchBook’s reorientation from completion to impact also changed what the team measured.

In 2025, the company introduced AI-powered quality audits of qualitative review responses. That allowed the team to look beyond whether managers had completed reviews and to evaluate whether the feedback itself was useful.

The impact was measurable. The department with the lowest review-quality score improved by 19 points over three quarters. PitchBook also found that quality scores consistently outpaced completion rates, indicating that when managers completed reviews, they did so well.

There is evidence that integrating a focus on competencies and skills in review cycles also improved the quality and specificity of feedback over time. In the three departments that initially adopted competencies in 2025, managers’ use of competency-specific language in employee performance reviews was 3x that of managers in other departments — a sign that managers had more intentional and specific conversations when provided the tools and language to do so.

Being done versus being done well is an important distinction. A high completion rate can indicate adoption, but quality metrics show whether the process is producing meaningful feedback. For PitchBook, the aim was never just to get more reviews submitted. It was to make reviews more specific, more actionable, and more useful for employee performance and growth.

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Building the Capabilities the Business Needs Next

With a stronger performance foundation in place, PitchBook developed a simple, enterprise-wide set of competencies and related skills for individual contributors and people managers, describing what good looks like across all levels of the organization. Departments supplement the core skills with function-specific ones, creating greater transparency for employees considering new roles in the organization.

The company is using data gathered through reviews to better understand where employees are focused and where targeted development planning can help. PitchBook is also on track to have 50% of employees with active, role-relevant development plans by July.

That work is closely tied to Lattice Grow, which Zach and Kara described as one of the most important parts of the platform for PitchBook. The team had been thinking for years about how to make skill-based development and competency frameworks scalable and easy to use. Lattice Grow gave them a place to document growth plans, connect them to performance conversations, and support employees identified for growth opportunities.

We've built competency guides and supported departments to build their own frameworks in spreadsheets, but no surprise, skills described in spreadsheets aren't 'sticky'. Lattice gave us a place to codify the capabilities we want to develop org-wide. Connecting skills to growth plans and performance conversations supports the continuous growth employees expect.

— Kara Hannigan, Sr. Director, People Development, PitchBook

The broader goal is to make development continuous. Rather than asking employees to create a plan once and forget about it, PitchBook wants growth to be visible, supported, and connected to the employee lifecycle.

That is where Talent Management begins to drive lasting success: not only by evaluating past work, but by helping the organization build future capability.

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