Principal Associate, Experience Design · PATH
Calibrations Ecosystem.
The pilot proved the concept. Now we had to build for 70,000 people. PATH became Capital One's first enterprise performance platform — and the calibrations ecosystem was the hardest part to get right.
Hero — PATH calibrations distribution UI showing rating distribution view
Full-bleed — HMW slide: How do we design a calibration experience that gives every leader what they need to make fair, confident decisions?
The Challenge
Scaling something human
Calibration is where performance decisions actually get made. Leaders gather — sometimes with a room full of peers — to align on ratings, surface standouts, and identify development gaps. It's high stakes, politically charged, and deeply dependent on the quality of information available in the room.
We'd proven with the pilot that better feedback inputs led to better calibration conversations. Now we needed to build a system that could hold that quality at 70,000-person scale — across business lines, seniority levels, and calibration models that looked very different from team to team.
My role: lead design for the end-to-end calibration experience within PATH — from how sessions are created and managed, to what leaders see in the room when decisions are being made.
Early brainstorm — whiteboard mapping the end-to-end calibration workflow
01
Who's actually in the room
We started with deep discovery — not just on the calibration session itself, but on all the people moving through it. The experience looked radically different depending on whether you were a first-time people leader, a senior VP running a large org, or an HR partner facilitating the session.
We built out personas and jobs-to-be-done frameworks that let us design for the full range — without trying to make one interface do everything for everyone.
Personas — people leaders, senior leaders, HR partners each with a different relationship to calibration
Jobs-to-be-done framework — the same calibration session, five different goals
02
Before the room: managing sessions
The calibration experience starts long before anyone walks into a session. Leaders need to see who's been nominated, understand the rating distribution across their team, flag concerns, and prepare talking points — all without the full picture that only comes together in the room.
We designed the session management experience to give leaders exactly what they needed ahead of time: clear visibility into team standing, easy ways to surface edge cases, and a prep experience that reduced the cognitive load in the session itself.
Session management UI — pre-calibration team view, rating distribution, and prep experience
03
In the room: designing for real decisions
Live calibrations are the hard part. You have multiple leaders, one screen, limited time, and years of performance data that needs to resolve into actionable decisions. We designed the live experience around a single constraint: the right information, at the right moment, without noise.
The distribution view gave rooms a shared anchor. The individual view surfaced 360 feedback alongside performance data, so leaders weren't debating from memory. Status tracking meant sessions could pause and resume without losing ground.
Live calibration UI — distribution view with individual deep-dive panel showing 360 feedback + performance data
Full-bleed — three states of the live calibration: distribution view, individual view, completed state
04
Early signal from the field
We ran iterative research throughout the build — not just usability studies, but ongoing conversations with people leaders and HR partners as the experience took shape. The early feedback validated our core bets and surfaced edge cases we hadn't anticipated.
Leaders described calibrations as feeling "more grounded" — less debate about facts, more real conversation about development. HR partners noted fewer escalations post-session. The signal was clear enough to accelerate the enterprise rollout.
Early feedback — leader and HR partner testimonials from the pilot
Full-bleed — scale stat: PATH reached 20,000+ employees in year one of enterprise rollout
Outcome
From pilot to platform
PATH launched as Capital One's first enterprise performance management platform — built on the foundation the pilot established.
- Scaled from an 800-person pilot to 70,000+ employees across Capital One
- Reached 20,000+ employees in year one of the enterprise rollout
- Calibration sessions reported fewer disputes and stronger post-session alignment
- 360 feedback became a standard, structured input into every calibration — not an afterthought
- HR partners reported reduced escalations and cleaner outcomes in sessions using PATH
What I learned
Growth as a leader
Building PATH taught me what it means to design at enterprise scale — where the system has to hold for every edge case, not just the happy path.
The work that mattered most wasn't the interface. It was the alignment work — getting HR, engineering, product, and business stakeholders onto the same model of what calibration should do and for whom. Design was the medium for that conversation.
I also learned that launching isn't the end. The most valuable research happened after PATH was in the field — when real users surfaced problems we never would have caught in a lab.
Growth slide — enterprise design, cross-functional alignment, evidence-driven decisions