Calibrations Ecosystem.

Problem statement

The pilot proved better feedback inputs led to better calibration conversations. Could that quality hold at 70,000-person scale — across business lines, seniority levels, and calibration models that looked nothing alike?

Role

Lead designer — owned the end-to-end calibration experience, from how sessions are created and managed to what leaders see in the room when decisions get made.

Platform

Enterprise web · PATH performance platform

Timeline

May 2024 – Jun 2025

Hero — PATH calibrations distribution UI showing rating distribution view

The Challenge

Scaling something human

Success metrics · OKRs

20K+

employees reached in year one

↑ 31%

leader confidence in calibration

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 whiteboard sessions mapping the end-to-end calibration workflow — Early whiteboard sessions helped us map the full calibration journey — far messier than the pilot suggested.

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.

The three calibration personas — people leaders, PM champs / HRBPs, and facilitators — and what each needs — Three personas, three different needs — from a single consistent prep space to flexible tools for editing ratings

Persona journey map — people leaders, HRBPs, and facilitators across prep, live, and post calibration — Personas mapped across the calibration journey — each role's jobs-to-be-done at every phase

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 — Session management — giving leaders a clear picture before the conversation begins

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

Live calibrations — 360 feedback and performance data surfaced together, in the moment decisions are made

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 from the field — leader and HR partner testimonials from the pilot — Early feedback from the field — leaders felt more prepared, conversations felt more fair

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.