Foursquare cut its performance cycle to 24 days and kept 90% of its top talent.
Foursquare is a 15-year-old tech company that needed to move faster. Bureaucracy had built up over the years – in products, in processes, in how decisions got made. Kit Krugman, SVP of People & Culture, was brought in to fix that. Perform [formerly Confirm] was the performance platform to help him.
Streamlined processes. Data-rich insights. A people-team geared for growth. Here’s how it happened.
days performance cycle
participation
top talent retained
Foursquare’s performance systems weren’t stitched together. Merit, promotions, anytime feedback, performance improvement plans – all living in separate worlds. The number of PIPs in play was itself a signal: feedback wasn’t reaching people in time to matter. Managers lacked real-time, data-driven insight into how their teams were actually performing.
What Foursquare needed was lightweight, team-based, and genuinely data-rich. Traditional performance reviews were none of those things.
“We needed to find the intersection of really lightweight, AI-enabled, minimal effort from employees, and yet high data points that were also team-based. Perform [formerly Confirm] lived really perfectly at the intersection of those two needs.” Kit Krugman, SVP of People & Culture, Foursquare.
Peer signals over top-down reviews.
With Perform [formerly Confirm], feedback comes from peers, not just managers. Short surveys – 8 to 10 minutes – surface what’s really happening across teams, not just what one person at the top can see.
AI-powered reviews and integrations into Slack, Google and Teams made it easy to act on. Participation at Foursquare soared.
“Peer-to-peer accountability prevents a purely top-down culture.” Kit Krugman
A simple rollout, built around real use
Foursquare started with the philosophy, not the tool. Team-based success, tied to leadership principles. Perform [formerly Confirm] was the proof point of that strategy.
Kit’s team explained the why before the how. And kept the launch itself simple – no lengthy change-management decks. Just quick demos and hands-on walkthroughs that let people see the value immediately.
Perform [formerly Confirm] became part of daily life, not another tool people had to use. Slack shoutouts. Casual check-ins. A way to give recognition, not just gather data.
From data to decisions
The insights didn’t just sit in a dashboard. Kit’s team used them to find top performers – including people who’d been flying under the radar – and acted. Promotions. Development investment. Leadership roles.
Peer feedback removed the usual “managing up” dynamic, where people tell their boss what they want to hear. Organizational Network Analysis helped the team spot red flags early – leading to targeted support in some cases, honest conversations about fit in others.
“Perform [formerly Confirm] equipped my team to have more strategic conversations with leaders.”
Kit Krugman, SVP of People & Culture, Foursquare
The results
The performance cycle now completes in 24 days.
Participation sits at 99%. And 90% of top talent has been retained.
The People team’s role changed too. Instead of reacting to problems, Kit’s team now brings patterns and insights straight to leadership.
Foursquare transformed performance management from a reactive burden into a strategic advantage.
“If I were pitching Perform [formerly Confirm] – which I feel like I constantly am, because I’m talking about it a lot – I would say it’s a better ROI. It’s less time and less energy from the organization, with a similar level of impact in terms of the actual return on that investment.” Kit Krugman
We needed to find the intersection of really lightweight, AI-enabled, minimal effort from employees, and yet high data points that were also team-based. Perform [formerly Confirm] lived really perfectly at the intersection of those two needs.
Kit Krugman, SVP People and Culture, Foursquare
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