Building for Speed:
Why Culture Change Starts with Performance
Foursquare – Leading Geospatial Intelligence Platform
Watch the full Foursquare story
Over the past year, Foursquare has quietly undergone a transformation focused on one thing: velocity. Velocity in decision making, operational rhythms, and the ability to continuously ship value to customers and partners.
Like all transformation work, this change required difficult decisions, new expectations, and most significantly, an underlying culture shift. As they've begun to see results—the launch of new products, innovations in the geospatial industry, and a healthier balance sheet—they're pulling back the curtain on the internal transformation efforts to share what they've learned.
1. Building a high velocity organization requires a principle-based culture
Even before joining Foursquare, CEO Gary Little and his team began talking about how to drive culture change in service of business results. They shared an ethos around the type of culture that supported a high velocity operating mode: a principle-based culture that provided context over control.
They wanted their leadership principles to dictate and define decision making instead of processes and policies that needed to be tightly managed. Their shared belief was that a principle-based culture is inherently the precursor for a high performance culture.
"A principles-based culture offers radical autonomy, but requires high degrees of excellence, accountability and intrapreneurship in turn."
Organizations that get this right know how to turn principles into action. Netflix, famously principle-based, had one simple expense policy: "Act in Netflix's best interest." Amazon used their leadership principles to define how they operate.
What This Means in Practice
Despite their age on paper, Foursquare still operates in startup mode. That means they need people who want to build, push, and solve hard problems—at speed. The challenge was that their organizational infrastructure wasn't designed to support that operating mode or reward those behaviors.
So they began rethinking culture by rethinking rewards—which meant redesigning performance from the ground up.
"Culture is the dominant and persistent patterns of behaviors, beliefs, norms, and values of a workplace community."
2. Traditional performance management processes produce friction, not velocity
One of the first questions asked was: how many PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans) do we do? The answer was higher than expected, but the next answer surprised even more: "How many people successfully respond to PIPs and remain at the company?" The answer was over 25%.
For anyone familiar with PIPs, they are predominately used to manage people out of the organization and ensure feedback is properly documented. If people are coming OFF of PIPs, that means they didn't receive clear and constructive feedback that might have improved their performance much earlier in the process.
The Vision: A "Post-PIP World"
In a post-PIP world, performance standing is so clear to employees that by the time you WOULD give an employee a PIP, you simply offer severance instead with a shared understanding that it's not working.
The Challenge with Traditional Performance Systems
- Slow and Process-Heavy: Annual or bi-annual performance review cadence grinds the organization to a halt
- Lagging Data: By the time managers deliver feedback, it's already stale
- Individual-Focused: When most work happens in teams or cross-functionally, focusing on individuals misses the full picture
- Adoption Issues: "Anytime feedback" models require massive behavior change that often results in spotty, inconsistent feedback
3. A performance system designed to support velocity needs light-weight processes and real-time data
So what did they do?
📊 Defined a New Philosophy: Team-Based Performance
They landed on team-based performance. Classic performance management rewards the individual over the team, which naturally creates the wrong incentives. Or as Gary put it: "we wanted to win championships, not individual awards."
They built out behaviors required to drive high team performance, which aligned to their Leadership Principles at every step. They also renovated their career matrix, architecting an overhaul of what it meant to exhibit these behaviors at different compensation levels—specifically, not titles.
⚡ Chose Confirm: A Challenger Performance Platform
They needed a performance technology platform that didn't simply perpetuate the status quo of annual performance reviews. After reviewing major players like Lattice, Rippling, and Culture Amp, they chose Confirm.
Why Confirm?
- Only platform providing team-based (network analysis) data as input for performance
- Designed to be light-weight, fast and easy to use
- Always-on data collection supporting data-driven feedback year-round
- ONA feature providing snapshot view of talent (star performers, influencers, detractors) as assessed by peers
- AI-enabled summaries for managers
- Word limits ensuring concise, direct feedback
- Skill and capability tagging that autopopulates
🔄 Broke with Convention on Process
- Year-round impact tracking: No more annual/bi-annual data collection periods
- Network feedback: ONA replaces traditional 360 reviews
- Simplified 9-box: Moved to simple 5-scale ranking on expectations
- No forced curve: Let quality of work define ratings, not quotas
- Uncapped increases: Executives make the case for rewarding high performers aligned with contributions
- Transparent data: Shared ratings distribution and top tagged behaviors publicly
📈 Reimagined Growth & Development
Shifted from a suite of underused programs (online learning, coaching access, blanket learning stipend) to:
- Team Effectiveness Coaching: Facilitated coaching of intact teams
- Employee-Led Growth: Application-based learning stipends requiring business-aligned rationale
- Building High Performance Teams: Resources for team members at all levels on contributing to high performing teams
Each program is focused on increasing impact and investing directly in the change they're driving. Each requires teams and individuals to take initiative, self-manage and keep business objectives in mind.
Results: A Leap Forward in Velocity
Culture change takes time—and it requires behavioral change across all parts of the organization. Over the past year, Foursquare has been focused on making that culture shift real and measuring it. The results from their most recent engagement survey show they're making progress.
+24 points year-over-year
+15 points year-over-year
+14 points year-over-year
+13 points year-over-year
Business Impact
That cultural momentum is showing up in business results. Despite the challenging macro environment, 2024 was Foursquare's most profitable year in company history and Q1 2025 was their first profitable Q1 in company history.
No single change drives those results, but the direction is clear: they're learning faster, moving faster, and building a culture that fits the business they are today.
Key Takeaways
💡 Culture Change Starts with Performance
You can't preach principles without redesigning the underlying performance system that rewards behaviors
🎯 Team Performance > Individual Performance
High performing teams drive better results than teams of high performers working in silos
⚡ Real-Time Data Beats Annual Reviews
Traditional annual/bi-annual reviews produce lagging data that's stale by the time it's delivered
🔄 Year-Round Feedback is Essential
Always-on data collection enables continuous improvement and faster course correction
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