Create a thriving feedback culture via Gmail and Slack

Leapsome provides you an elegant solution to build stronger teams through real-time peer feedback. It helps you boost productivity and retain top talent with continuous feedback, 360° performance reviews, goals & OKRs and 1:1 meetings. Leapsome integrates directly with Gmail and Slack — so people actually use it and it’s not “just another tool”.

Kevin William David interviewed Kajetan Armansperg, Co-Founder of Leapsome to know more.

Hi Kajetan, So tell us about Leapsome?

Leapsome provides an elegant solution to give and request feedback, manage goals & OKRs and run performance reviews. A layer of people analytics helps managers gain actionable insights and build a culture of continuous learning. Our customers especially appreciate our Slack and Gmail integrations and the fact that it is a one-stop-platform for performance & talent development — both factors lead to high levels of employee engagement.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

In 2016, still in our previous jobs as managers at Funding Circle and DIE ZEIT, we saw that accelerating change through digitization calls for a new model of performance and talent management — a model that does away with tedious processes, keeps the employee engaged and creates a scalable culture of continuous learning to nurture your top talent.

How is Leapsome different from what already exists in the market?

Let’s be honest — there are quite a few performance management platforms out there, including Lattice and Reflektive. What makes us stand out is our strong focus on regular interactions and on structured data — we don’t only collect “general” feedback but guide you through the feedback process along specific dimensions like skills (“communication”, “structuring”, …), active goals/ OKRs or company values. This makes it easier to give feedback and provides us with a wealth of data to provide insights and make personalized learning recommendations to the individual user.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Leapsome?

Like many startups, we started off in the tech segment and count fast-growing startups among our customers. We now have extended this focus and have a number of established corporates (like Merck) piloting our product. Within companies that see feedback and learning as a strategic priority, the first touch point is usually top management and / or HR.

How are your customers using Leapsome? Could you share a few different use cases?

Most customers are working on building a more agile and open feedback culture that supports continuous learning. To achieve that, they use our feedback module with Slack & Gmail integrations.

Some companies still want to “bridge” the two worlds between more traditional annual performance reviews and more frequent feedback — for those, we have a highly automated performance review module.

With the rise of OKRs, goal and OKR tracking has become another very important use case. In fact, our goals module is very flexible and allows both KPI and OKR tracking. At the same time, it is linked with the feedback module, allowing you to request feedback on goals.

We are currently also working on a pulse survey module — allowing our customers to cover another important tool of strategic HR development in our platform.

Have there been unique use cases for Leapsome that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We realized early on that some managers used the feedback module in an unforeseen way — they tried to manage their bi-weekly 1:1 meetings with it. Seeing that need, we build a proper 1:1 meeting feature that now allows you to have more structured meetings with your teammates or reports, thereby enabling more effective coaching & leadership conversations.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We got started by tapping into our networks and generating leads via local events. We then worked closely with our initial customers to collect their feedback and constantly iterate on the product. Lately, referrals have turned into a very effective lead generator for us. We haven’t found THE silver bullet but keep iterating to identify which marketing and sales channels work most effectively for different customer segments. B2B sales requires patience and perseverance.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We started off with a single feature (continuous feedback) but soon added a number of other modules (goals, performance reviews, 1:1 meetings) and will add more in the future, choosing a platform approach.

That obviously adds complexity for the end user. We therefore spent a lot of time building a very simple dashboard and notification system that allows the user to quickly get an overview of what’s going on on the platform. Investing into great onboarding — via in-tool demos and email cascades — is equally important.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Gmail and Slack are extremely important, as they allow users to seamlessly incorporate feedback and 1:1 meeting management into their daily workflows. HRIS integrations (Personio and soon BambooHR & Namely) help us to onboard larger companies in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

All internal communication happens over Gmail or Slack. We use Trello to manage our to dos and the product roadmap. Stripe and ChartMogul are used for billing and revenue analytics. And to strengthen the culture of our growing team, we obviously use Leapsome ;).

Originally published at siftery.com.