Client snapshot
A distributed digital agency
Serious ambitions, a strong team, and the right questions starting to surface.
The situation
The “people” questions started on schedule
“What does growth look like here? How am I doing? Is there a path forward for me?”
The agency had been growing quickly for three years: great client work, talented team with people carefully chosen across three continents, strong leadership team. They'd already started building a career framework internally, because they knew it was a crucial next step in their growth journey. But between client development, client interactions, and focused delivery work, there was no time to finish it, let alone run a full cycle.
They needed someone who had run this before, to help them build the system, get through the first cycle and build internal capabilities to own this work over time.
“We believe review processes should be owned internally. It's an extremely intimate moment for a company, and it's much more powerful when it's run from the inside. Our job is to help you do it well, learn the process and get you to the point where you never need us for it again”
Pauline Bertry, 90n
The starting point
Three main challenges to overcome
A framework built on expectations, not behaviors
They already had a draft, which is rare. But it described abstract expectations rather than concrete behaviors. For someone with two or three years of experience, 'independently own a client work stream' is not actionable - so we needed to build a framework that would reflect both the work people were doing day-to-day and the company strategy, and at the same time provide clear guidance to people.
No one had ever run this before end to end
There's invisible work in a review cycle: calendar alignment, submission tracking, committee prep, feedback memo review, debrief discussions. If you've never run one, you don't know what you don't know. The leadership team needed someone to hold the orchestration end to end and build this capability internally over time.
A distributed team across three time zones
Design, product, customer experience, and software engineering, sitting in the US, Brazil, and India, at different levels of seniority, with a wide range of experience and expertise. The framework, the cadence and the format had to work for all of them and be flexible enough to enable predictable scaling.
How we worked
What we did
Built a career framework
Built a behavior-driven framework aligned with the agency's strategy, where it stands today and where it's heading.
Run end-to-end review cycle
Ran the full cycle: self-reflections, feedback collection, calibration committees, and final delivery to every employee.
Created transparent skills map
Created full visibility on skills coverage, growth areas, aspirations, and placement fit across the whole team.
Build leadership capabilities
Trained the team on self-reflection writing, feedback collection, and coached advisors on how to deliver it well.
Created internal ownership
Equipped one team member to own and start running the cycles once we leave so that the process become fully theirs.
The tool
The Growth Hub
The review cycle needed a system that would help people learn the process, reduce admin time, and create space for genuine human conversations.
We built the Growth Hub: a semi-custom platform that lets participants, growth advisors, and leadership all work in one place. Participants submit their self-reflection memos and build their exposure lists. Advisors collect feedback and prepare committee cases. Leadership tracks progress in real time and reviews org-wide insights at the end.
We deliberately integrated AI features to help people engage better with each other, without it taking the central space. For self-reflections, we created a coach that asked people questions to drive their thinking, without writing content for them. For Growth Advisors, it helped extract key insights from conversations with people on the exposure list. For Leadership, it created an overview of key emerging themes across the organization based on people's self-reflections.
What's inside
Impact
What they came away with
Full team picture
For the first time in three years, leadership had visibility on skills, growth areas, and aspirations across every person.
Patterns surfaced
Recurring development needs emerged clearly, shaping how the agency will invest in its people going forward.
Smarter placement decisions
A few role mismatches were identified; leadership now has the context to explore lateral moves that serve both person and team.
Capability gaps made visible
Skill gaps in the agency's offering became concrete, informing hiring and development priorities.
A baseline for what comes next
This cycle is the foundation. Every future review builds on it, they're not starting from scratch again.
Lantern for people leaders
Turn what you learn running reviews into posts people read
Every review cycle leaves you notes on what worked and what you would change. Lantern turns them into a week of posts in your voice, so the lessons reach your team, your peers and the people you will hire next.
Try Lantern for free100 free credits, about ten posts. No card needed.