Rho
How Rho transformed their performance management from time-consuming and reactive to efficient and proactive with Windmill.
Effective & Efficient Performance Management
Traditional performance management systems—run through spreadsheets, HRIS platforms, or point solutions like Lattice and 15Five—are time-consuming and disruptive, often requiring managers to dig through scattered inputs to understand what’s been going on. Feedback loops get slowed down, administrative burdens pile up quickly, and performance review cycles end up slowing down the org instead of propelling teams forward.
Problem: Before Windmill, performance management at Rho required managers to dedicate a significant portion of their time to tracking down information and connecting the dots on their teams. From performance review cycles to ongoing career development conversations, the lift was very heavy:
The performance review… always is notoriously long, taking weeks to get through.
Previously as a manager, you would have to take so much time…skimming through many sources to figure out what are the problems, what’s failing at the organization.
Solution: With Windmill, Stas and the Rho team streamlined performance management, freeing them up to spend time solving problems instead of tracking and piecing information together.
The way I think about the impact of Windmill more generally is in terms of time not wasted.
I’m not wasting my time on looking for feedback and insights. I’m allocating that time on problem solving, which also happens to be my favorite thing to do.
Proactively Unblock Your Team, and Track Progress Across Your Org
Today’s performance management is rooted in reactivity. Issues often go unnoticed until they snowball—by the time a manager sees the problem, it’s already affecting output, morale, or retention. Feedback loops are slow, surface-level, and disconnected from the daily flow of work, making it hard to spot and solve problems in real time. The result is wasted time, avoidable escalations, and teams that feel unseen until it’s too late.
Problem: Before using Windmill, Rho’s management was stuck in the past. Employees hardly engaged with the company’s HR software, and organizational pain points were addressed reactively once they became noticeable.
Solution: Once the Rho team set up recurring routines in Windmill, leadership started getting authentic feedback alongside new, powerful insights around critical blockers, cross-functional delays, and operational pain points. Blockers soon became a structured part of exec meetings — allowing Stas’s team to not just spot, but own and solve issues rapidly.
We as an executive team… take blockers very seriously. We review them together… highlight the most critical blockers to discuss. Seeing blockers for ICs and then being able to synthesize weekly blockers across the organization — that’s really powerful, because this is how I can see trends.
This is how you can find out that maybe there was an interpersonal issue, maybe there was a technology issue, someone just needed access to something… or maybe there is a sort of cross-functional problem that’s going on that we don’t have visibility into.
I love getting my Windmill report every Monday morning… it’s a really great forcing function for me to see what happened with my team over the course of last week. It’s a synthesis of all of the team’s accomplishments and blockers and feedback… I can stay on top of the sentiment and the performance of my team.
Better Employee Engagement versus Traditional Platforms
Existing HR platforms were built for People Op teams, not for the employees and managers that are supposed to be utilizing them. It’s often a huge hassle to get folks to engage with their HR platforms, and when they do, it feels like a disruption to their day-to-day.
Problem: When Stas joined Rho as SVP of Operations, the team was using a different tool. It was doing an okay job at facilitating continuous feedback amongst employees and managers, but it was very reliant on managers manually engaging with inputs, and engagement with employees started to drop off.
At some point, folks stopped to engage with this format, and we just sort of…lost folks’ interest.
Occasionally you had some drop-off…associated with managers not engaging with those inputs in the first place.
If the manager was engaging with the inputs, you had that flywheel effect and would get more engagement. But it was lumpy and not consistent.
Solution: Through Windy’s conversational prompting within Slack, Rho’s employee engagement increased. Plus, automations allowed momentum to build scalably with very little manual lift:
Low Lift Implementation, High Impact Results
Implementing new tools can be scary: many take a ton of time to set up, require heavy admin work, and then…they ultimately fail to engage employees. Big lift, no reward.
Problem: Previous software implementations have been significant time-sucks for the Rho team, while support teams have often been slow and hard to reach.
Solution: With Windmill, implementation was quick and painless. Plus, our team is constantly looking for customer feedback that directs our future roadmap and new integrations:
The setup was super easy… it took zero time for us to get up to speed. It was sort of like plug and play. You just enable the integrations.
Super fast, super easy. I don’t think we ever had any questions.