Performance Review Cycle Orchestrator

The problem this kills

Performance review season is a slow-motion fire drill. You email a stack of templates, then live inside a "completion tracker" spreadsheet for six weeks - color-coding cells, cross-checking who got which form, and sending the same nagging reminder over and over. A handful of managers never finish, the cycle that was supposed to wrap in three weeks drags into the next quarter, and when leadership asks "where are we?" you have no clean answer.

Worse, the messy reality keeps breaking the spreadsheet: someone got hired mid-cycle, two people transferred teams, and now nobody's sure which manager is supposed to write the review. Meanwhile, draft ratings sit in inboxes where they can accidentally get forwarded before anyone decided to release them.

What you'll build

A private web app, just for your HR/people-ops team, that runs the whole cycle from setup to close:

• You configure a cycle (open date, due date, reminder cadence) and pick which forms apply to which levels or roles.
• The tool builds the list of employee-manager pairs from your roster and assigns the correct form to each.
• HR reviews the whole setup - who's included, which forms, the dates - and approves the launch. Nothing goes out until a human says go.
• Participants get notified, then automatically reminded on your cadence until they submit.
• A live dashboard shows completion by team, by manager, and overall.
• HR closes the cycle and decides when results are released - never the machine.
• You export a clean completion CSV in the exact columns your HRIS or leadership deck expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which then builds the tool with you - no prior coding needed.

It opens by interviewing you about your business - your current review process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, how your roster and forms are actually named, your typical and peak headcount, your approval and reminder rules, and your messiest edge cases (mid-cycle hires, exits, transfers, dotted-line managers). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, the form-assignment logic, and every later step around your answers. You get a tool fit to how you actually run reviews - not a generic template.

From there it walks you through standing up the database, the login, the cycle setup screen, the approval gate, the reminder engine, the completion dashboard, and the CSV export, with a ready-to-paste prompt at the end of every step.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data.
• A complete audit trail - who configured, approved, launched, and closed the cycle, and exactly when.
• A hard human approval gate before launch: HR confirms the participant list, forms, and dates before a single email goes out.
• No auto-release of ratings, ever - closing the cycle and releasing results is a deliberate human decision.
• Duplicate guards so the same employee can't end up with two review records in one cycle (the dedupe key is employee ID + cycle).

Who it's for

HR and people-ops folks who run review cycles out of emailed templates and a frantic completion spreadsheet, and who are tired of being the human reminder bot for six weeks straight. If you can keep a roster in a Google Sheet, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.