Summary
Vidyard's performance system was broken. Managers placed employees in nine-box grids with no clear expectations, no career framework, and no two-way conversation. Decisions on compensation and promotions happened in silos, riddled with bias. Employees felt the process was opaque and unfair — yet Sarika Lamont, Vidyard's Chief People Officer, had no technology, no team bandwidth, and a business contracting through a SaaS downturn.

Three and a half years later, she's rebuilt the entire system — career frameworks, competencies, performance reviews, and now an AI-powered interactive tool that took five minutes to prototype. What once required two quarters and a team of specialists now happens in a week. In this episode, Sarika walks through how she dismantled a one-sided performance process, designed for scale during contraction, and used Claude to compress months of work into days — all while solving for what employees and managers actually need, not what HR traditionally builds.

Timestamps
00:01 How Sarika fell into HR from management consulting at a federal contracting startup
05:59 The broken nine-box system she inherited: no expectations, no framework, pure manager bias
11:28 Why cross-functional partnerships with finance and business leaders matter more than HR credentials
17:22 Building a career framework from scratch: IC paths, management tracks, and leveling for scale
23:35 The SaaS downturn, AI disruption, and why the system went stagnant
28:19 Using Claude to redesign competencies in days instead of quarters
33:55 What replaces the time saved: ongoing enablement, adoption, and human-to-human coaching
38:12 Where to start if you're overwhelmed: validate the real problem first, then ask AI where to begin

Takeaways
- Build your performance system from the business problem backward — not from what HR traditionally designs — or you'll solve for process instead of outcomes.
- Career frameworks need differentiation level-to-level so employees see the gap between "intermediate" and "senior" in concrete, actionable terms, not themes.
- AI compresses iteration cycles from quarters to days, but the time saved goes to enablement and adoption — the work HR has always neglected because building took too long.
- Start by validating what employees and managers actually need through exit data, engagement surveys, and one-on-ones — then use AI as a thought partner to fill the gaps you can't solve manually.
- Performance transparency isn't about revealing ratings — it's about documenting expectations, competencies, and decision-making frameworks so people understand how to grow.

Connect with the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarikal/
Learn more about Vidyard: https://www.vidyard.com/

Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Kinfolk, the AI service desk built for HR.

See more at kinfolkhq.com