Performance Review Readiness
How does your company handle career progression? Eight questions, three minutes. Start the assessment.
A free diagnostic for agencies, design studios and consulting firms. It asks how people actually progress where you work — not what your handbook says — and gives you a score out of 100, the name for where you are, and the one thing to fix first.
Free, and there is no account to create. The score is behind an email, which is not added to any list.
The eight questions
- When someone asks how to reach the next level, what happens?
- Who makes the final call on promotions?
- How would you describe your performance review process?
- How clearly are your seniority levels defined?
- How often do managers hold career conversations with their team members?
- How consistent are promotion decisions across teams?
- What happens after a career conversation?
- When someone wants a new challenge, how do they find one internally?
Four answers each, running from ad hoc to documented and consistent. Their positions are the score: a maximum of 24, shown out of 100.
The four bands
0 to 39 · Case by case
Progression here is decided in the moment. None of it is written down. Every promotion starts from scratch, and the answer depends on who is asking.
What to do first: agree what one level means here, in words you would use again.
40 to 64 · Carried by your managers
Your managers are the framework. Good managers apply the norms well. But the norms live in their heads, and leave when they do.
What to do first: get what your best managers already do into shared criteria.
65 to 84 · Structured, unevenly applied
You have the framework. What slips is the rhythm. The criteria exist. What varies is the use: one lead calibrates, another improvises, and follow-up depends on who ran it.
What to do first: put the cycle on a rhythm a client deadline cannot derail.
85 to 100 · Documented and consistent
Your answers describe a working system. Levels are explicit, promotions get calibrated, and career conversations leave something behind that someone reads.
What to do first: keep it even across teams as new people arrive.
Who it is for
Founders, ops and people leads, and managers at agencies, design studios and consulting firms — anywhere people are asking how to get to the next level and the answer is not written down.
Who made it
Polar Bear is a People Ops consultancy founded by Pauline Bertry and Alexey Lobachev, both ex-McKinsey. We build career frameworks, review cycles and ways of working for human-size teams.
Take the assessment · The Iceberg Score · Book a free 30-minute call