Integrating Goal Tracking into GoCo’s Performance Management Feature
Designing a scalable system for setting, tracking, and reviewing employee goals
Overview
Many organizations struggle to effectively set, track, and align employee goals. Existing solutions often rely on spreadsheets or fragmented tools, resulting in poor visibility, low accountability, and weak alignment between individual work and company objectives.
This project focused on designing a Goals section within GoCo’s Performance Management feature that enables employees, managers, and admins to create, track, and review goals in a centralized, structured, and intuitive way — while supporting performance reviews and long-term growth conversations.
Problem
Teams lacked a reliable way to:
Track employee goals consistently over time
Understand progress without manual follow-ups
Align individual goals with performance reviews
Capture context (status updates, milestones, comments, history)
As a result, goal setting felt disconnected from performance management, reducing motivation and making reviews less data-driven.
Goal
Deliver competitive parity for goal tracking
Enable employees and managers to easily create and manage goals
Improve visibility into progress for managers and admins
Integrate goals directly into performance reviews
Drive 10% adoption within the first 6 months
Lay the foundation for future enhancements (Team Goals, Company Goals, OKRs)
My Role
Product Designer
Led end-to-end design of the Goals feature
Translated product requirements into detailed UX flows and specs
Designed employee, manager, and admin experiences
Collaborated closely with PM and Engineering on scope, milestones, and trade-offs
Designed scalable systems for future expansion (AI summaries, reporting, permissions)
User Stories
User stories were broken down to better understand and evaluate the complexity of each requirement.
1. Goal Creation (Employees & Managers)
Users can create individual goals with:
Required title, optional description and due date
Optional SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound)
Optional milestones with progress metrics:
Done / Not Done
Numeric
Percentage
The experience supports both quick goal creation and deeper structure, depending on user needs.
SMART criteria are optional and non-blocking, allowing teams with different maturity levels to adopt structured goal-setting at their own pace.
Introduced milestone-level tracking with multiple metric types so progress reflects real work, not just a single completion checkbox.
2. Goal Tracking & Status System
Goals support clear lifecycle states:
Not Started
On Track
Delayed
Completed
Missed
Statuses are partially automated (e.g. due dates, milestone completion) while still allowing manual overrides to reflect real-world nuance.
Users can:
Update progress via percentage or milestone completion
Add comments and view full activity history
Edit or archive goals (with permission-based rules)
Balanced automation with human judgment by auto-updating goal status based on dates and milestones while still allowing users to override statuses when real-world context demands it.
Centralized comments, progress updates, and edits into a single timeline to preserve context and reduce miscommunication during performance discussions.
3. Visibility & Management
Employee dashboard: Personal goals and progress
Manager/Admin dashboard: All accessible goals across direct reports
Filtering by status, team member, department, or ownership
Archived goals are hidden by default but can be toggled
Clear permission rules ensure:
Employees can’t delete goals created by managers
Managers can manage goals for their team
Admins have configurable access levels
Designed dashboards that make goal progress immediately scannable, helping employees and managers understand status without opening each goal.
4. Goals Inside Performance Reviews
A key design decision was embedding goals directly into performance reviews to avoid context switching.
Within a review, users can:
Reference existing goals
Create new goals directly from the review flow
View goal details, milestones, SMART criteria, and history
Freeze goals “in time” once the review step is completed to preserve review integrity
This ties goal-setting directly to feedback and growth conversations.
Integrated goals directly into performance reviews to eliminate context switching and ensure reviews reflect real, ongoing work rather than memory-based feedback.
5. AI-Powered Employee Summaries
To support better decision-making, AI summaries were designed across:
Goals
Performance reviews
Timeline activity
Employment history
Each summary provides:
Highlights
Areas for improvement
A concise overall narrative
This helps managers and admins quickly understand employee context without digging through raw data.
Designed AI summaries to surface highlights, areas for improvement, and an overall narrative, helping managers quickly understand progress without reading raw data.
6. Notifications & Accountability
The system proactively keeps users informed through inbox and email notifications:
When a goal is created
Upcoming due dates (1 week and 1 day reminders)
Goal status changes (completed or missed)
New comments on goals
This reinforces accountability without requiring manual follow-ups.
Automated reminders and status-based notifications reduce manual follow-ups while keeping employees accountable for upcoming and missed goals.
Impact & Outcomes
Introduced a centralized, scalable goal-tracking system
Reduced reliance on spreadsheets and ad-hoc tracking
Improved alignment between goals and performance reviews
Created a foundation for future features like:
Team and company goals
OKRs
Advanced reporting
Goal benchmarking
The feature was released and positioned as a core part of GoCo’s Performance Management offering.
Key Takeaway
Goal tracking is not just a task list — it’s a continuous feedback system. By designing flexible goal creation, clear progress visibility, and deep integration with performance reviews, this feature helps teams stay aligned, motivated, and accountable over time.
