Performance Reviews Fail Because Managers Forget What Happened

Henrik Thesing — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:25:54 +0000

A few months ago, I noticed something uncomfortable about performance reviews:

Even good managers often don't have the full picture.

Not because they don't care.

Not because they don't pay attention.

But because humans are terrible at remembering months of small, important moments.

A great customer interaction.
A difficult problem someone solved.
A teammate stepping up during an incident.
A coaching conversation that changed someone's behavior.

These things happen every week.

Then review time arrives.

Suddenly, managers have to answer:

What did this person actually achieve?
Where did they improve?
What patterns have I noticed over time?
Am I evaluating the whole period or just the last few weeks?

And many end up reconstructing the story from:

memory
scattered notes
documents
spreadsheets
calendar entries

This creates a common problem: recency bias.

The most recent events become the most visible events.

The solutions managers build themselves

When I talked to managers about this, I noticed a pattern.

Everyone had created their own system:

OneNote pages per employee
spreadsheets with columns for each report
personal documents
weekly summaries
AI-generated review drafts

And honestly, many of these systems work.

The problem isn't that managers don't know how to take notes.

The problem is turning those notes into a reliable picture of someone's performance.

The idea behind FeedbackVault

I started building FeedbackVault to solve this specific problem.

The idea:

Capture observations when they happen → organize them over time → prepare better review conversations.

Instead of starting a review cycle by asking:

"How do I remember the last 6 months?"

you start with:

"Here is the story that happened over the last 6 months."

The goal is not another HR platform.

It's a lightweight way for managers to keep context.

What I'm learning

The biggest challenge isn't building software.

It's adoption.

A spreadsheet already works.

A notes document already works.

For a new tool to matter, it needs to create enough value that switching feels worth it.

That's the part I'm exploring now.

If you manage a team, I'd love to hear:

How do you currently prepare performance reviews?
What system (if any) do you use?
What's the hardest part of giving fair feedback?

I'm building FeedbackVault in public and learning from real workflows.

DEV Community: Henrik Thesing

Performance Reviews Fail Because Managers Forget What Happened