A framework, not a dashboard.
Primer replaces subjective performance reviews with a structured system where employees participate in defining how they're measured.
You have the source code.
We don't have to be right.
You're not relying on us to fix your organization. Primer is a finished, working system. Test it on a team. Use it as-is. If your culture, language, or way of working ever calls for changes, you have the source code and can adapt any of it on your own schedule. Most teams run it as shipped. Some reshape it over time. Both are valid; neither is required to get value on day one.
The Five-Tier Framework
Every metric is measured against five tiers. Not pass/fail. Not a score from 1 to 10. Five meaningful states that tell you exactly where you stand.
Alarm: Immediate attention required
Concern: Below expectations, trending down
Content: Meeting baseline expectations
Effective: Exceeding expectations consistently
Optimized: Best-in-class performance
Own Your Metrics
Critical and legally required metrics are set top-down by management. Employees then participate: they define the weighting across all their metrics and propose additional goals of their own. Managers review and approve the complete picture. No one operates under a scorecard they had no hand in shaping.
Weight What Matters
Not everything is equally important. Employees assign explicit weights to each metric. When you say safety is 40% and schedule is 30%, you have made a strategic statement.
See Your Score
Composite scores are calculated transparently. You can see exactly how each metric contributes to your overall tier. No black boxes.
Challenge the System
The Inquiry mechanism lets any employee formally challenge a peer's metric, threshold, or weight. Cross-functional conflicts get resolved through structure, not politics.
Cascade Goals
Strategic goals flow down the organization with full dependency tracking. Every goal connects to the metrics that measure its success.
A key differentiator
Two-party metric ownership
Most performance tools let a single person, usually the manager, sometimes HR, define both what gets measured and what counts as good. That's how review cycles get political, and it's why so many scorecards feel like something done to people instead of with them.
Primer splits the responsibility. Critical and legally required metrics are set top-down by management — but employees participate by defining the weighting and proposing additional goals of their own. Managers review and approve the complete picture. Neither party can finalize a scorecard alone, and mid-cycle adjustments require a documented reason plus a second-party approval, so a bad quarter cannot be quietly rewritten as a good one. The conversation is built into the data model, and the audit trail is permanent.
Top-down
Management sets critical metrics
Legally required and strategically critical metrics are defined at the organizational level and assigned to each role.
Bottom-up
Employees participate and shape
Employees define the weighting, propose additional goals, and shape how success is measured for their role. Managers review and approve the complete scorecard.
Built for every level
See organizational health at a glance.
Translate strategy into measurable execution.
Define success with your team, not for them.
Know exactly what good looks like.
Cross-silo visibility without politics.
See it in action
Walk through the framework yourself. Define metrics, set weights, see how scoring works.