The challenge
Continuous feedback only works if busy managers engage, and the old tool made that hard
RetailNext’s people team, led by Chief People Officer Andrew Golden and Senior HRBP Sarah Carranza Walker, wanted to move away from annual performance reviews to continuous feedback. The problem with that ambition is well-known: it only works if managers engage, and most won’t, because they don’t have the time.
Their previous tool didn’t help. Reports landed as long, dense documents that required as much work to read as they did to act on. Windmill solved that problem for already highly stretched managers by bringing all the necessary context to them, making continuous feedback actually possible.
The first cycle
A first cycle so smooth that managers asked to run it again
When RetailNext ran their first performance review cycle on Windmill, Sarah, who admin’d the rollout, saw something rare for HR.
“Everything was so smooth, from the ease of use, to the way the managers were able to hop in. We've been getting people asking us if we're going to do it again. As an HR team, you don't often get feedback around — like, that was good, we should do it again. You're like, whoa, that's unheard of.”
That demand and feedback from their team drove the next move.
The solution
Monthly check-ins, with review prep cut from three hours per person to about thirty minutes
Instead of waiting another year, RetailNext started rolling out monthly continuous-feedback reflections.
The reason it worked is that monthly check-ins on Windmill don’t feel like extra work. Windy, Windmill’s Slack-native AI assistant, assembles each team member’s recent contributions into a structured brief, so managers walk in with extensive context already gathered. That engine cut review prep time dramatically for people like Karim Atef Mansour, who manages six engineers and prides himself on thorough reviews.
Why it stuck
Engineering, the toughest crowd for HR tools, became the most consistent participants
Engineering, who historically is the toughest crowd for HR tools, became RetailNext’s most consistent participants. They folded Windmill into their existing Slack workflow, and they kept showing up because the tool gave them something back: a clearer picture of where their teams stood, without the manual preparation.
What started as a single review cycle became RetailNext’s continuous-feedback infrastructure…not because HR mandated it, but because managers asked for more.
