Nirvana

About Nirvana

Nirvana is a healthcare technology company that leverages AI to automate insurance eligibility checks and cost share estimates, so nothing gets in the way of reliable care for patients and providers.

The Challenge: Running Performance Reviews Before You Hire an HR Team During Peak Season

Without an HR team (and even often with one), performance reviews typically mean long hours, scattered spreadsheets, and immense administrative burden. For Emily, Nirvana’s Chief of Staff, this would be her first time orchestrating a performance review cycle, and as a company running mid-year reviews during their busiest season, efficiency was crucial.

"The second half of the year is by far our busiest period, so when it came to performance reviews, I was hesitant to introduce a process that could disrupt or distract the team from their day-to-day work."

Emily Baccaglini

Chief of Staff

LinkedIn

With Windmill, she ran an organized, efficient mid-year cycle with a 100% completion rate for self and upward reviews.

Median completion times:

• Peer Review: 5 minutes
• Upward Review: 16 minutes
• Self Review: 50 minutes

Plus an ~80% preference for Windmill among employees who had prior performance review experience.

A Review Process Built on Months of Trust and Data

Introducing a new performance review process often leads to fielding endless questions, but Windmill’s approach, building on months of data already collected by the platform, gave the process immediate credibility and familiarity.

Nirvana started using Windmill in the early summer to collect ongoing feedback. With months of rich data already in the platform, it made running performance reviews with Windmill the clear choice, so managers could draw directly from the insights Windy had captured.

Users described the process as:

Faster and easier to understand what the company wanted to hear from me

Compared to my previous review, this one gave me more concrete examples and practical takeaways

"What mattered most to me was running a review process the team would actually feel good about. I went into this expecting the usual groans you get when you introduce anything involving performance reviews. Instead, I was genuinely surprised that our team actually enjoyed it. Windmill made the whole process feel lighter, more intuitive, and produced far better results than what we'd used before."

Kelvin Chan

CEO

LinkedIn

Slack as the Perfect Medium to Complete Reviews

Windmill’s conversational Slack format prompted deeper reflection without the intimidation of staring at a blank document. Employees shared feedback like “it felt more like a two-way dialogue.”

Nirvana also avoided the problem of introducing new software by keeping the majority of the employee experience in Slack, where they already work.

"Our management team had already been using Windmill to collect other types of feedback, and because Slack is part of our everyday workflow, the rest of the team was immediately very comfortable engaging with Windy there—which made the whole process extremely low-lift."

Emily Baccaglini

Chief of Staff

LinkedIn

Employees described it as:

Natural, like a conversation

Easier than writing in a Google Doc

Convenient not having to access something else

For Nirvana’s distributed team, including international contractors, the familiar interface eliminated training overhead and made coordination seamless.

A Seamless Review Cycle from Start to Finish

Beyond the employee experience, Windmill turned performance reviews into a seamless operational process, even for someone who had never run a cycle before.

"Running this process manually like we used to—chasing people down, stitching together information across different systems and spreadsheets—would've taken an unbelievable amount of time. I honestly can't imagine doing it that way now."

Emily Baccaglini

Chief of Staff

LinkedIn

She particularly valued the calibration module:

"Using the calibration module in Windmill was my favorite part of the process. It is so, so helpful. Having all of the information in one place, in a really easy to read way, made our performance conversations so much more productive."

Emily Baccaglini

Chief of Staff

LinkedIn

As one of Windmill’s earliest performance review customers, Nirvana also benefited from collaboration with the team. When Nirvana had feature requests mid-cycle, Windmill deployed a solution, sometimes shipping changes in as little as 12 hours.