The Digital Performance Review: Is Your Scalable System Earning Its Keep?

In my last article, we talked about why your first hire shouldn’t be a person, but a system. We looked at the ONS data and realised that to avoid a classic trap that slows profitability right done, we have to think about where and when to automate. We called it "hiring a system".

Since we're all very smart bizniz people over here, we know that adding a system isn't enough - we have to monitor its performance and make tweaks and improvements until it's working exactly as needed. Just as you wouldn’t hire a human employee, give them a desk and a login, and then never speak to them again, you can just parachute a system into your messy (but adorable, I'm sure) business and expect it to solve all your problems. For a new employee, you’d run 1-to-1s, you’d set OKRs/KPIs, and if they were spending their days looking busy while actually achieving nothing, you’d have a few difficult conversations. We need to think about the same level of interrogation of performance for a system.

In my best-selling book, How To Write Your Strategy, the final stage of the framework is Performance Management, which gets broken down into a quantitative and objective analysis of each employee's inputs, outputs, and outcomes.

Let's look at how we can use that framework to run a performance review for your digital hire.

The performance framework: human vs. digital scalable systems

When we manage a person, we look at their effort (Inputs/Tasks), the work they produce (Outputs/Projects), and the value they create for the business (Outcomes/Objectives and Key Results). Your automated system should be judged by the exact same bunch of quantitative yardsticks.

If you’re paying for a "Senior" level tool (looking at you, HubSpot Enterprise and Asana Advance) but it’s delivering "Intern" level outcomes, it might be time to put that system on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).

1. Inputs: the fuel for your scalable system

In a human system, inputs are the smallest bits of work an employee completes each day; these small steps roll up together to build the bigger things (Projects) that are going to move the needle. In a digital system, inputs are still the smallest individual steps, they're just a lot less manual.

To have a high-performing system, you have to feed it the right things. In our Strategy framework, we break work down into its smallest, most definable components. When reviewing your system, look at what you are feeding into the machine.

Data entry tasks

Are you still manually typing data from one spreadsheet to another? If so, your input process is broken. A high-performing system should "inhale" data automatically via integrations through tools like Zapier or Make.

Trigger tasks

Every automation starts with a trigger. Is the trigger a manual action you have to take (e.g., clicking a button), or is it an organic business event (e.g., a customer booking a call)?

Instructional clarity

Just as a human needs a clear brief, a system needs clean data. If the tasks you are feeding in are messy, incomplete, or inconsistent, the system will spend its time processing errors instead of progress.

The performance review: inputs

If the "Input" stage still requires you to perform heavy manual tasks just to get the automation started, your system hasn't actually replaced a hire, it’s just given you a different set of chores. A successful system should minimise the human Task input required to generate a result.

2. Outputs: the work produced by your scalable system

Outputs are the tangible things the system does. In a human role, this is the number of reports written or features built or campaigns launched.

For your digital system, outputs are:

Process volume

How many invoices were sent? How many leads were moved in your CRM pipeline from "New" to "Contacted"?

Accuracy & speed

Is the system doing the work faster and with fewer errors than you could do manually?

Integration health

Are the separate tools talking to each other, or are they working in silos?

The performance review: outputs

If your system is producing the correct outputs but doing so with a 20% error rate (e.g., duplicate emails or broken links), it’s failing its probation. We want high-volume, high-accuracy outputs that happen while you sleep.

3. Outcomes: the business impact of your scalable system

This is where most founders get it wrong. They get excited by the outputs (look at all these automated emails!) but ignore the outcomes. Outcomes are the actual changes in your business state - has this system actually moved the needle or did you just spend two weeks learning no-code integrations to be right back where you started?

For your digital system, outcomes are:

The profitability gap

Remember that ONS data from the last article? Is your Revenue Per Employee actually going up? How is your Financial Objective's performance tracking over time?

Capacity liberation

Are you actually using the time saved to work on Strategy, or are you just finding new, digital ways to be busy because the system needs to be fed too frequently?

Customer experience

How is your Mission-Led Objective doing? Do your clients feel more taken care of because of the consistency, or do they feel like they’re being shouted at by a robot?

The performance review: outcomes

If your system is sending 1,000 automated emails (Output) but your conversion rate has tanked because the tone is off (Outcome), the system is a net-negative hire. A successful system doesn’t just "do things"; it moves the needle on your OKRs - just like you'd want an employee to.

Is it time to "fire" your software?

No-one wants to go through the hiring process and invest all that time and effort into a failed hire, but it's way worse for your business in the long term if you ignore problems as they arise purely because you put a lot of time into creating them. Just like a human team, systems can sometimes just not work out, no matter how much we invest into it. We add a tool for this, a plugin for that, and suddenly we have a really complex but unfortunately very sluggish digital architecture that costs £500 a month and solves problems we don't actually have.

Take a look at your Project Management tool (Asana, Trello, whatever your operating system is where you can see all your work and how it all connects together to drive your business forward). Look at your Task list. If the system is working, then:

1. Your manual Task list should be shorter.

2. Your high-value work should be getting 80% of your attention.

3. You should feel a sense of operational zen because the machine is doing the heavy lifting.

   
   

If you’re still feeling the chaos, your system isn't working - it’s just looking busy until the weekend rolls around.

Go through your SaaS invoices this month. For every tool, ask: What is the Input (what you're feeding it, both manually and automatically), the Output (what it does), and the Outcome (how it makes me or saves memoney)? If you can’t answer the last one, it might be time to hand in its notice.

What do you think? Is your system on track for a promotion or is it about to be looking for a new role? if you fancy a chat about how you can build your own scalable, automated systems, give me a shout in the link below.

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