People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as CPG Founders

People & HRFor CPG Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're a CPG founder running a team of 4–8 people. Performance reviews happen once or twice a year, and every cycle you're starting from scratch: digging through Slack to remember what someone shipped, trying to reconstruct six months of context from memory, and pasting notes into a Google Doc that nobody actually fills out consistently. There's no HR team. There's no HRIS with structured review workflows. Your calendar is full of co-packer calls and broker meetings, so review conversations keep getting pushed. The result is reviews that are too vague to be useful, action items nobody tracks, and employees who feel like their growth is an afterthought.

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People & HRFor CPG Founders4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured review cycle where every 1:1 and performance conversation is automatically captured, summarized, and stored — so next cycle you're not reconstructing the year from memory

A living document per employee that pulls together action items from past meetings, project completions, and notes, all searchable and updated through Starch

A lightweight task system that turns review outcomes (promotions, improvement plans, training goals) into tracked action items with owners and due dates, so decisions actually get executed

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Task Manager Project Management

Data sources & config

Meeting Notes captures and transcribes all 1:1 and review calls in real time. Knowledge Management connects directly to Notion (Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule) so your existing team wiki stays in sync and employee profiles are searchable. Task Manager and Project Management are native Starch apps — no external integration needed. Slack is also available to connect from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query channel history for context when building review summaries.

Prompts to copy

Transcribe today's performance review with Jake, summarize key feedback themes, extract any development goals or action items, and save the summary to his employee profile in our Knowledge Management wiki

Search our meeting history for every 1:1 with Maria over the last 6 months and generate a performance narrative I can use as the basis for her annual review

Create tasks for each action item that came out of this week's review cycle — assign them to the right person, set due dates 30 days out, and flag any that are marked high priority

Build an employee review tracker in Project Management with columns for: Review Scheduled, Review Completed, Action Items Set, Follow-Up Due — one card per team member

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 At the start of the review cycle, open Project Management and prompt Starch: 'Create a project called Q2 2026 Performance Reviews with one card per direct report, each card in the Review Scheduled column.' This gives you a single Kanban view of where every review stands.

2 Before each 1:1 review meeting, ask Starch: 'Pull every meeting note and action item involving [employee name] from the last six months and give me a one-page summary of themes, wins, and open items.' Starch searches your Meeting Notes archive and Notion-synced docs to generate this brief.

3 Run your review conversation with Meeting Notes active. It transcribes in real time and automatically extracts decisions, commitments, and action items at the end of the call — so you're not typing while you're trying to listen.

4 After the meeting, Starch saves a structured summary to the employee's profile in Knowledge Management: feedback themes, development goals, agreed-upon actions, and a rating if you use one. This is the permanent record — no Google Doc to maintain separately.

5 Prompt Starch: 'From today's review with [name], create tasks in Task Manager for each action item, assign them to the correct person, mark anything with a deadline under 30 days as P2 or higher.' Action items from the conversation become tracked todos immediately.

6 Move the employee's card in Project Management from Review Scheduled to Review Completed. Set a follow-up task 30 days out: 'Check in with [name] on the goals we set in the Q2 review.'

7 Repeat for each team member. Once all reviews are done, prompt Starch: 'Give me a summary across all Q2 performance reviews — what themes came up most often, who has open action items, and which follow-ups are due in the next two weeks.'

8 For any compensation or title changes that came out of reviews, use Task Manager to create a P1 task: 'Update offer letter / payroll for [name] by [date]' so it doesn't get buried under co-packer emails.

9 At the midpoint between review cycles, ask Starch: 'Remind me of the development goals set for each team member in Q2 reviews and flag anyone whose action items are overdue.' This is your mid-cycle check-in trigger.

10 Before the next review cycle, prompt Starch: 'Search all meeting notes, action items, and project completions for [employee] since their last review and draft a performance narrative I can edit.' Your prep time drops from two hours per person to fifteen minutes.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Review Cycle — 6-Person CPG Team

Sample numbers from a real run

Team members reviewed	6
Hours spent on review prep (before Starch)	14
Hours spent on review prep (with Starch)	4
Action items extracted across all reviews	23
Action items with owners + due dates in Task Manager	23
Open action items still tracked 30 days later	19

In June 2026, you run reviews for your six-person team: an ops lead managing co-packers, two brand/marketing people, a sales rep covering DTC and wholesale, a fulfillment coordinator, and a part-time bookkeeper. Before Starch, this took roughly 14 hours of prep and documentation across the cycle — mostly reconstructing context from memory and chasing down half-completed Google Docs. With Starch, before each review you pull a 6-month summary from Meeting Notes and your Notion-synced wiki. The ops lead review surfaces three unresolved co-packer performance complaints you'd flagged in January — you'd forgotten them, she hadn't. The sales rep review shows six out of eight quarterly goals were hit; Starch found the evidence in your meeting archives without you searching for it. Across all six reviews, Starch extracts 23 action items: training plans, a promotion conversation to revisit in 90 days, a PIP for one role, and several tool-access requests. All 23 go into Task Manager with owners and due dates before the end of the week. Thirty days later, 19 are still being tracked — compared to the usual outcome where you can't find the doc you made.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of direct reports with a completed review and documented action items within the target cycle window

Average days between review conversation and action items logged in Task Manager (target: same day)

Open action items from last review cycle still unresolved at 60 days (indicator of follow-through breakdown)

Time spent on review prep per employee (target: under 45 minutes with Starch vs. 2+ hours without)

Employee retention rate in the 90 days following a review cycle (small teams feel attrition acutely)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Lattice or Leapsome

Purpose-built for structured review cycles with templates and calibration workflows, but cost $8–14 per employee per month and assume an HR admin to configure — overkill for a 6-person CPG team with no dedicated people function.

Google Docs + Sheets + Calendar

Free and familiar, but there's no memory across cycles — you're reconstructing context manually every time, action items live in docs nobody checks, and nothing talks to each other.

Notion standalone

Good for building an employee wiki and storing notes, but it doesn't transcribe meetings, generate review narratives from history, or turn decisions into tracked tasks automatically — you're still doing the synthesis yourself.

15Five

Check-in and review tool with good manager workflows, but it requires employees to engage with the platform regularly to work well — hard to maintain adoption on a lean CPG team where everyone is heads-down on operations.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, knowledge management, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We only have 5 people. Is this overkill?

Probably not — small teams actually suffer more from bad reviews because each person is doing the work of two or three. The value here isn't process for its own sake; it's that you stop losing the institutional memory of what was agreed on. With 5 people and no HR support, Starch is doing the admin work you'd otherwise skip.

Does Starch store my employees' performance data securely?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if you have a compliance requirement. For most early-stage CPG founders running lean teams, this isn't a blocker, but it's an honest limitation you should factor in if you're handling sensitive HR data.

What if we use Slack for all our async communication — can Starch pull context from there?

Yes. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog and the agent can query channel history live when building review summaries or searching for context about a project. It's a live query — not a full historical archive — but it's enough to surface relevant threads and mentions.

Can Starch handle the whole review cycle if our team is remote and async?

Yes, and it's actually better suited to async teams. Meeting Notes works whether the review is a video call or a recorded async loom. Knowledge Management keeps everything searchable regardless of timezone. Action items in Task Manager don't require a shared office to stay tracked.

What if we want to track performance against specific CPG goals — like sell-through rate or deduction recovery?

That's a custom build. Describe it to Starch: 'Build me a review template that includes fields for sell-through rate, on-time delivery to co-packer schedule, and deduction dispute outcomes.' Starch can wire those into the employee profiles in Knowledge Management so every review includes the metrics that actually matter for a CPG operation.

We don't do formal annual reviews — just informal check-ins. Will this still help?

Yes, possibly more so. Informal check-ins are exactly where action items get lost. Meeting Notes captures them even in casual 1:1s, and Task Manager turns 'yeah let's revisit that in a few weeks' into an actual tracked item. The review cycle structure is optional — use as much or as little of it as fits how you actually operate.