Performance Against Potential
Every manager carries two stories. The first is the hire who interviewed like a champion — crisp answers, the right vocabulary, a handshake you remember — and who could not do the job. The second is the quiet one two desks over who could have run the place, if anyone had thought to look. I have both stories. Everyone does. They are the same story, and the moral is not "interview better." It is that we were measuring the wrong thing.
A résumé measures the past. An interview measures charm. A performance review, most places, measures how the last quarter felt. None of those is the thing you want, which is simpler to say than to do: how far is this person's performance from their potential, in this role, at this level of difficulty? That distance is where every good hiring decision, every honest review and every promotion that didn't blow up in your face actually lives. I started writing down a way to measure it in 2015, made it an internal playbook at Vista Equity in 2017, and in 2020 rebuilt it to lead the Customer Success organizations I founded there and at other private-equity-backed companies. I have used it ever since. Today it goes on the shelf at juan.co/playbooks, free to take.
Three disciplines, twelve competencies
A competency, in the dry language of the trade, is a piece of knowledge, skill or ability that correlates with performance. The trick is not listing them — every company has a poster in the lunchroom — but organizing them so they can be measured. Mine hang from three things I have never seen a good executive do without, whatever the title on the door: they think strategically and with discipline, they act with a bias toward action, and they build relationships that work. Under those three sit twelve competencies — strives for continuous improvement, manages resources effectively, resolves conflict through empathy, and so on. You have seen lists like it. The list is not the model.
Altitude
The model is the second axis, which I call situational complexity, and which is the thing most frameworks leave out. The same behavior means something different at a different altitude. "Organizes work using processes" at low complexity means following the playbook well and knowing when you have left it. At moderate complexity it means improvising inside the playbook when the customer does not match it. At high complexity it means writing the playbook that everyone below you follows, and then teaching it. Those are three different jobs, and a person can be excellent at the first and lost at the third — not because they are weak, but because nobody told them the ground had changed.
So every one of the twelve competencies is described three times: what it looks like at low, moderate and high complexity, what proficiency means there, and a concrete example. That gives you two things at once. You can place a role on the scale — this job is mostly moderate, with two behaviors that run high. And you can place a person against the rung they hold and the one above it. The distance between the two is the whole conversation. It is the review. It is the development plan. It is, when the distance has closed, the promotion.
Why Customer Success
I built it for Customer Success because that is where I was standing — founding and running the customer organizations of software companies inside the Vista Equity portfolio and beyond, where a Customer Success Manager is asked to apply a well-understood body of practice to familiar situations and to architect novel solutions for ambiguous problems with contentious stakeholders, often on the same afternoon. It is a moderate-to-high complexity domain by its nature. The middle of the document says exactly what each behavior looks like for a Customer Success Manager I, a CSM II, a Senior CSM and a Manager of Customer Success — a definition and an example for every rung — and closes with two job descriptions so that the ladder has a floor and a landing.
But the disciplines were never about Customer Success. The examples were. If you run engineering, or finance, or a hospital floor, keep the first eleven pages and the last eighteen and write your own ladder in the middle. The scaffolding holds.
Where to look
The last third is the part people ask me for: for every competency, the interview questions that surface it. They are mapped to the Employee Personality Profile — Criteria's EPP, the assessment that many private-equity-backed software companies run before a candidate ever meets a hiring manager, and which I came to know well inside the portfolio. A profile does not tell you whether to hire someone. It tells you where to press. If the scale that predicts conveys information clearly comes back low, you do not reject the candidate; you ask the three questions written for that behavior and listen harder than usual. Prediction is not a verdict. It is a flashlight.
What it is not
It is not a score. I have watched competency frameworks curdle into spreadsheets where a human being becomes a 3.2, and I want no part of that. The model gives you language — precise, shared, written down in advance — for a conversation that has to happen between two people in a room. Use it to make that conversation honest. Do not use it to avoid having it.
Eleven versions in its current form, most of them made in the field after a hire went wrong or right in a way the document had not predicted. A decade of use is the only credential it claims. It is the first thing on the shelf, and the shelf is the point: the models, methods and operating systems I built because I needed them, written down so you do not have to. Take it, run it, and tell me where it is wrong — that is how it got to version 1.5.2.