David González is Head of People Performance & Growth who joined Snowflake to build its performance architecture after the company came out of hypergrowth. David holds a PhD in Performance Improvement and started his career in advertising, working on Coca-Cola, Bud Light, and Procter brands before shifting into People work through his "Brand ME" project and the Center for Creative Leadership. His central argument in this episode: use AI to automate the administrative core of HR and redeploy People professionals as "performance architects" — executive coaches and strategic truth-tellers who handle judgment, politics, and behavioral change.

For People leaders at 100–1,500 person scaleups, González targets the exact friction of this stage: data scattered across the company, multiple inconsistent performance scales, and siloed, subjective decisions. He describes arriving at Snowflake to find "an untended garden" and walks through the Performance Excellence Architecture he built to replace it.

• Fragmented performance data: At Snowflake, David González found data scattered across the company with multiple performance scales and inconsistent processes, forcing a move from decentralized, subjective decisions to enterprise-wide, data-driven insights.
• Administrative burden on people leaders: David explains how a quarterly performance cadence created too much administrative load, and how removing it accidentally opened a coverage gap in manager-employee touchpoints.
• Scaling without killing startup culture: David addresses leadership fear that adding process slows a high-growth company, arguing for methodical, minimal infrastructure introduced in tight partnership with the executive team.

1. Start from the vision, not the tool: Build top-down — define your ethos, then design principles, then measurement tools. David structured it at Snowflake around four North Stars: clarity, accountability, advancement, and rewards.
2. Let employees tell you where to start: David used annual engagement and pulse survey data to identify that employees wanted clearer performance measurement and career guidance, which then became a company OKR.
3. Measure both the "what" and the "how": David introduced a unified five-point look-back scale that embeds two "how" questions into a weighted rating, reducing bias and evaluating every employee consistently across functions.

• How do I make data-driven People decisions when my company is too small to have much data? David González advises running a focused engagement survey with questions relevant to your company, then using AI interview tools that now deliver fast, low-cost qualitative data — even a 50-person startup can interview its leadership team and managers to build a usable data set.
• How do I add HR structure without slowing down our startup culture? David recommends being surgical and methodical, introducing only infrastructure whose value you can prove with data, and partnering closely with the executive team while iterating over time rather than overlaying heavy process at once.
• What will HR professionals do once AI handles the admin? According to David González, People professionals become performance architects — extreme executive coaches skilled in conflict resolution, systemic influence, and systems thinking who provide the human judgment, context, and body-language reading that AI cannot replicate.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Connect with David González on LinkedIn