Question 1

What is Perfolio?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio is a personal career logbook and promotion engine. It connects to the tools where your work happens, tracks what you and your coding agents ship, maps that work directly against your company ladder, and generates a verified case with citations when review time arrives.

Question 2

Does Perfolio guarantee a promotion?

Accepted Answer

No software can guarantee a promotion, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling snake oil. Promotions ultimately depend on business performance, department headcount, and committee budgets that no tool can dictate. What Perfolio guarantees is that you walk into review season with an undeniable, citation-backed case: every rubric pillar cleared with real deliverables, zero recency bias, and warm sponsors in your corner. It turns promotion conversations from vague impressions into a review of hard, verified outcomes.

Question 3

How is this different from a brag doc, Notion page, or Google Doc?

Accepted Answer

Brag docs rely entirely on your memory and discipline. In practice, people forget roughly 80% of what they did six months ago, and docs quietly go stale between review cycles. Perfolio captures deliverables from read-only links as they happen, matches each item to your ladder, and keeps links back to the original commits, pull requests, and tickets. Nothing depends on midnight memory games.

Question 4

Why shouldn't I just keep a private Obsidian vault or a spreadsheet?

Accepted Answer

A private vault or spreadsheet is a fine place to store raw text, but it does not do the analytical heavy lifting. It cannot automatically pull pull-request or terminal activity, it cannot tell you which competencies on your ladder have zero evidence, it cannot track whether your key advocates have gone cold, and it leaves you with a 20-hour writing project every December. Perfolio turns your work stream into an ongoing calibration system so you are ready all year.

Question 5

Can't I just paste my raw notes into ChatGPT or Claude at review time?

Accepted Answer

ChatGPT only knows what you paste into the prompt window. It has no access to your commit history, cannot verify whether a claim actually happened, and invents plausible-sounding fluff when details are missing. Managers and promotion committees see right through AI-generated buzzwords. Perfolio produces evidence-backed packets where every claim links directly to a verified pull request, document, or milestone.

Question 6

Who is Perfolio built for?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio is designed for anyone evaluated against a written career ladder. That includes individual contributors who do outstanding technical work but hate self-promotion, managers who need to build ironclad cases for their reports, and engineers aiming for Senior, Staff, or Principal roles where cross-functional scope and influence must be proven.

Question 7

Why is tracking work harder now that engineers use AI agents?

Accepted Answer

AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot let engineers ship significantly higher volume. Because raw output is now easy for everyone, shipping lots of code no longer distinguishes you. The work that actually earns promotions is architectural judgment, scoping, technical leadership, and unblocking teams. When agents generate thousands of lines across dozens of files, tracing your actual decisions and strategic contributions gets lost in the noise.

Question 8

How does Perfolio capture work shipped with AI agents?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio tracks the actual outcomes and milestones produced during agent sessions. Read-only links to GitHub, Linear, and your terminal log merged pull requests, closed tickets, and system deployments. It notes what was delivered, the context of the decision, and the people who reviewed it, regardless of whether you wrote every line by hand or guided an agent to build it.

Question 9

How does the Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration work?

Accepted Answer

If you use AI tools that support MCP (such as Cursor or Claude Code), you can connect Perfolio's local MCP server. As you work through complex tasks, your agent can call session tools to log verified milestones, architecture decisions, and deliverables directly to your Perfolio review queue. It captures the context in real time without interrupting your development flow.

Question 10

Does Perfolio give credit to the AI agent instead of me?

Accepted Answer

No. Promotion committees do not promote AI models; they promote the engineer responsible for the system. Perfolio frames deliverables around the decisions you made, the trade-offs you evaluated, and the business impact you achieved. Capturing the full trail is what proves your technical direction and ownership.

Question 11

Can Perfolio's AI hallucinate claims, invent metrics, or fake source links?

Accepted Answer

AI can hallucinate, omit context, or make a poor suggestion. Perfolio does not automatically add an AI suggestion to your accepted career record. Proposed record changes are schema-validated and presented for you to review, edit, accept, or reject. You remain responsible for checking claims, metrics, links, and any material you share.

Question 12

Can my employer or manager see what is inside my Perfolio account?

Accepted Answer

Organization and manager surfaces cannot access your private entries, gaps, drafts, or scores. User-owned records are protected by authenticated application controls and Supabase Postgres Row-Level Security. Content you explicitly publish, submit, or share is visible to the recipients you choose.

Question 13

Does my employer own my Perfolio record under my invention assignment or employment agreement?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio does not determine the ownership of work product or override your employment agreement, company policy, or applicable law. Your Perfolio account is designed to be portable, but you are responsible for deciding what information you may enter, connect, export, or share. Do not add confidential employer material unless you are authorized to do so.

Question 14

Does Perfolio store my company's proprietary source code or diffs?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio is designed to use narrow, read-only GitHub access for work context rather than cloning repositories or storing full codebases. Connector behavior and available scopes can change, so review the connection consent screen and the current connector disclosure before authorizing access. You remain responsible for complying with your employer's policies and for avoiding unauthorized confidential material.

Question 15

What exactly do the GitHub, Slack, and document connectors read?

Accepted Answer

Connector permissions are read-only and limited by provider. GitHub reads work metadata such as merged pull requests and reviews; Slack is limited to approved public-channel activity; enabled Google Workspace capabilities may read selected calendar, document, or comment metadata. Perfolio does not request connector write access. Because enabled capabilities can change, the Privacy page is the authoritative per-connector disclosure.

Question 16

If I connect my work tools, will corporate IT or Infosec flag or block it?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio uses standard OAuth 2.0 with minimal read-only scopes that standard developer workflows use. If your company restricts third-party OAuth apps or requires IT pre-approval, you don't need to connect cloud accounts at all. You can use Perfolio manually, import markdown logs, or use our local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server directly from your machine.

Question 17

Can I use Perfolio without connecting my work cloud accounts?

Accepted Answer

Yes, completely. You can manually type logs, drop in weekly summaries, upload existing brag docs in markdown or text, or use our local terminal tools. Connecting GitHub, Slack, or Google Workspace is entirely optional.

Question 18

Is my data used to train AI models, and how is it secured?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio does not use customer content to train its own models. We use the paid tier of the Google Gemini API, under which Google says prompts and responses are not used to improve Google products. Google may retain inputs and outputs for limited periods under its terms, including for abuse monitoring and, when Google Search grounding is used, to provide grounded results. New and changed configured sensitive values are written only as AES-256-GCM ciphertext, with separate per-user data keys wrapped by Google Cloud KMS. Supabase Row-Level Security isolates user-owned records, and traffic is protected with TLS. Google's own certifications and commitments apply to Google services, and do not independently certify Perfolio. This is application-layer encryption, not end-to-end or zero-knowledge encryption.

Question 19

How does Perfolio map my work to my company's promotion ladder?

Accepted Answer

You provide your company's written leveling rubric (or select one of our standard industry benchmarks). Perfolio analyzes your accepted evidence items and maps each one to specific competencies, such as System Architecture, Operational Excellence, Mentorship, or Cross-Team Influence. It continuously calculates your coverage percentage so you can see whether you are meeting expectations or have fatal gaps.

Question 20

What if my company doesn't have a written rubric, or our ladder is under NDA?

Accepted Answer

You don't need to paste proprietary company rubrics. Perfolio comes pre-loaded with industry-standard engineering ladders across levels from Junior IC to Staff, Principal, and Engineering Management, modeled on public frameworks from companies like Dropbox, Carta, and Radford. If your company has no written ladder, Perfolio can generate a benchmark rubric customized to your role and target level.

Question 21

How does the Sponsor Warmth Radar work? Does it email or ping my coworkers?

Accepted Answer

It never emails, messages, or pings anyone. The radar is a passive, private tracking tool for your eyes only. It looks at your real collaboration signals (such as who reviewed your code, co-authored RFCs, or attended key milestone meetings) and shows you how recently your sponsors engaged with your work. If an executive sponsor hasn't seen your impact in 60 days, Perfolio flags that relationship so you know to share an update before review season.

Question 22

How does Perfolio help if my work is backend infrastructure or hard to quantify?

Accepted Answer

Not all high-impact engineering involves revenue metrics. Infrastructure cutovers, reliability improvements, technical debt reduction, and security hardenings are evaluated on risk mitigation, latency reductions, uptime preservation, and developer velocity. Perfolio prompts you to record the baseline, the intervention, and the verified operational result so your technical wins stand up to committee scrutiny.

Question 23

What do I actually hand my manager at review time?

Accepted Answer

You can export a clean, structured promotion dossier in Markdown or PDF. It organizes your achievements directly by rubric competency, includes links to every verified piece of evidence, quotes corroborating feedback from sponsors, and provides an executive summary. You can paste it directly into your company's performance management software (like Lattice, Culture Amp, or Workday) or send it to your manager as a standalone document.

Question 24

What happens to my record when I switch companies?

Accepted Answer

Your account stays with you. Because Perfolio is registered to your personal account rather than your corporate SSO, your accumulated record of achievements, metrics, and career milestones moves with you throughout your career. When you start your next role, you simply add your new company's ladder and continue building.

Question 25

If my company buys Perfolio for the whole engineering org, can my manager see my drafts?

Accepted Answer

No. Even under company-sponsored plans, organization and manager surfaces cannot access your private evidence queue, ladder gaps, drafts, or scores. Content you explicitly publish, submit, or share is visible to the recipients you choose. Perfolio and its disclosed service providers still process data as needed to operate the features you use.

Question 26

Can I export all of my data, and in what format?

Accepted Answer

Yes, at any time. You can export your entire career history as standard Markdown, structured JSON, or CSV. There is no proprietary lock-in: if you decide to leave Perfolio, every word and citation you ever recorded is yours to take.

Question 27

What happens if I cancel my subscription or if Perfolio shuts down?

Accepted Answer

If you cancel a paid plan, your account may move to an available free tier subject to the plan terms in effect at that time. Existing content is not deleted solely because you cancel a paid plan, but service availability, plan limits, and retention remain subject to the Terms of Service and applicable law. Export your data before ending your account.

Question 28

Is there a free plan, and does my data ever expire?

Accepted Answer

Perfolio currently offers a free tier with the limits shown on the Pricing page. Features, limits, and availability may change as described in the Terms of Service. You can export available account data through the service.

Question 29

What are AI units, and why aren't AI operations unlimited?

Accepted Answer

Every AI operation (parsing an activity batch, matching an entry to a complex rubric, or generating a multi-page dossier) calls advanced Google Gemini models, which charge per token. Rather than hiding model costs behind vague fair-use policies or artificial monthly subscription cliffs, we give you a transparent monthly allowance of AI units. Reading, editing, browsing, and exporting your data never consumes AI units; only new AI synthesis calls use them.

Question 30

What features require a paid subscription?

Accepted Answer

Paid plans (Plus and Pro) provide higher monthly AI unit allowances, support for multiple simultaneous ladders (such as tracking both Staff IC and Management tracks), automated scheduled background capture, and advanced dossier PDF formatting. Full tier details are available on our Pricing page.

Question 31

Why would my company pay for Perfolio? What is the actual ROI?

Accepted Answer

The return comes from three places, none of which require surveillance. First, retention: an opaque, stalled promotion path is one of the top reasons strong engineers quit, and a single regretted departure at senior level costs six figures to backfill and ramp. Giving your team a tool that keeps their growth path visible directly reduces that. Second, calibration efficiency: when engineers arrive at review with verified, dated, peer-corroborated evidence, committees spend less time reconstructing who did what and managers stop losing weekends to packet writing. Third, employer brand: 'every engineer gets a private career system' is a concrete recruiting differentiator that signals you invest in craft rather than monitoring.

Question 32

If we roll this out, can I finally see what each of my engineers is actually working on?

Accepted Answer

No, and that is deliberate. Organization-admin surfaces cannot access an employee's private entries, gaps, drafts, or scores. That boundary is enforced with application authorization and database Row-Level Security; content an employee explicitly publishes or shares remains visible to its chosen recipients. Perfolio solves career growth and review preparation, not real-time employee monitoring.

Question 33

How is this different from employee monitoring or productivity surveillance software?

Accepted Answer

It is the opposite category. Perfolio does not provide organization admins with keystroke logs, screenshots, activity scores, or access to employees' private career records. Individuals control their connections, review proposed record changes, and own a portable record. Employers may fund the benefit and administer rollout capabilities without receiving private content; employee-published updates remain visible to their selected recipients.

Question 34

What exactly does the company get to see and administer?

Accepted Answer

You administer rollout capability rather than private individual records: seat and license management, verified workplace domains, onboarding, and support. After the organization reaches five users, reporting includes aggregate and cohort-level adoption, evidence volume, coverage and readiness distributions, momentum, and gap-closure trends derived from employee activity. Private entries, evidence rows, gaps, drafts, names, and individual scores are not exposed through organization-admin surfaces; employee-published updates are visible to their chosen recipients.

Question 35

We already pay for Lattice, Culture Amp, or Workday. Why add another tool?

Accepted Answer

Those are the company's system of record for the review cycle: the forms, ratings, workflows, and HR administration. Perfolio is the employee's system of record for the evidence that feeds into them. They are complementary, not competing. Today most engineers show up to those platforms with a blank text box and a panicked memory dump; Perfolio means they arrive with a verified, rubric-mapped case they can paste straight into your existing performance software, which makes the data flowing into your system materially better.

Question 36

How does this concretely improve our calibration and reduce review bias?

Accepted Answer

Calibration quality is capped by the quality of its inputs. When decisions rest on whichever accomplishments a manager happened to remember, outcomes skew toward recency and manager proximity rather than real impact. Perfolio feeds calibration dated evidence linked to source pull requests, documents, and milestones, plus corroboration from the peers and sponsors who witnessed the work. Committees spend their time judging impact instead of arguing over what actually happened, which produces faster and more defensible decisions.

Question 37

Does connecting Perfolio create IP, legal, or data-privacy exposure for us?

Accepted Answer

The design minimizes exposure. Perfolio does not clone repositories or store source-code diffs; connectors use narrow read-only scopes; and organization-admin surfaces do not expose employees' private mail, chats, documents, or individual career records. New and changed configured sensitive values are encrypted before database storage using per-user keys wrapped by Google Cloud KMS. Contact us to discuss your security, legal, and data-processing requirements during procurement.

Question 38

Won't giving people a portable career record just make it easier for them to leave?

Accepted Answer

The evidence points the other way. People do not leave because they have a tidy record; they leave because their path feels stalled and invisible. A tool that actively maps their ladder and shows forward progress makes the next level feel reachable, which is what keeps high performers in seat. A portable record also signals that leadership is confident enough to invest in people's growth without holding their history hostage, and that confidence is itself a retention and recruiting asset.

Question 39

How do we roll it out, and how is it typically funded?

Accepted Answer

Most teams fund it out of a learning and development or growth budget, since it is a per-employee career benefit. Rollout runs through our team: you get a verified workplace domain so employees auto-join, seat and license controls, dedicated onboarding, and custom contracting, invoicing, and procurement. Reach out through the Contact Sales page or email sales@perfolio.io and we will scope it with you.

Question 40

What if more people meet the bar than we have room to promote?

Accepted Answer

Meeting the ladder has never guaranteed a promotion, and everyone knows it. It gets you into a small pool, and headcount decides the rest. Perfolio is careful about this. It never tells anyone they're owed a promotion. It shows them what they've done and where they still come up short. So when you can only move two of ten strong people, the other eight aren't left guessing. They can see where they stand and what the next step is, and that's usually the difference between someone staying to go after it and someone deciding it was politics and walking. That oversubscribed moment is where the tool earns its keep, because it's exactly when you're most likely to lose good people.

Question 41

Won't this just make more people ask for a promotion?

Accepted Answer

The people it nudges to raise their hand are the ones who can now point to real work they did, and those are people you want to keep rather than quiet down. Because it's just as honest about gaps as it is about wins, it also heads off a lot of the 'I think I'm ready' conversations that go nowhere today. You get fewer of those, more grounded ones when they do happen, and you hear about the genuinely ready people before they start interviewing somewhere else.

Question 42

Does someone hitting every criterion mean we owe them a promotion?

Accepted Answer

No, and we're deliberate about not implying it. Hitting the bar is the ticket into the conversation, not a claim on your budget. The tool stops at showing evidence. It doesn't predict or grade whether a promotion should happen, and it never hands anyone a verdict to wave in your face. That call stays yours.

Question 43

Won't people use this to argue their way through a review?

Accepted Answer

In practice it calms a review down instead of heating it up. Rather than 'I feel like I did a lot this year,' you start from work that's dated and linked back to the source. Nobody's relitigating what actually happened, so the conversation gets shorter and the time goes to what comes next.

Question 44

What if someone's evidence doesn't match their manager's read of them?

Accepted Answer

That's a gap worth catching early. If someone has a solid, verifiable case and their manager sees it differently, that disconnect was already there. It's far better to have it come up in a 1:1 while you can still do something about it than to find out the week the person resigns.

Question 45

Why should we pay for it if employees could just buy it themselves?

Accepted Answer

Plenty of them do, and that's usually how it first shows up inside a company. Paying for it is the same call you make with a learning subscription or a decent laptop. You're covering something that helps people do better, more visible work and gives them a reason to stay. One senior person not leaving pays for a lot of seats.

Question 46

How would we actually know it's working?

Accepted Answer

Two things, and neither needs us to see anyone's private data. Ask your team how many hours the last review cycle ate, then ask again a couple of cycles later and watch that number fall. And look at whether the people who actually used it are still around at renewal. If neither moved, don't renew. We'd genuinely rather you measure it than take our word for it.

Question 47

Isn't this a nice-to-have that gets cut the moment budgets tighten?

Accepted Answer

Keeping your people matters more when money's tight, not less, because you can't easily backfill and every exit hurts. We won't pretend it's an emergency purchase though. It's a growth benefit, it should be funded like one, and framed that way it holds up when someone goes hunting for things to cut.

Question 48

We pay for it, then the person leaves and takes their record with them. What did we get?

Accepted Answer

You got the years they were here doing sharper, better-documented work, and the reviews that were easier because of it. The record belonging to them is the whole reason they trust it enough to be honest in it, and that honesty is what created the value while they stayed. A record they had to leave behind is one nobody would ever have been candid in.

Question 49

Won't this just reward people who are already good at selling themselves?

Accepted Answer

It's built to do the reverse. The people who get overlooked today are often your strongest quiet ones, the folks who do the work and hate talking about it. Capturing that work as it happens puts them on the same footing as the natural self-promoters. If anything it takes some of the shine off simply being loud.

Question 50

Are the people who don't use it going to lose out at review time?

Accepted Answer

No more than they do today, when everyone's running on memory. It doesn't invent anything. It helps people recall real work they actually did. Managers should still be judging the work itself, not how neatly it was written up, and good evidence in front of them helps them do that fairly across the whole team.

Question 51

We're not only an engineering org. Does this work for anyone but engineers?

Accepted Answer

Engineering is where we started, because that's where written ladders and agent-driven work are clearest. The problem underneath, proving your impact against a rubric you're measured on, shows up for anyone who has one. The approach carries over; the connectors and examples just lead with engineering for now.

Question 52

Doesn't this cut managers out of the loop?

Accepted Answer

It makes their job lighter, not smaller. Remembering a report's wins, prepping their case, writing the packet, all of that is easier when the person kept a running record of their own. It's something a manager leans on, not something that routes around them.

Question 53

Won't everyone just start gaming the ladder?

Accepted Answer

Only if you reward noise, and we went out of our way not to. It doesn't count commits or messages or meetings. It tracks outcomes that a real person vouched for. The behavior it encourages is the one you already want, which is doing work that matters and being able to show it.

Question 54

Does this replace our 1:1s and growth conversations?

Accepted Answer

No, it feeds them. Instead of burning the first half of a 1:1 piecing together what happened, you both start from the same honest picture and spend the time on direction and unblocking. It gives those conversations something real to stand on.

Question 55

Can we just require the whole team to use it?

Accepted Answer

You can offer it to everyone, but forcing it tends to backfire. What makes it useful is people being honest in it, logging the gaps and the relationships that have gone cold, and they only do that when it's genuinely theirs and private. Mandate it and you get tidy-looking theater instead of the real picture.

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