Nala

About NALA

NALA is the global multi-currency account for the next billion.

NALA is built for people who live across borders, empowering people to receive, hold, convert and send money fast, with low, transparent fees. Over a million customers. Billions moved. Two-time Forbes Fintech 50.

NALA has raised over $50M, backed by some of the world’s best investors including Y Combinator, Accel and Acrew Capital, alongside founders of Robinhood, Monzo, Klarna, Kalshi, Deel and Chime.

The problem

NALA’s team is spread across 18 countries with hubs in London and Nairobi, with 80+ employees between them. A year of work lived in Slack threads, Linear tickets, and pull requests, and at review time everyone was expected to reconstruct it from memory. The process was heavy on top of that: long question sets, a dense list of skills to score against, and none of it living where people actually worked.

That left two different problems for two different groups. For ICs, reviews meant a blank page and hours of recall. For the people running them, the gap was participation. Engagement across 1:1s, feedback, and reviews was lower than the team wanted. Managers had little visibility into who was actually keeping up with their 1:1s or staying engaged with the process. And every formal review cycle still leaned on managers to draft from scratch, by hand.

What Windmill changed

With Windmill, NALA moved self and peer reviews into Slack, where the team already worked, and opened each review with an AI summary of what that person had actually shipped over the year. The blank page problem disappeared, and so did the busywork of digging through months of work history.

For managers, those same summaries took on the hardest part of the job: remembering what every direct report had done across a full year.

It made it a lot easier to recollect what my directs worked on, and the AI summaries made it quicker to write my feedback. Windmill is 🔥.

- Engineering Manager at NALA

Fewer, sharper questions kept the cycle light, and a more transparent calibration step gave the people running reviews a clearer, shared view of the whole org.

That calibration step came with a pre-read that surfaced where ratings didn’t match the narrative before a session even started, an audit trail whenever a rating moved, and a view of how each manager rated relative to the company average, the kind of cross-team visibility that’s even harder to get when your managers are spread across over a dozen countries.

What stood out

~90% of employees who could compare this cycle to past ones preferred Windmill to their previous systems, at a company where nearly half the team are engineers, historically the hardest audience for any performance tool. The cycle also handed the team 537 hours back, time that used to go into reconstructing a year of work from memory.

But the more telling result was who agreed, and why. Leadership and the rest of the team usually want different things from a review process — and here, both described the same rollout as a win, for their own reasons.

The team read it as time back and a process that finally respected it:

That was the best performance review I’ve had.

- Engineer at NALA

Leadership read it as alignment and visibility they hadn’t had across a distributed org. For NALA’s Head of People, Owen Fleming, that landed hardest in calibration: seeing each manager’s rating patterns and the spread across teams laid out in one place.

"I couldn't be a bigger fan of Windmill, and a bunch of managers at the org have said this is the best performance cycle they've been involved in. Some of them were very wary initially that I was getting rid of [our previous tool]. For them to come full circle and be like, 'hey, no, this is awesome' is a testament to the product you have."

Owen Fleming

Head of People

That’s what makes NALA’s story stand out: the same cycle that gave individual contributors their time back gave leaders a clearer, more aligned view of the whole company. One tool solved two problems that normally pull in opposite directions.