The framework
There's a version of you that only exists in other people.
You can't see it and you've never read it. It's assembled out of a thousand small observations by people who work beside you every day and have never once been asked to write any of it down.
This is the map we use to ask.
Our principles
Three principles. Everything else follows from them.
- Nobody rates anyone.Every question names a person instead of scoring one. Ratings drift — your four out of five isn't mine — and comparisons don't. It's also why answering costs three seconds instead of thirty.
- Only the people who would know.Questions about you go to the people you actually work with, worked out from the channels you share. Praise from someone who's never worked with you isn't worth collecting.
- There is nothing bad to collect.Every question asks who's good at something. No negative questions. We'd rather tell you what you're good at, so you can start doing it on purpose.
How it builds up
Nothing here starts with a framework. It ends with one.
Every word on your profile can be walked back to one moment somebody witnessed. This is the whole climb.
- A moment.Someone notices you did something well. This happens constantly, and almost none of it ever gets said out loud.
- A signal.Instead of scoring you, they pick your name out of four. Three seconds, one clean unit, nothing that can be inflated.
- A claim.Eight of those land on the same thing — and never fewer than three different people among them. One person saying it eight times is still one person.
- A facet.Every claim has exactly one home. Twelve of them, each a specific thing people say, like Level Head rather than “good under stress.”
- A pillar.Four of those, and they aren't ours to invent.
- A framework.One that can be wrong. It makes four predictions about what we should find as more people use it; one is already confirmed in our own data, and we're on the hook for the rest.
The map
Everything anyone notices about how you work sits in one of four.
Four isn't a tidy number we landed on. For fifty years, research into how people read each other keeps arriving at the same two questions underneath every impression: is this person effective, and is this person good to us. Those two are the evidence. Splitting each one is ours.
In the work
Was the excellence in the work itself?
Delivery
Did the work get done?
How you get things done, and get them right.
- Execution
- Tough Calls
- Untangling
Thinking
Did the work get clearer?
How you work a problem, and see past it.
- Sharp Eye
- Big Picture
- Always Learning
With people
Or in what happened between people?
Connection
Did people move together?
How work moves when you're working with people.
- Making It Clear
- First to Help
- Getting Alignment
Multiplier
Did someone come away better?
How people are better for having worked with you.
- Feedback That Lands
- Making Room
- Level Head
There is no fifth. A fifth would have to be someone being good at their job in a way that helped neither the work nor the people in it — and there is no such moment to witness.
These are kinds of moment, not types of people. Two facets inside the same pillar can pull in opposite directions — and in our own data they do. The people who stay steady when it all goes wrong and the people who make sure everyone is included are, mostly, not the same people.
Nobody fills all four. Which ones fill in, and which stay quiet, is the part that's actually about you.
The twelve
Twelve things people notice.
This is the whole vocabulary — everything kudoSnap can ever tell you about how you work. Not qualities you claim. Moments somebody watched.
None of these are hidden from you because they're private. They're hidden because of where you're standing — the part of you that other people can see is the one pane of self-knowledge somebody else has to open for you.
Turn one over to see what it would mean if it were yours.
Any of these can become a card, and it takes eight of the same thing from at least three different people. Nobody holds more than three at once — and rarely the three they would have picked.
The questions
Sixty of them, and each one belongs to exactly one facet.
“Who do you trust most to hit a deadline?”
Execution
“Who's the person you want reviewing it before it goes out?”
Sharp Eye
“Who explains complex things the clearest?”
Making It Clear
“Who makes new people feel welcome?”
Making Room
Nobody is asked to rate anything. Four names arrive and you pick one, and the facet is simply where that question lives. Eight answers have to land on the same one before it becomes anything at all.
All sixty, in the facets they feed — nothing held back, including the ones that count for nothing.
Wildcards
Not everything we ask is about work.
- Who would you want next to you in a zombie apocalypse?
- Who has the most infectious laugh?
- Who makes Slack threads actually fun to read?
- Who would absolutely crush it on a reality TV show?
- Who gives the best snack recommendations?
- Who would you road-trip cross-country with?
About one in ten. They never touch a facet, never shape a card, and nothing they collect goes anywhere near your profile.
They exist because a week of nothing but competence is a long week.
What it doesn't do
Three things this is not.
Not a personality test.
Picking names tells you who stands out at something. It can't order everyone in the middle, and it never claims to describe who you are — only how you're seen.
Not evaluation data.
Nothing here is built to reach a review. You can only be picked in polls you appear in, so a count is not a ranking and there is no way to turn one into one.
Not the whole picture.
Silence is never read as its opposite. A facet with nothing in it means nobody has said it yet — not that it isn't true of you.
The reasoning and the reading behind all of this is written down, including the parts that don't work in our favour — sixteen sources, and what each one doesn't prove.
Where you'd land
Pick the three you think are yours.
Almost everyone gets this wrong, and the reason is the whole point. The ones you would name are the ones you work at. The ones people actually say about you are usually the ones that cost you nothing — which is exactly why you can't see them, and why nobody has ever thought to mention them.
Twelve facets. Three of them are yours. There is one way to find out which.