Modern workplaces are evolving rapidly, and organizations are rethinking how they manage performance, engagement, and employee growth. Traditional annual reviews often fail to capture real-time contributions, leaving managers and HR teams with fragmented insights while burning out and frustrating employees.
This is where Bora Unlu saw a glaring need for a software solution that integrates reviews, feedback, recognition, goal-setting, and development directly into employees’ daily workflow, making performance management continuous, contextual, and actionable.
Deeply embedded in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, Teamflect empowers organizations to streamline HR processes while improving adoption and engagement.
From reaching customers in 50 countries to navigating the balance between flexibility and simplicity, Bora Unlu, co-founder & CEO of Teamflect, offers a candid look at what it takes to build an HR software that people actually use.
Read the full interview to learn more about this transformative approach.
To begin, what inspired you to build Teamflect, and which specific challenges in employee engagement or performance management were you most determined to address?
Teamflect was born from a simple observation: there was a serious disconnect between the work employees were doing every day and the way they were evaluated at the end of a review cycle.
I had seen this firsthand. When performance management is separated from actual work, employees feel unseen, managers make decisions with incomplete context, and HR teams are forced to run important processes with stale or fragmented information. That creates frustration for employees and bad decisions for companies.
We wanted to build a performance management platform that brings goals, feedback, recognition, 1-on-1s, reviews, and development closer to the flow of work.
The aim was not only to make HR processes easier, but to make performance conversations more continuous, more accurate, and more useful for everyone involved.
Since launching Teamflect, how has your vision for performance management evolved, particularly as organizations embrace continuous feedback, OKRs, and more employee-centric cultures?
Our vision has become more continuous and more contextual over time.
Companies are increasingly moving away from treating performance reviews as a once-a-year administrative event. They want ongoing feedback, clearer goals, better manager-employee conversations, and a stronger connection between day-to-day work and long-term development.
AI will accelerate this shift. The hard part of continuous performance management has always been the effort required to collect, organize, and interpret information. AI can help managers and HR teams prepare better, identify patterns earlier, and turn scattered performance signals into useful insights.
For Teamflect, the goal is to collect the right performance data points throughout the year and present them to HR teams, managers, and employees in a way that is insightful, digestible, and fair.
The HR technology space is highly competitive. What differentiates Teamflect from other performance management solutions, especially those operating outside the Microsoft ecosystem?
Teamflect’s biggest differentiator is that it is built deeply inside the Microsoft ecosystem, especially Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.
Continuous performance management only works if people actually use the system. The problem with many HR tools is that they create extra work. Employees and managers are asked to go somewhere else, remember another process, and manually record things that already happened in their real workflow.
Teamflect solves this by bringing performance management to where people already collaborate. Feedback, recognition, goals, reviews, surveys, and 1-on-1s become part of the daily Microsoft Teams experience instead of a separate HR ritual. That makes adoption easier and helps organizations capture more relevant performance context throughout the year.
Teamflect is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams. How has this strategic alignment influenced your product adoption, growth trajectory, and overall go-to-market strategy?
The Microsoft ecosystem has been central to our growth from the beginning.
When we first launched, Microsoft Teams was entering a major growth period, and being available where customers were already working helped us reach our first users much faster. The Microsoft AppSource marketplace also became an important discovery channel and helped us build early credibility.
Today, the same logic is becoming even more important with Microsoft 365 Copilot and the broader shift toward AI-assisted work. Because Teamflect already sits inside the Microsoft environment, we can build performance workflows that feel natural to Microsoft-centered organizations instead of asking them to adopt another disconnected system.
The partnership also matters from a trust perspective. HR software handles sensitive employee data, so customers care deeply about security, governance, and vendor credibility. Being aligned with Microsoft helps us meet those expectations more effectively.
Could you elaborate on Teamflect’s business model and your primary go-to-market approach? Which channels or strategies have proven most effective in driving customer acquisition and adoption?
Teamflect is a subscription-based SaaS platform for organizations that want performance management, employee engagement, and talent workflows inside Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.
Microsoft AppSource was the initial growth engine for us and continues to be an important channel. It gave us visibility at the exact moment when many companies were standardizing work around Microsoft Teams.
Since then, we have invested heavily in educational content, SEO, blog content, YouTube, product-led adoption, and partnerships. HR buyers often research carefully before making a decision, so useful content has been an important part of how we build trust and help customers understand what modern performance management can look like.
Partnerships are also becoming a larger part of our strategy. Teamflect sits at the intersection of performance management, employee engagement, Microsoft 365, and HR systems of record, so we see strong value in building an ecosystem around that position.
What have been some of the most significant challenges you’ve encountered while scaling Teamflect across product development, operations, or customer acquisition, and how have you navigated them?
One of the biggest challenges is that every organization has its own performance management philosophy.
Some companies are very OKR-driven. Some focus on competencies. Some care deeply about 1-on-1s and manager habits. Others are redesigning their review process, recognition program, or development framework. There is no single universal way to run performance management well.
The product challenge is to support that flexibility without making the platform feel complex. We have had to build Teamflect so organizations can adapt it to their processes, while still making it simple enough for HR teams to launch and for managers and employees to use regularly.
That balance between configurability and usability is one of the hardest parts of building HR software at scale.
How do you systematically gather and incorporate user feedback into your product roadmap? Could you share an example where customer insights directly informed a key feature or product enhancement?
Customer feedback is one of the main reasons Teamflect has evolved the way it has.
We maintain a public roadmap and customer voice board where users can submit ideas, vote, and discuss feedback. In addition to that, we speak with customers proactively through onboarding, support, customer success conversations, and product discovery calls.
It is difficult to point to only one example because so much of the product has been shaped by customers. Many of our workflows around reviews, goals, recognition, 1-on-1s, surveys, and reporting have been improved directly through customer feedback.
The important principle for us is not to treat feedback as a list of feature requests. We try to understand the underlying workflow problem: what HR is trying to achieve, where managers are getting stuck, and what would make the process easier for employees.
What recent milestones or achievements has Teamflect reached that you are particularly proud of?
One recent milestone we are very proud of is reaching customers in our 50th country.
For us, that is more than a geographic achievement. It shows that the performance management problems we are solving are not limited to one market or one type of company. Organizations everywhere are trying to make goals, feedback, recognition, reviews, and manager conversations more effective.
Our next ambition is simple: keep expanding that reach and continue building a product that works for organizations across different countries, industries, and cultures.
From your perspective, how do you define and measure success, not only in terms of business growth but also in the tangible impact Teamflect delivers to organizations and their employees?
Business growth matters, but the most important success signal for us is whether people are actually using Teamflect and getting value from it.
In HR technology, adoption is everything. A performance management platform can look powerful on paper, but if managers and employees do not use it, it will not change how the organization works.
We look closely at user happiness, usage rates, customer feedback, retention, and the quality of outcomes customers describe. When a customer tells us Teamflect helped them run reviews more effectively, improve manager conversations, align teams around goals, or make employees feel more recognized, that is the kind of success we care about most.
With trends such as AI in HR, remote work, and employee experience gaining prominence, how do you see the future of performance management evolving?
Performance management will become more important in times to come, not less.
Work is becoming faster, more distributed, and more AI-assisted. In that environment, organizations will need better ways to understand contribution, alignment, development, and performance. The old model of relying on occasional reviews and fragmented manager memory will not be enough.
AI will be especially useful in helping HR teams and managers analyze performance data, prepare for conversations, identify risks earlier, and surface timely insights. But AI alone is not the answer. It needs the right workflow context, the right permissions, and the right human judgment around it.
The future of performance management will be more continuous, more data-informed, and more embedded in the tools where work actually happens.
Looking ahead, what are your long-term strategic goals for Teamflect over the next three to five years? Are there any upcoming innovations or expansions you can share with us?
Our long-term goal is to become the go-to HR and performance management platform for organizations that work in the Microsoft ecosystem.
That means deepening our core performance management capabilities and expanding into adjacent HR areas where we can create value for Microsoft-centered companies, such as learning, development, compensation-related workflows, and broader employee experience use cases.
We will also continue to invest heavily in AI. We are seeing strong feedback and promising use cases around our AI agent capabilities, especially where AI can help managers and HR teams act on performance context instead of simply generating text.
At the same time, we want to deepen our integrations with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the broader Microsoft work environment. We believe the next generation of HR software will be much more embedded, contextual, and intelligent than traditional standalone platforms.
Finally, what advice would you offer to aspiring entrepreneurs building SaaS products in the HR technology or productivity space today?
HR technology is a challenging space, but it is also a very durable one.
People, performance, culture, and productivity will always be central to how companies operate. That means organizations will continue to invest in tools that help them hire, develop, engage, evaluate, and retain talent.
At the same time, the space is competitive because the problems are valuable.
My advice is to be very clear about the specific workflow you are improving and the behavior change your product requires. In HR and productivity software, the best product is not always the one with the longest feature list. It is often the one that fits naturally into how people already work and makes an important process easier to actually follow.
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