Windmill uses Liveblocks to make every performance management experience multiplayer, even when there’s only one user.
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Windmill is building a modern performance management platform that connects people, evidence, expectations, and perspectives. Windy, its AI agent, makes that context accessible through Slack, the web, and MCP.
Together, these sources form Windmill’s context graph, a continuously updated, cited understanding of the workforce that helps each person’s work speak for itself.
Across the product, the same information needs to stay current in very different experiences. An employee might complete a performance review conversationally with Windy in Slack. A manager and direct report might share a 1:1. A committee might adjust employee ratings together during a live calibration. Liveblocks provides the realtime foundation that keeps those experiences and participants in sync.
Deciding to make 1:1s collaborative led the Windmill team to a broader realization. Even when users typically work alone, they routinely open multiple tabs, use split screens, and continue working through unreliable internet. Multiplayer infrastructure became essential to keeping every view consistent and the experience smooth and reliable.
Having essentially a full multiplayer experience for single player use is actually super helpful from a UX perspective.Max ShawCo-founder at Windmill
For Windmill, multiplayer is more than two people editing at the same time. It also provides the reliability layer behind autosave, reconnecting, and keeping several views of the same information synchronized. Users can focus on the conversation or decision in front of them instead of managing where their work was last saved.
Work and conversations are part of the same collaborative space.
Windmill uses Liveblocks across two distinct collaborative surfaces. Shared 1:1 notes are rich-text documents built with Tiptap, while performance calibration uses a custom visual board.
For the 1:1 documents, Windmill paired Liveblocks with Tiptap to keep rich-text editing collaborative.
During performance calibrations, committees use a visual grid to review employees and move them between performance groups. Windmill built the interface specifically for that workflow, using Liveblocks Sync to keep everyone’s changes synchronized. When Windmill co-founder Max Shaw showed the live board to customers, they were amazed by what he had considered a basic collaborative feature.
Windmill’s calibration board keeps committee decisions synchronized in realtime.
Liveblocks keeps both surfaces synchronized without forcing them into a single interaction pattern.
For a small engineering team, that means more time spent on the performance management experience and less time maintaining realtime infrastructure. “We got up and running super quickly,” Max says. The ongoing maintenance has been equally straightforward.
I don’t really think about it that much, which is a good thing.Max ShawCo-founder at Windmill
Windmill approached its product as agent-first, with much of the agent experience arriving before the full web interface. Windy can help employees prepare for 1:1s, suggest material for a performance review, rewrite content, or guide someone through a task conversationally. Windmill also provides a complete visual interface for people who want granular control.
Windmill built a “Markdown++” format that lets agents work with a Markdown-like representation while the shared document remains ProseMirror under the hood. Human and agent interfaces become two ways of interacting with the same document. When an agent makes a change, it appears in the shared editor in realtime. When a person edits, the agent can work from the latest version. Max emphasized that the person must remain in control.
Even if it’s just you working with an agent, it’s multiplayer.Max ShawCo-founder at Windmill
As Windmill expands, collaboration can become part of an existing workflow as it evolves or shape a new one from the start. In either case, the team can focus on how performance decisions should work instead of keeping people, agents, tabs, and interfaces in sync.
That foundation gives Windmill room to keep developing its context graph, agent experiences, and performance workflows without rebuilding realtime behavior for every new part of the product.
