Kona provides tailored coaching and enablement to managers in native workflows like Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet helping improve critical manager effectiveness skills that increase performance, engagement, and retention
15Five, the AI-driven performance management platform trusted by thousands of organizations, has officially launched Kona by 15Five during its flagship virtual event, Next. The launch comes on the heels of 15Five’s acquisition of Kona earlier this year, reinforcing the company’s commitment to transforming manager effectiveness through intelligent enablement solutions.
Kona by 15Five is an AI-powered coaching tool designed specifically for people managers. Integrated directly into virtual meetings, Kona delivers real-time, tailored coaching while respecting individual privacy. Drawing from data within the 15Five platform—including performance reviews, engagement surveys, and contextual insights developed over time—Kona helps managers build essential leadership capabilities. Whether it’s facilitating more impactful meetings or navigating tough conversations, Kona equips managers to improve continuously and measurably.
Kona also tracks behavioral shifts to give HR leaders a dynamic view of which managerial interventions are producing results and where additional support is needed.
The importance of effective management is underscored by recent findings from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, which reveals that global employee engagement dropped to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the steepest decline. Gallup data also attributes a 70% variance in team engagement to the quality of management—highlighting the critical role managers play in organizational health and performance.
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“HR leaders know that managers are the critical lynchpin for maximum employee performance, engagement and retention,” said Jim Morrisroe, 15Five’s CEO. “Failing to equip them with personalized enablement tools and training minimizes the role they play in increasing performance, engagement, and retention on their teams to drive organizational success. Kona enables organizations to deploy personalized manager enablement at scale, helping HR teams further unlock the impact of manager effectiveness, and early adopters have already seen meaningful results in this regard.”
“As a growing company, we’re promoting rockstar individual contributors into management roles, but we can’t scale traditional coaching fast enough,” said Jenn Sobocinski, Senior Director of People and Culture at ReUp Education, an early adopter of Kona. “Kona is helping us support those new managers in real time, with feedback that helps them adjust and grow immediately. It’s also changed how I run my own meetings. This kind of continuous, in-the-flow coaching is exactly what fast-growing companies need.”
“We’ve heard CHROs and CEOs clearly: they need managers to be the drivers of business success,” said Sid Pandiya, 15Five’s General Manager of Manager Products and former CEO of Kona. “But being a manager is more complicated than ever before. Instead of one-size-fits-all solutions that HR hopes will work, 15Five’s manager products are personalized based on data such as performance reviews, engagement surveys, and manager effectiveness measurements, so everyone can focus on what matters most. Even in the early days of building Kona by 15Five, we’ve seen how personalization powered by data, combined with continuous measurement, enables HR to see where efforts are working and where they need to double down.”
With Kona now integrated into its platform, 15Five further strengthens its ability to help HR leaders drive organizational impact. Its comprehensive suite includes performance reviews, engagement surveys, onboarding assessments, eNPS, and manager effectiveness tools—each designed to generate actionable insights and power smarter, data-backed decisions.
