Summary
Chronosphere is the observability platform built for control in the modern, containerized world, empowers customers to focus on the data and insights that matter, helping reduce data complexity, optimize costs, and remediate issues faster.
As Chronosphere scaled rapidly and navigated a time-sensitive acquisition—the leadership team faced a familiar executive challenge: how to make fast, global compensation decisions without sacrificing rigor, consistency, or control.
With a lean People function and increasing complexity across geographies, roles, and equity programs, compensation risked becoming a bottleneck to growth. The question wasn’t how to run a compensation cycle—it was how to turn compensation into a system leaders could trust in real time.
By implementing Compensation Planning, Market Pricing, and Team View from Pave, Chronosphere built a data-driven compensation system that supports executive decision making at every stage of growth, from routine planning cycles to acquisition diligence under tight timelines.
Key Wins
- Reduced compensation planning cycles from two months to three weeks
- Enabled managers to make informed, confident decisions, resulting in minimal post-cycle escalations
- Gained real-time and historical visibility into spend, equity, and market alignment across each employee’s full compensation journey—eliminating manual spreadsheet analysis
- Delivered clean, executive-ready compensation data during a time-sensitive acquisition diligence process
- Designed and implemented compensation bands for employees across 19 countries in weeks, not months
"[Pave] scales decision quality, whether you’re supporting hundreds of employees or thousands."
- Trisha Feldman, Head of Compensation and People Analytics at Chronosphere
Setting the Scene
When Trisha Feldman, Head of Compensation and People Analytics, joined Chronosphere, the company was scaling quickly. Hiring velocity was high, organizational complexity was increasing, and compensation decisions needed to be made faster and with greater confidence.
At the same time, the People team was operating with limited bandwidth. Compensation data lived in spreadsheets, processes were manual, and answering even basic questions about pay, equity, or budget impact required significant time and effort.
Trisha’s focus wasn’t simply to make compensation faster; it was to build a system that preserved decision quality while scaling speed, without adding unnecessary headcount.
Fortunately, Chronosphere was already in the process of implementing Pave.
Expediting Compensation Planning
Before Pave, each compensation cycle took roughly two months. Gathering data, aggregating recommendations, validating decisions, and communicating outcomes was manual, fragmented, and time-consuming.
By moving away from spreadsheets and onto Compensation Planning from Pave, Trisha centralized data, standardized logic, and created a single source of truth for managers and leaders. The result: compensation cycles were reduced from two months to three weeks.
“My north star for a compensation cycle was ‘no noise,’” said Trisha. “If managers understand the rules, the tradeoffs, and the timelines upfront, compensation stops being reactive and becomes a tool for aligning incentives with what the company is trying to achieve.”
Pave enabled clear, upfront communication of methodology, budgets, and decision frameworks—eliminating ambiguity, last-minute churn, and post-cycle confusion.
After the cycle, one Product leader joked that compensation had become “boring” in the best possible way. Decisions were predictable, information was accessible, and surprises were eliminated. When the system worked, execution became simpler and more consistent.
Measuring Compensation Planning Impact
With the right infrastructure in place, compensation planning shifted from executing a process to actively informing business decisions.
Using Pave, Trisha monitors cycle progress, budget utilization, and decision patterns across departments in real time. Pave’s tools like Cycle Insights allow the team to identify risks early, understand tradeoffs before decisions are finalized, and course-correct during the cycle—rather than reacting after the fact.
“Being able to assess the impact of a compensation cycle before decisions are finalized fundamentally changes how you operate,” Trisha explained. “It allows you to manage risk, ensure consistency, and make better decisions for the business—not just report on them afterward.”
Trisha also relies on insights from Pave Data Lab to pressure-test broader organizational questions, including:
- How many direct reports should a manager have?
- How should bonuses be structured?
- What’s the right number of job levels?
These benchmarks help inform decisions and validate those decisions when discussing tradeoffs with the executive team.
Supporting an Acquisition With Speed & Confidence
As Chronosphere continued to grow, the company acquired a business with employees across 19 countries. Overnight, Trisha’s scope expanded from managing compensation in a handful of geographies to supporting a truly global workforce.
The acquisition introduced immediate, high-stakes questions: how to align two compensation philosophies, establish fair and consistent pay bands, and deliver clear answers to leadership under tight diligence timelines.
During this period, compensation data shifted from an operational input to a critical executive and diligence requirement.
Using Pave’s Market Pricing and Compensation Planning tools, Trisha evaluated benchmarks, modeled geographic differentials, and applied them consistently across compensation tiers in minutes rather than weeks. This allowed Chronosphere to move quickly without compromising rigor or introducing downstream risk.
“In an acquisition, speed matters—but so does being right. Pave let us move fast without guessing.”
- Trisha Feldman, Head of Compensation and People Analytics at Chronosphere
Beyond band design, Trisha used Pave to clearly communicate outcomes to leaders, managers, and employees that helped newly integrated teams understand where they sat within ranges during a period of significant change.
“Rolling out compensation bands is only part of the work,” she added. “Communicating clearly and confidently is just as critical—and having the data readily available makes that possible.”
Looking Ahead
Pave reshaped how Trisha approaches compensation strategy at Chronosphere. Compensation planning is no longer centered on managing a cycle. Instead, it’s directly connected to how the business makes decisions about growth, spend, and organizational design.
As Chronosphere continues to scale, Pave provides the foundation to operate with consistency and confidence across geographies, growth stages, and moments of heightened complexity.
“When compensation data is clean, current, and trusted, leaders make better decisions faster,” said Trisha. “Pave moves compensation teams beyond process management and into direct support of business outcomes. It scales decision quality whether you’re supporting hundreds of employees or thousands.
