Designing high-performance porous electrodes is the key to next-generation electrochemical energy devices. Current machine-learning-based electrode design strategies are mainly orientated toward physical properties; however, the electrochemical performance is the ultimate design objective. Performance-orientated electrode design is challenging because the current data driven approaches do not accurately extract high-dimensional features in complex multiphase microstructures. Herein, this work reports a novel performance-informed deep learning framework, termed π learning, which enables performance-informed microstructure generation, toward overall performance prediction of candidate electrodes by adding most relevant physical features into the learning process. This is achieved by integrating physics-informed generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and with advanced multi-physics, multi-scale modeling of 3D porous electrodes. This work demonstrates the advantages of π learning by employing two popular design philosophies: forward and inverse designs, for the design of solid oxide fuel cells electrodes. π learning thus has the potential to unlock performance-driven learning in the design of next generation porous electrodes for advanced electrochemical energy devices such as fuel cells and batteries.