When I was writing Built for People I have to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. “Writing a book is like writing ten blogs” was something that crossed my mind quite a few times in the early days (very foolish). It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that writing a book is a lot more difficult than writing 10 blogs, or, honestly, maybe even more challenging than writing one-hundred blogs. While I was writing Built for People there were many chapters, ideas, tangents, interviews, thoughts, and paragraphs that were sent to the proverbial scrap heap, very likely never to be seen again. However, one idea that kept swirling around my head was the idea of the relationship with purpose and the employment “products” we’re building, particularly in modern capitalism and the strange times we found ourselves in at the time of Built for People‘s publication in 2023.

The years surrounding 2021 exposed a profound tension between capitalism and purpose that became impossible to ignore. As the pandemic forced a global reckoning with work, we witnessed a striking dissonance: companies proclaimed their commitment to purpose and employee wellbeing while simultaneously conducting mass layoffs via video calls. Industry giants spoke eloquently about their world-changing missions in the same breath as they announced record profits amid widespread hurt and anguish. Many of us in Management, HR and People Operations found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of crafting purpose statements by morning and processing terminations by afternoon. This era laid bare a fundamental contradiction at the heart of our modern workplace narrative – the expectation that profit-driven entities could authentically prioritize purpose when economic pressures mounted. As millions reassessed their relationship with work during the Great Resignation, it became clear that the corporate purpose playbook wasn’t just failing; it was actively breeding cynicism. Employees weren’t rejecting purpose itself; they were rejecting the inauthenticity of company purpose as a corporate performance.

I was reminded of Studs Terkel’s profound observation from his groundbreaking oral history Working: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor.” Terkel captured this truth in 1974, yet half a century later, we’re still struggling to reconcile this fundamental human need with the realities of modern capitalism. The pandemic didn’t create this tension, it merely accelerated and exposed what was already there, forcing us to confront questions we’d been avoiding about the true nature of meaning in work.

My journey into these questions wasn’t purely academic. Growing up in rural Queensland, Australia my father drove trucks across Australia’s vast landscapes, and my mother gradually climbed from secretarial work to professional roles in the mining industry. For them, and for many of the communities I’ve been part of, work wasn’t just about paychecks, it was about what it could do for our family, contribution, and their place in the world. Yet somewhere along the way, as work became more abstract, more digital, more disconnected from tangible outcomes, I felt I had witnessed a loss of something essential about this relationship. It’s hard for me to reconcile this personal evolution at times, as I feel incredibly privileged to live a life in the city I live in, doing work that I find incredibly intellectually challenging, while remembering where I came from and the world of work I grew up understanding. There is a dignity in working close to the land, close to your customers, and close to your community; but as the world has evolved and globalised, I’ve found myself asking questions my parents perhaps never asked themselves. I’m not sure if my parents would have found the same kinds of dissatisfaction those I interviewed for this book have sometimes felt had my parents lived similar lives, or even if my folks asked themselves the same kinds of questions in silence but never out loud.

These nagging thoughts eventually became this book, or at least, the ideas behind this book. There was still so much more work to do. As I spoke with more leaders, employees, and organisations about building better workplaces, I kept encountering the same paradox: companies investing heavily in purpose initiatives that employees viewed with increasing cynicism. Something wasn’t adding up. The more organisations pushed purpose from the top down, the more purpose seemed to evaporate from the bottom up.

The research process itself has been transformative. I’ve had conversations with people across industries and roles, from C-suite executives to frontline workers, from people who’d found deep fulfilment in their careers, to those who’d walked away entirely. What struck me was the universality of the hunger for meaning, regardless of position or pay grade. The paths to finding this commitment varied wildly, often contradicting the neat narratives presented in leadership books and corporate purpose statements I’d ‘grown up’ with in the professional sense. There were many times I left an interview with more questions than answers, and many more times I found myself quite tired of hearing my own internal narrative as I attempted to unpick their answers, as much for you as a reader as for myself as an author and practitioner. When I began interviewing people about their relationship with purpose at work, I expected to find clear patterns (foolish, yet again — you’d think I would learn!) — certain industries or roles that naturally provided more meaning, or specific purpose initiatives that consistently succeeded. Instead, I discovered something far more complex and personal. For some, purpose came through deep connection with colleagues; for others, through mastery of a craft; for still others, through alignment with organisational mission. There was no one-size-fits-all approach, no magic purpose statement or framework that could transform work for everyone.

What began as an exploration of a relatively “simple” theme (foolish, foolish!) soon revealed itself as a much deeper question about our fundamental relationship with work. I discovered that the way we’ve been thinking about purpose—as something companies can manufacture and deliver to employees—was fundamentally flawed. This realization led me down unexpected paths, from the history of how our relationship with work has evolved over centuries to cutting-edge research on meaning-making in the modern workplace.

The timing of this research and writing coincided with another profound shift in how we think about work: the emergence of sophisticated AI systems capable of performing increasingly complex knowledge, creative, and analytical work. As these technologies force us to reconsider what makes human work unique and valuable, the question of purpose takes on new urgency. If machines can write code, analyze data, and even generate creative content, what distinctive value do humans bring? This technological revolution offers both challenge and opportunity—pushing us to dig deeper into what truly makes work meaningful beyond mere productivity or output.

Like both books I’ve now written (and one of the most joyful and enlightening parts of the Author’s Journey), writing this book has reshaped my own thinking about purpose at work, and without sounding too grandiose, has changed some of my thinking about the path of my own life. Where I once saw purpose as a product to be optimised, I now understand it as a collective journey to be undertaken. Where I once focused primarily on how companies could articulate purpose better, I now see the critical importance of creating spaces where purpose can be discovered collectively.

This shift in perspective hasn’t made me any less passionate about building great workplace experiences. If anything, it’s deepened my conviction that the employee experience matters enormously. But it’s changed how I think about that experience; less as something designed for employees and more as something created with them.

In many ways, this book is the natural evolution of the ideas I explored in Built for People. It takes the product mindset I advocated there and extends it to address one of the most complex ‘problem-statements’ in the modern workplace: how can we feel and develop authentic purpose in a world increasingly skeptical of corporate purpose-washing.

The structure of this book reflects this journey. We begin by exploring how our relationship with work has evolved historically, examining the forces that shaped our current expectations about purpose. We then dive into the modern workplace, revealing both the promise and pitfalls of corporate purpose initiatives. Next, we explore the crossroads many of us face in our careers, as we reconsider and sometimes reinvent our relationship with work. Finally, we move toward practical approaches for creating environments where authentic purpose can flourish—not through prescription, but through co-creation.

Wendell Berry reminds us that “The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think,” the field still needs tending, the community still needs feeding. Meaning in work is found when it serves the life of the world. Throughout this exploration, I’ve been continually drawn back to this essential truth: purpose emerges most naturally when we connect our daily efforts to the lives they touch and the communities they serve. In our increasingly complex and abstract economy, finding these connections requires new approaches, new structures, and new conversations. Authenticity is a word that has appeared over and over. This desire for authentic purpose reflects a fundamental human need to align our external actions with our internal values—to feel that what we do reflects who we are and why we are here on this earth. Yet authenticity in the workplace is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, particularly because of the inherent power dynamics that structure our professional relationships. For leaders, the challenge is uniquely complex. They’re caught in a paradox: expected to be vulnerable and authentic while simultaneously maintaining the authority and certainty their roles demand. Several executives I interviewed described feeling trapped in a performance, worried that showing genuine doubt or uncertainty might undermine their effectiveness or even their position. I myself have felt the pull of authenticity and career, something I know is felt more acutely in folks from marginalised communities or who don’t see themselves frequently represented. This creates a particular kind of organisational doublespeak, where authenticity is celebrated in corporate values statements but often subtly punished in practice. Employees quickly learn to perform a carefully calibrated version of “authenticity” that doesn’t threaten existing power structures. Most fundamentally, it means recognizing that authentic purpose can only flourish in environments where power is used to amplify voices rather than direct them.

My hope is that this book offers both a critical perspective on how we’ve approached purpose in the past and a practical path forward for creating workplaces where meaning can flourish authentically. Not by manufacturing purpose, but by creating the conditions where it can emerge naturally through connection, contribution, and collective meaning-making.

While on his podcast, Work for Humans, my friend (and author of the introduction to this book) Dart Lindsley, asked me, “What job does your job do for you?” a question which, at the time and despite all of my big talk about the productising work, had stumped me… and even now after writing an entire second book with this topic front of mind, I find it complex to get a succinct answer for myself. In writing this I wanted to explore my own relationship with purpose, work, and the job my job does for me, while also giving some meaningful frameworks for you to think about and use to break away from the dissonance and longing we can feel when relating our own personal sense of purpose and fulfilment to work.

In short, the job my job does for me is to connect me to wonderful new people, encourages me to explore new ideas, and offers a life yielding an abundance of joy which may have otherwise remained unreachable to someone of my background. While you read this book I’d love you to not only be thinking about how these principals, frameworks, and case studies apply to your role as a manager, a leader, or a people-professional; but also that you take some time to ask yourself, “what job is my job doing for me?”

Sources and Further Reading

1. Studs Terkel’s oral history Working (1974): “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread…” Terkel, S. (1974) Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books.

2. Wendell Berry: “The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think…” Berry, W. (2012) This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

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People strategy has developed a bit of a messiah complex, and I say that with love, because I’ve absolutely contributed to it.

Somewhere between the culture decks and the purpose workshops, we collectively decided that every employee should feel called to their work. That anything less is a failure of leadership, or worse, a failure of our People programmes. It’s well-intentioned. It’s also, if I’m honest, not how most people actually experience work, and designing as though it is is caused more than a few People Teams to build programmes that serve an imaginary workforce rather than the real one.

Two researchers helped me think about this clearly. The first is Joe Pine, who along with James Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy in 1999 and mapped out a competitive spectrum that has evolved incredibly well and is a foundation of an analogy I use for building purposeful People Programmes.

For all products, there is a spectrum of competitive position and pricing capacity, which starts at Commodities (undifferentiated, low pricing) and stretches upwards…Commodities become goods. Goods become services. Services become experiences. And experiences (at the top of the graph) become transformations. The idea is that the most economically valuable thing you can offer someone isn’t a product or even an experience; it’s a change in them. You’re not selling a gym membership, you’re selling a stronger body. You’re not selling an MBA, you’re selling a different way of thinking. The customer doesn’t just consume the thing: they become someone different because of it.

In Built for People, I argued that the employee experience is a product (a subscription product) and that People Teams are the product managers building it. Which means, if that framing holds, your employees are “buying” something. The question is: what are they actually in the market for?

Okay… now meet Amy Wrzesniewski, a Yale organisational psychologist whose research categorises how people relate to their work. Not by industry or seniority, but by orientation. You can see your work as a job (a transaction: time for money, no more), a career (a vehicle for progression and status), or a calling (work inseparable from identity, intrinsically meaningful). Crucially, the orientation isn’t fixed to the role. Hospital cleaners who saw their work as central to patient recovery described it as a calling. Lawyers who felt trapped described it as a job. Same hours, very different relationship with what those hours mean.

Here’s the part that feels easy to move over: all three are completely legitimate.

According to the research I did for Purpose and Work, a significant portion of your workforce is likely career-oriented. They want development, fair progression, recognition, a fulfilling experience in their work. They are not, to be blunt, looking to be transformed: they’re looking to be supported and given a reasonable shot at moving forward with a high quality of life offered by their career. That’s a rational relationship with work, and for many folks, it’s exactly the right one. Your People programmes should be genuinely excellent at serving it, and for most teams, the experience layer (the onboarding portals, the offsites, the wellbeing benefits, the culture comms) exists primarily for this cohort. Don’t underestimate them either; they are very often the backbone of your organisation.

But some of your employees are oriented toward calling. For them, a good experience isn’t enough. They’re asking a different question altogether: not “is this a pleasant place to work?” but “am I becoming someone better here?” In Pine’s language, they’re in the market for a transformation. If your programmes only deliver experiences, that group goes underserved. And they tend to be, in my experience, some of the people you’d most like to retain.

So the real question isn’t how do you make everyone feel called to their work. It’s: do your programmes have the range to serve more than one orientation?

A few places to look:

Your performance framework: a career-oriented employee wants clarity, fairness, and a credible path forward. A calling-oriented employee wants to see their own growth named and taken seriously. A well-designed performance process can do both; most don’t really try.

Your manager enablement work: managers are the single biggest variable in which orientation someone settles into. A manager who connects work to purpose and names growth when it’s happening creates the conditions for calling. A manager who only assigns tasks and reviews output caps the experience at career, at best. Training managers to do the former isn’t complicated. Not doing it is expensive.

One honest caveat, and it’s worth keeping close: Wrzesniewski’s research is clear that calling orientation can’t be manufactured. Any organisation that tries tends to produce something that feels more like a religion than a company. What you can do is remove the conditions that actively prevent it, like unclear expectations, bad management, work that feels pointless, no visible progression. Fixing those isn’t revolutionary, it’s just competent.

PERMA

One framework that makes this a bit more concrete (and which I find genuinely useful as a diagnostic) is Seligman’s PERMA model, borrowed (again) from a field that has nothing to do with HR. PERMA maps the five elements of wellbeing: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. On its own it’s a reasonable wellbeing framework. But mapped across Pine’s spectrum, it becomes something more useful: a way to see exactly which layer your current programmes are operating at.

Take Relationships (the R). At the service level, you’re offering community service initiatives and family-friendly scheduling, decent, functional, ticking a box. At the experience level, you’ve got social committees and cross-functional collaboration… people are connecting, it feels good. At the transformation level, you’re building mission-aligned team bonds: relationships formed around shared purpose, not just proximity. Same element, three very different levels of investment and return.

The same logic runs through all five. Achievement at service level is pay transparency and quality metrics. At experience level, promotion cycles and mentorship. At transformation level, employees have genuine clarity on their personal contribution to change. Meaning at service level is customer impact stories and (my personal favourite entry in this table) explicitly avoiding purpose-washing. Which, yes, absolutely counts as a People programme.

What I find useful about using PERMA as a lens here is that it stops the conversation being abstract. You can take each element, look at what you’re actually doing, and place it honestly on the spectrum. Most People Teams, if they’re truthful, are operating at service level on three or four of the five and patting themselves on the back for the one experience-level initiative they shipped last quarter. That’s not a criticism (capacity is real) but it’s worth knowing where you actually are before you decide where to go next.

The point isn’t to chase a workforce of true believers. It’s to stop accidentally capping everyone at the same level of engagement because it was easier to design for one type of person.

Know your cohorts. Design for the range. The experience layer is the floor. For some of your people, there’s considerably more ceiling available… if you build for it.

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On my first week at Leapsome I told the company I would be doing the same, but trying to reach as many of our 150 folks across the first four weeks as possible.

There is a version of this story where I tell you I spent my first week at Leapsome carefully sending bespoke meeting invitations to every single person on the team, researching their calendars, considering their time zones, and handwriting agendas.

That version is fiction.

The real version involves Leapsome as a platform, Gemini, a .ics file, and about forty-five minutes of moving calendar blocks around like a particularly detailed game of Tetris.

And it works brilliantly.

When you are joining a new company as a People leader: everyone expects you to listen, but nobody builds you the infrastructure to actually do it easily. You’re dropped into a Google Calendar full of strangers’ names, access to a HRIS, engagement surveys, and given a laptop to kick off your user research. The only way to form a real view (not the curated town-hall version, but the actual texture of what’s happening) is to talk to people. A lot of people. Individually.

So I book 1:1s with everyone. Not just my team. Everyone. Once a year, roughly 30 minutes, no agenda, no prep required. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. And it kind of is, briefly, and then it isn’t.

The Setup: Don’t Do This Manually

The first mistake most People leaders make is trying to schedule these one by one. You open your calendar, search for someone’s name, check their availability, draft an invite, send it, then move on to the next person. Multiply that by however many people are in your organisation and you’ve just spent two days doing something a moderately capable spreadsheet could do for you.

Here’s what actually works:

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The classic path would be to buy an employee engagement platform. Research vendors. Sit through demos. Build a business case. Wait for budget approval. Maybe launch something in Q3 (if you’re lucky).

Instead, Andrew built it himself. In two weeks. Using Replit, a tool that’s costs are small, but they’re diminished even more by the minimal time investment required to get up and running.

Andrew isn’t a technical leader who accidentally ended up in HR. He studied psychology at university. His first job out of college was selling promotional pens door-to-door in San Francisco. He is not a developer. He’s just someone who got tired of waiting for perfect solutions that didn’t seem to come.

But what really makes Andrew impressive to me is that he stopped asking for permission and started building things.

And that’s really the entire point of this piece I’m writing about today, and it’s kind of the point of almost everything I advocate for in Built for People. So let’s dig in…

The Problem with “Strategic HR”

I’ve spent the last decade obsessing over making HR more strategic. Learn the business model. Understand the P&L. Speak the language of the C-suite. Get that coveted seat at the table.

All good advice. All completely necessary. And yet, entirely insufficient on its own. The word “built” is in “built for people” on purpose. You can know every line item in the budget, attend every board meeting, speak fluent finance, and still be seen as fundamentally administrative if the only thing you do when problems emerge is... schedule meetings about them, or purchase more tools to be implemented.

It’s a troubling cycle that seems to have emerged in the last decade or so where a leader identifies a real problem (and, if I’m frank, this is a HR problem as much as it is a Finance one, Customer Success, or Marketing)... the problem statement is well written, it’s something that’s genuinely costing the business money or making employees miserable. They present it effectively to leadership. Everyone nods. Everyone agrees it’s important and must be solved. Then what happens?

Six months of vendor demos. An RFP process using those god awful procurement spreadsheets (I’m sorry but please). A committee is ‘spun up’ to evaluate solutions. A budget request that gets pushed to next quarter, “once revenue picks up”. Meanwhile, the problem is still there, still costing money, still making people miserable.

Often this is what passes for strategic HR work.

I often get feedback that I’m still very ‘hands on’, because I spend time using Zapier, Sana, or Claude. It’s because I think that strategy also involves knowing how to (not always necessarily being the individual to do the full programme of work), but knowing how to direct a team to build the thing that solves the problem. This month. This week. Today, if you can!

As Andrew puts it: “Stop trying to be a consultant and go get in the business and sit side by side and build things and fix things with people.”

That’s the work. Not the decks. Not the vendor evaluations. Not the perfectly formatted business cases that live in shared drives nobody opens. The actual building of actual solutions to actual problems.

How We Got Here (And Why It’s Changing)

For years, HR teams have been stuck in a specific pattern when it comes to solving problems:

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It’s been a long five years, y’all. We’ve seen a lot, we’ve done a lot. To say, “so much has changed” feels trite and wholly inadequate. To put it lightly, the last half-decade of work has been… eventful. Things weren’t always this way, surely? In my first role at BHP I remember we rolled out SAP over the course of what I am almost sure was 18 months to two years, a process driven by a winding map of systems training and stakeholder management. The idea of taking that kind of time now is baffling; a view I have, no doubt, at least partially adopted due to my move out of enterprise corporate business, and into the foray of the tech/scale-up world.

Regardless of the size of your business, constant change isn’t just the reality of modern work, it’s become the defining feature of leading people over the last five years; the pandemic, working from home, returning to office, rising interest rates, a euro-usd forex parity, layoffs, the AI boom… “unprecedented times” abound. And if you’re a People leader trying to keep your team grounded whilst everything around them shifts like a game of Jumanji, you’re probably feeling a bit, well, tired.

The Problem with Change Management Theatre

Traditional change management was designed for a world where companies announced one big transformation every few years rather than every few weeks, where everyone got a branded swag bag to commemorate the occasion, and our systems and tools remained in place, relatively uninterrupted, for years at a time.

That world is dead and buried. Gone the way of fax machines, landlines, and “reply all” email chains about the coffee machine being down. Now we’re looking at a future with:

• Strategic pivots every quarter (sometimes every month),

• Technology that changes faster than we can metabolise the launch notes,

• Market conditions shifting like British weather (and, frequently, as bleak), and

• Teams spread across time zones who’ve never met in person.

The community listening to Modern People Leader have expressed a desire to consider new methods around how to approach change, without practices rooted in 2019 (or earlier).

What Your Brain Actually Does During Change

In 2018 I read a book that I ended up bandying around to quite a few other folks on the leadership team at McCann Worldgroup, a company going through a significant digital and agile transformation in the wake of social media. Hillary Scarlett’s brilliant work in “Neuroscience for Organizational Change” shows us that when faced with ambiguity, our brains don’t just feel uncomfortable—they actually consume more glucose, making us mentally exhausted before we’ve even started adapting. Your brain is literally wired to resist uncertainty.

Every time you announce a “strategic realignment” or “organisational restructure,” you’re essentially asking people’s brains to work overtime whilst simultaneously expecting them to be creative, collaborative, and enthusiastic about the future. It’s like asking someone to run a marathon whilst wine-tasting…technically possible, but probably not their best performance.

Today, the traditional approaches are proving themselves as fundamentally flawed. Kotter’s 8-Step Process, with its emphasis on creating urgency - woo, just what we need - and communicating the vision first, assumes people are operating from a rational, executive-function mindset when actually, their threat-detection systems are in overdrive.

Applying Maslow’s hierarchy to change mirrors what neuroscience tells us about how our brains prioritise information. We literally cannot focus on the bigger picture and self-actualisation when our threat-detection systems are activated. It’s not a character flaw or lack of ambition, it’s basic human wiring.

Level 1: Physiological Needs - “Am I Going to Be Okay?”

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You've been using AI for your People Ops work, haven't you? Right? Everyone has! If you take a single look at LinkedIn you’ll find a whole array of self-appointed AI-People-Experts sharing their latest wisdom on using LLMs in our work, so you know that the momentum is out there. Maybe it's helping you write that tricky performance review feedback like Thomas at Juro, or perhaps you've been using Sana to help structure your onboarding documentation or User Interviews as we shared a few weeks ago. And every time you do it, there's this little voice in the back of your head whispering, "Is this okay? Am I cheating?”

You're not. But we need to talk about it.

The reality is that AI has fundamentally changed the game for People teams. You may remember when I mentioned in my original "People Ops as a Product" post that HR teams traditionally haven't been particularly well-resourced in analysis and data? Well, as I discussed with Daniel and Stephen on the Metrics Episode of MPL Build, AI has basically handed us a superpower. We can now do complex analysis, generate insights, and create documentation at speeds that would have required entire analytics teams just a few years ago.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and right now, many People teams are flying blind with limited guardrails around AI use, and I’ve heard from multiple people leaders that they’re still trying to work out how to put appropriate guidance in for their team to wield this new power.

The Wild West of AI in HR

I've been watching People teams across the spectrum, from scrappy startups to massive enterprises, and the approaches to AI are all over the map. Some teams are pretending it doesn't exist (good luck with that). Others are going full robot overlord and trying to automate everything in a quest to reduce spend, maximise output, and test the limits of what we can achieve within today’s toolkit. Most are somewhere in the messy middle; using AI tools quietly, inconsistently, and without any real framework for what's appropriate.

This isn't sustainable. And frankly, it's not fair to your team members who are left guessing about what's okay and what isn't.

Why You Need an AI Fair Use Policy

An AI fair use policy isn't just about legal implications or making it clear to your compliance team you've got your act together (though those are nice side effects, I assure you). It's about creating clarity and confidence for your team so they can focus on doing brilliant work instead of worrying whether they're breaking some unspoken rule.

When you give someone a new tool without any instructions, they either don't use it at all (missed opportunity) or they use it wrong (potential burning fires). Neither option serves anyone well.

A proper AI fair use policy does three critical things:

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You've done the work. You've talked to employees, run the user research, mapped the pain points, and written beautiful problem statements that would make any product manager giddy with joy. You've embraced the whole "employees as users" part of the work, and honestly? You're feeling pretty dang good about it.

Then someone—potentially your CEO, maybe your management team—asks the question that makes your stomach drop: "So what are we actually going to build first?"

And suddenly you're staring at a Notion page full of problems spanning across "onboarding process" to "the expense system" to "we desperately need better manager training” but also “we haven’t got a consistent offsite calendar.”

The Paralysis of Infinite Problems

Here's a problem with applying product thinking to People Ops: identifying problems is the easy part. I mean, talk to any colleague for fifteen minutes and they'll give you enough material to keep your roadmap busy until 2030.

The hard part—the part that separates teams who actually ship impactful employee experiences from teams who get stuck in analysis paralysis—is figuring out what to tackle first, how to break it down into something you can actually deliver, and how to convince everyone (including yourself) that you're not just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is where some people ops teams really struggle to put pen to paper effectively. They either try to boil the ocean by fixing everything at once, or they default to whatever screams loudest that week. Neither approach ends well.

The Question That Changes Things

One of the most common questions I get isn't "how do I find problems?" (trust me, as I said, your team can happily provide those). It's this: "I've identified the problems, I've got my team bought in on the approach—now how do we actually decide what's most important and what ships first?"

Closely followed by: "How do I break these massive, complicated people problems down into something we can actually deliver without waiting eighteen months and building the Death Star of HR solutions?"

Enter: Minimum Loveable Products for People Ops

Your product team doesn't try to build everything at once. They start with an MVP, except in People Operations we can rarely get away with minimum viable (ethics, tradition, expectations). What we need are Minimum Loveable Products: the smallest version of a solution that employees actually want to use and that solves a real problem.

Think new hire experience: instead of rebuilding your entire onboarding program from scratch (Death Star approach as mentioned previously), maybe you start with fixing the single most painful day-one experience. Or performance reviews: instead of implementing a whole new system, maybe you test a lightweight feedback or calibration tool with one team first.

The frameworks I'm going to share in this blog do a little to help you get there. I’m hoping I can help you take your beautifully identified problems and turn them into a prioritised, actionable roadmap that your team can actually execute.

The PEOPLE Framework

The PEOPLE framework is a scoring system that helps you cut through the noise and figure out what deserves your team's precious time and energy.

Here's how it works:

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Now comes the implementation challenge: building a systematic framework that can handle this complexity while remaining practical and scalable.

The Challenge of Building Systematic Frameworks

The complexity we discussed in Part I creates a real operational challenge. How do you build compensation systems that are sophisticated enough to handle global competition and multi-dimensional talent markets, while still being practical for hiring managers to use and fair for employees to understand?

The best frameworks balance five critical characteristics:

1. Systematic - Consistent logic that reduces bias and increases fairness. This doesn’t mean the entire system is identical and treats all folks the same, but it does mean that each difference, possible exception, and variation us both understood and clearly documented.

2. Scalable - Works whether you're hiring 10 people or 100 people per year, and reflects your company’s budget and hiring goals.

3. Defensible - Based on clear reasoning that stands up to internal and external scrutiny

4. Flexible - Can adapt to market changes without complete rebuilds, and allows for revisitation for strategic purposes

5. Strategic - Aligned with your business goals rather than just administrative convenience

The Multi-Layer Framework Approach

In my experience, the challenge many teams face is that traditional compensation approaches weren't designed for this level of complexity. Building something that handles today's realities requires more sophisticated thinking.

Think of your compensation framework like a well-designed system where each component serves a specific purpose and they work together to handle complexity systematically.

Layer 1: Market Intelligence Foundation

The foundation of any modern compensation framework has to be sophisticated market intelligence. But the challenge now is that "market data" isn't straightforward when your competitive set spans multiple geographies, industries, and company stages.

Building Comprehensive Market Intelligence:

You can buy both compensation data and market intelligence, but if you are wanting to build something in house, you can also do market research yourself using multiple sources and develop your own basis of compensation data. This is useful because you can be more reactive than some market tools allow, as they are retroactively adding in data in many instances (Not all! Many new tools are much more dynamic now, and I encourage you to check them out).

Segmented Analysis: Instead of looking at broad categories like "software engineers," analyze specific segments like "senior full-stack engineers at remote-first SaaS companies with 50-200 employees"

Competitive Set Definition: Identify the 10-15 companies you actually compete with for talent (often different from your business competitors)

Dynamic Tracking: Monitor how compensation in your competitive set evolves, not just static benchmarks

Navigating Data Source Complexity:

As I said, premium data sets (Radford, CandorIQ, ERI) provide comprehensive coverage and industry credibility, but can lag market movements

Real-time sources (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, AngelList) capture current market dynamics but require careful filtering and validation

Direct competitive intelligence through your hiring process gives you the most accurate picture of what you're actually competing against, but requires a lot of work to find the data and collate it in a logical way.

The key insight: treat market intelligence as an ongoing strategic function, not a once-per-year benchmarking exercise.

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