How to Prioritize Employee Experience Problems with the PEOPLE Framework

This one goes out to everyone who's staring at a list of 47 employee experience problems and wondering which fire to put out first.

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: