Structuring a People Ops as a Product Team

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If there's one thing I've learned after years of being the person awkwardly hovering at the morning stand-up, it's that product teams have some dang good ideas about how to get things done. The perspective of People Ops as a Product which I wrote about in my book Built for People shifts how we think about the employee experience, positioning it as something we deliberately design, build, and iterate upon—just like product teams do with software or services. But with fewer midnight deployments and slightly less caffeine consumption. Slightly.

But how do we actually structure a People team to operate this way? After years of implementing and refining this approach across multiple organizations, I've found that the squad model offers the most effective framework for People teams looking to balance operational excellence with innovation.

Understanding the Dual Nature of People Work

Before diving into team structure, let's acknowledge something we all know but rarely say out loud: People Ops professionals are expected to be both customer support officers and systems engineers, occasionally in the same 30-minute meeting. This is a part of the analogy between People Operations and Product Management that receives scrutiny, and which I understand, but if the analogy was perfect, it wouldn’t be an analogy. And that is why I adopted the (very confusing, not necessarily my favourite) language (seriously, I am in too deep to change it now):

Human Operations: The deeply personal, high-touch work that requires empathy, judgment, and interpersonal skills. This includes coaching conversations, conflict resolution, complex employee relations issues, and culture-building activities. Essentially, it’s times when you are “troubleshooting” your products (helping people use the policies, frameworks etc that you have built) or times where you are conducting qualitative user research (ethically, of course).

People Operations: The systematic, process-driven work that creates scalable experiences across the employee lifecycle—from recruitment workflows to performance systems to offboarding protocols. This is the work we primarily talk about when it comes to People Ops as a Product, but it is not the only work. It requires excellent Human Operations to truly build world-class People Products, because the work we do in empathetically understanding and supporting our users is the work that

A well-structured People team needs to excel at both aspects. The challenge is that traditional HR org structures often fail to create space for the product development mindset needed for great People Operations work, and instead focus on the advisory work and administration, which puts you in a commercial “back seat” in terms of developing truly customer (and company) focussed new pieces of work.

“‘People debt’ is a real issue for classic HR teams. When I think about ‘people debt’, it's really about those gaps, or inefficiencies, in how we manage the people function that quietly pile up over time and prevent us from looking at the employee experience from a wildly different and new lens.”

Crystal Boysen, Chief People Officer, Sprout Social

The Squad Approach to People Operations

The squad model, popularized by companies like Spotify, offers an elegant solution. Here's how it works in a People context:

What is a People Squad?
A cross-functional group within your People team, focused on solving specific employee experience challenges. Squads typically consist of 3-6 people with complementary skills who collaborate to design, build, and ship People products.

Importantly, and this is one thing that I have been asked a lot about over the last few years, squads can be implemented without disrupting existing management lines. This is a critical point that often gets overlooked. You don't need to reorganize your entire reporting structure to work in squads. The management hierarchy can remain stable while the functional working groups shift into a more agile formation.

People Squads, like in Product, can be established around changing problem statements or user stories, or other themes, such as "Acquisition" and “Onboarding” etc.

Building Effective People Squads

The ideal squad combines diverse skill sets that mirror those found in product teams. I tend to have my teams take on the “roles” above but not always having these specific job titles, so they may all be People Partners, or we may have three People Partners, a Recruiter, and one Analytics person who has been brought in from an external company.

1. Research: Acts as the primary user researcher and stakeholder liaison, bringing deep understanding of business context and employee needs. Focuses on creating intuitive, engaging experiences that solve real employee problems. This person may have a background in UX, communications, or learning design.

2. People Operations Specialist: The process expert who ensures solutions can be implemented efficiently and consistently at scale. For example, understanding the systems limitations, tooling stack etc.

3. Analytics/Data: Brings quantitative rigor to understand problems and measure impact (this can be a part-time or contract role in smaller teams).

4. Squad Lead: Coordinates the work, removes blockers, and ensures alignment with broader organizational goals. Often this is a more senior People Partner or People Ops Manager.

Not every squad needs all these roles permanently assigned. For specialized projects, you might bring in subject matter experts temporarily—such as Compensation specialists, Learning designers, or Recruitment experts.

Squad Formation Examples

Here are three approaches to squad formation, each with different advantages:

1. Employee Journey Squads

Organize squads around key phases of the employee lifecycle:

• Talent Acquisition Squad: Focuses on candidate experience, employer brand, and onboarding

• Employee Growth Squad: Works on performance, development, and learning systems

• Employee Experience Squad: Tackles engagement, culture initiatives, and workplace experience

• Employee Transition Squad: Handles internal mobility, succession, and offboarding

2. Business Function Squads

Structure squads to align with major business functions in larger companies:

• Tech & Product Squad: Supporting engineering, product, and design teams

• Go-to-Market Squad: Supporting sales, marketing, and customer success

• Operations Squad: Supporting finance, legal, and operational functions

3. Problem-Domain Squads

Form squads around specific organizational challenges and user stories:

• Retention Squad: Focused on reducing unwanted attrition

• Performance Enablement Squad: Building systems for better performance outcomes

• Diversity & Inclusion Squad: Creating inclusive processes and experiences

• Distributed Work Squad: Designing for remote/hybrid effectiveness

Balancing Product Building with Day-to-Day Operations

A common concern when implementing a squad model is: "Who will handle the operational work?"

The reality is that People teams will always have administrative and operational responsibilities—just as product and engineering teams still have meetings, emails, and maintenance work. For most People teams, product building will occupy about 40-50% of total capacity, with the remainder devoted to Human Operations and day-to-day needs.

Here's how to make this balance work:

1. Create clear service level expectations: Define response times for routine requests and communicate them broadly.

2. Implement "office hours": Designate specific times when People team members are available for ad-hoc support, leaving other time blocks protected for squad work.

3. Rotate operational responsibilities: Establish a ticketing system or rotation for handling day-to-day requests so that squad members have dedicated focus time.

4. Use "interrupt buffers": Assign certain team members as first responders for urgent issues, shielding others to focus on squad work.

5. Timebox product work: Set aside specific days or time blocks exclusively for squad collaboration, road map implementation, and planning.

Common Challenges and Solutions

As with any organizational change, implementing a squad model comes with challenges:

Challenge: Team members are too busy with operational work to focus on product development.
Solution: Start with one dedicated "innovation day" per week for squad work, gradually expanding as you optimize operational processes.

Challenge: Skills gaps limit squad effectiveness.
Solution: Partner with other departments (like Product or UX) to provide mentorship, or bring in external consultants for critical projects while upskilling your team.

Challenge: Senior leadership expects immediate results.
Solution: Begin with a high-visibility "lighthouse" project that can demonstrate the value of the squad approach quickly.

Challenge: Existing team structures create silos that hinder collaboration.
Solution: Create cross-functional workspaces and rituals that bring different specialists together regularly.

A People Squad in Action

Let me share a quick example of how this works in practice:

A mid-sized tech company formed a "Retention Squad" consisting of an HR Business Partner, a Compensation Specialist, a People Data Analyst, and a Learning Designer. The squad focused on solving the company's retention challenges in engineering departments.

They begin the quarter with a problem statement, “Our attrition in the engineering team has been increasing by 0.5% per month for the last 6 months, it is causing our recruitment costs to increase, and our product roadmap to suffer delays which is costing us both in opex and revenue.”

Their aim for this quarter is to stop or reverse the attrition trend in the Engineering team by EOQ.

Their process:

1. Research: Analyzed exit data, conducted stay interviews, mapped market data at companies where the exiting team had left to, and mapped the current employee experience.

2. Ideate: Developed multiple potential interventions to address key friction points

3. Prioritize: Selected three high-impact initiatives based on effort/impact evaluation

4. Build: Developed a new piece of work, amended an existing policy, and set the measurements to understand the trends

5. Measure: Tracked retention improvements, sentiment shifts, and manager effectiveness scores

The squad operated on a 2-week sprint cycle, with dedicated squad work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each member maintained their regular operational responsibilities but had protected time for squad work. Management reporting lines remained unchanged, with the senior HRBP leading the squad process.

The Future of People Teams

As the workplace continues to evolve rapidly, People teams must become more agile, data-driven, and product-minded. The squad model provides a practical framework for this evolution without requiring radical organizational restructuring.

By balancing Human Operations with People Operations and creating dedicated capacity for experience design, People teams can deliver both the day-to-day support employees need and the innovative systems that enable organizational success.

Remember that this transformation doesn't happen overnight. Start small, demonstrate impact, and gradually expand your squad approach as your team develops new skills and mindsets.

The most successful People teams of the future won't be those with the largest headcount or budget, but those who can most effectively combine deep human understanding with product development discipline to create exceptional employee experiences at scale.

If you already have an existing People Ops team and you’re wondering how to make the transition, then check out our blog on restructuring. The other question I get frequently is what if you’re going out to market to hire a new team? Well, good news - we’ve also created a comprehensive guide on how to hire for People Ops as a product, including interview questions, scorecards, and role overviews.

P.S. Want hands-on help bringing product principles to life on your people team? Let’s talk — send a message to build@themodernpeopleleader.com.