299 - AMA with Jessica Zwaan on Org Design & Metrics

So I call everyone of my teams, people in tele partners, people in talent, they're leads or whatever, right? I don't have TA and payroll and L&D. And that is because your job is to work on the products in all of those departments. You may have like operational tasks within them, so you'll have spikes. But it's almost the same way as a product manager who happens to be in the acquisitions squad. They may be a person that has a lot of knowledge about how to do acquisition. Like building products that have like a strong kind of product acquisition funnel. But it doesn't mean that they can't lean in and move into a different squad and start working on like, I don't know, product marketing. That's totally doable. It's the same way that I think about my people team. - You're listening to the Modern People Leader podcast, where we go behind the scenes with today's top HR leaders and work experts. We talk to them about how they've gotten to where they're at, what they do every day, and what they see coming next for the future of work. Hope you enjoy. - All right, hello everybody. Thank you for being here. So I'm Daniel, one of the co-hosts of the Modern People Leader podcast. I've got my co-host Steven here with me, and we've got Jesse here again. So one of our co-founder for MPL Bill. And so this is our second AMA that we're doing. Our first one we did, was that a month ago? Or was it longer? - It was a little bit longer than a month ago. So please don't tell me my life is a big way, like Sans, no. - It's gone by so fast. So yeah, we got ton of good feedback from AMA1 and we're back with number two. And so for those of you who joined for the first one, appreciate you coming back. And for anyone new, quick heads up for how this works. It's gonna be super casual. There's not any slide decks. There's no presentation. It's just Jesse answering your questions live. And we got about 50 pre-submitted questions. So never ending content. We're not gonna run out of things to talk about. - Just an all conversation. - All conversation, y'all. - Yeah. And today we're focusing on metrics and org design. And Jesse's gonna share some real examples from both. And we actually picked these topics from the survey that we sent out after AMA1. So for all of you who responded, thank you. It makes the content better. And we wanna cover things that you actually care about. So yeah, let's do this thing. And we start out every podcast, webinar, AMA with good news stories. And so if you've listened to the pod, I'm sure you're familiar with this. It's just our way of kicking things off on a positive note. And it could be something personal, it could be something work related. And if you've got a good news story, drop it in the chat. And I will go first. So as of yesterday, our daughter, Lena, is officially walking. So she's. (laughs) - She can't believe that. - I'm so stressed for you. - It's crazy. Yeah, it's our weekends are exhausting. It's literally just chasing her around. Well, this past weekend, it was walking around everywhere with one hand. And now she's like throwing our hands down, taking like five or six steps and then tumbling over. And she's getting like a little more cautious because she's taken a few big spills, but we've now put a helmet on her. So she's moving, she's grooving. And yeah, she's keeping us busy. Jesse, you wanna go next? - Yeah, absolutely. This week I started my new role at Leavesom, which is. - Congrats. - So exciting. Yeah, this probably doesn't surprise you, but I have a lot of personal validation by being personally like knows a lot of things about a company. And like really knows like their problems were solving all the different bits and pieces that I'm like caused it. So like leaving a company for me is like, oh, this is a little traumatic because I have to like go back to being like a kind of like fresh little baby. That's like, doesn't know anything like unhelpful actively to everyone. So I'm really excited, but I'm enjoying. I'm trying to do my best to enjoy this new process of being unhelpful but learning. - Get out of here. I think that leaves me. So my good news is we, wow, had a fast and furious transform. We were joking and kind of perplex before we hit record that we, the three of us didn't even run into each other at transform. It just was so crazy. And transform was actually our first event, technical event that we did this year. So we did our off the record breakfast, which was awesome. But our marquee event is MPL live. And our first MPL live is in Toronto this year will also be in London over the summer and then in San Francisco to close out the year. But Toronto, wow, we're so excited. We have such an amazing lineup. It's such a great community of HR leaders. So if any of you are in Toronto or near Toronto or no people in Toronto, this is something, this is when you definitely don't want to miss. So, but that's my good news. Hopefully y'all are sharing your good news in the chat 'cause we wanna hear what's going on with you. Before we jump into the conversation today, I wanted to take a quick step back, zoom out a little bit. If you were at the first AMA, you know that it was awesome. We spent a lot of time just focusing on the mindset behind people's ops as a product, what it is, why it matters, why more and more teams are starting to explore this new operating model. There was a point, I think early 2025, where I kid you not. It was like one day, like pre-Q1 2025, maybe one out of 10 HR leaders that came on our show would mention some form of people ops as a product. Some people call it different things. And then after Q1 2025, I feel like every single guess that we had on the show was talking about it, whether it was Dropbox or Sprout Social or, you know, I can't even New York life, the big kind of insurance company also came on our show and talked about it. So so many companies big and smaller, adopting this new way. And it just like brings a lot of joy to my heart. And so one of the things we heard afterwards was like, all right, I get it. I understand conceptually what this is, but like how does this actually work? Like how do you structure a team this way? How do you, what actually changes day to day? So how do we implement programs and all the HR things that we are used to implementing? And so I went through a bill for people cohort in 2024. And I remember me and my cohort members like just having similar questions. And so today I thought it would be great. We thought it would be great to dig deeper to that next layer into the mechanics. We're going to focus on two areas. Daniel mentioned these already. First, org design, what is the people teams product? And how do you design a new people org around said product? And metrics, how do you tie? Because if we can't measure it, like not a lot of people are going to get engaged enthusiastic, at least, you know, on our ELT. So like what are the metrics we should be tracking to just show that we're actually driving the business outcomes that the company wants? And that we can make real progress. We can make more progress with this new operating model. And so the reason we're so happy to have Jesse back and to just like this AMA format is just so clutch, like literally in our cohort, like the AMA, is it was everything. Everyone wanted to talk to Jesse. And that's because you've written about these methodologies. You've implemented these methodologies. You've advised dozens and dozens of companies on how to do this work. And so we've had a front row seat. We get to talk to you every week about this stuff. And so now we want to share these nuggets with the world. So that's zooming out what we want to do, you know, getting super tactical in terms of how the session's going to work. Well, first, if all that sounds interesting, then you're definitely in the right place. Today, we're going to start this conversation with a few pre-submitted questions. We're going to open it up to a lot of questions from the chat. Our colleague Regina is helping us track all the questions you're submitting. So please, please submit any questions. There's no dumb question. Jesse will tell you, I ask a lot of really dumb questions. And so in she kind of coached me through like, hey, there's no experts at this. Well, I take that back. There are some experts. But generally speaking, we're all working to figure this out together. So get your question out there. Daniel, you ready to do this? You ready to get into the details here? Yeah. So as I said, we got like 50 questions and from the pre-submitted questions. And there were a lot of questions about how people team structure changes as you scale with this model. So we're going to get into that eventually. But before we do that, I wanted to zoom out of it. So Jesse, if you're a people leader who's thinking about making this change, what's one thing that every leader should be doing right now, regardless of company size, as they rethink how their team is structured? When I think about our recent humans, times, machines, conversations that we're having with C-H-R-O's, there's one theme that keeps coming up. The vision is clear. The pressure is real. But the roadmap is a little bit less clear. It's one thing to talk about the future of work. It's another to sit down with your CEO and say, here's how work, the workforce, and our organization really need to change. But I get it. There are a lot of difficult questions that you need to answer. What work should we redesign? How will AI reshape roles and careers? What kind of organization do we need to move faster? And these are exactly the questions explored in Deloitte's latest human capital trends report. There's some interesting findings in there. The report shows that we're no longer balancing tensions. We're at a tipping point. There are. Report brings together insights from thousands of leaders and explores how organizations can build a human edge. It's about moving beyond simply having humans and machines to creating a system where their capabilities multiply. It looks at how companies are redesigning work for this new future, how to shift from a mindset of cost efficiency to want to value creation and how to move from static plans to dynamic orchestration of talent and technology. In other words, it helps turn big future of work conversations into practical leadership questions for a world that won't sit still. If you're thinking about how your organization evolves and the age of AI, go check it out. It's a great read. I read it a couple of times. So if you want to learn more, you can find the link in the show notes. - Yeah, I feel like I kind of say this every time that we talk about structure because there's, I feel like the last couple of years have put so much organizational fatigue out into the world in terms of like the layoffs and the team redesigns and also just like the restructures and changes that are coming with AI that I totally understand when HR leaders are like, I don't want to add more restructuring conversation into a already very noisy environment of people planning game, our restructuring. So I say this because I don't think you need to restructure your entire team to do people as a product. It's absolutely, there's like a really interesting couple of ways you can do it and create org design. But I think one of the biggest and most important mindset, it's biggest important shifts is actually a mindset shift. It's an operating principle shift and that is really about how do you think about things in terms of outputs? How do we really focus on problem statements? Like all these things I've said again and again, that is more critical than anything else. If you're really nervous about doing a whole big redesign at the moment and before you implement this, you don't have to do that straight away. So I think that's the first thing. But I do think the way you measure your team as like monitor their success and measure your own success, we'll definitely need to change. And that's something that I know we're going to get to talking about metrics. So that's really important. I actually know a lot of people leaders that have not made organizational design changes until after people, up to as a product kind of operationally was running a little bit. So what you might do for example is run your team, keep people in a kind of traditional kind of like shared services model, but then have people select their projects they're working on in that quarter in a more kind of product management style way. So you're running a retrospective, you're setting goals, you're asking for a roadmap, those kinds of things, you can do that and then gradually start shifting to a different kind of structure. Does that make sense? - It does, Jesse. So I remember we spent a lot of time building the business case. How do I even sell a CEO on doing this? And I remember you sharing that there's no like silver bulletway to do this. And it looks a little bit different in every organization and sometimes there's kind of a CEO who's read a thing and they're like, yeah, we need to like totally redo. I want to reimagine how we do HR at this company. Other times there, you know, it's coming from within HR. Like we need to be better. There's a more modern way of doing things. Do you see any difference like, is there any pattern in the companies that you have worked with or observed just in terms of like when you get to org design, are you more likely to be successful if you've already got that full buy-in or like, 'cause what I'm hearing is, you know, it's okay to like MVP this and to show that value over time might be a little more complicated 'cause you're gonna have to manage, you know, an old way and kind of a new way in parallel. And so I'm just curious, like is there any kind of patterns that you know, based on the successful orgs adapting this that you see? - Yeah, really great question. The first thing is actually I'm yet to meet a CEO that doesn't philosophically get and support people, ups as a product. Maybe again, if you're in the chat and you're like, my CEO hates it, I'd love to hear about it. What I've found is actually because it is so much more focused around the language that they're probably familiar with and the kinds of ways of thinking that they are also incentivized to be thinking about. So, output and efficiency and productivity and ROI and I'm not reducing humans to those things, but that is like the output is that becomes a big part of your success measurements. It tends to be kind of easy, I think, to explain to quite a lot of CEOs founders that kind of level. What could be more difficult actually is the buy-over from your own team? It represents a kind of like a couple of scary things. The big scary thing that I think a lot of people kind of bulk against is it flattens a lot of people operations work in a lot of ways. So, I call everyone in my team's people and tele partners and people in talent leads or whatever, right? I don't have like TA and payroll and L&D and that is because your job is to work on the products in all of those departments. You may have like operational tasks within them, so you'll have spikes, but it's almost the same way as a product manager who happens to be in the acquisitions squad. They may be a person that has a lot of knowledge about how to do acquisition, like building products that have like a strong kind of product acquisition funnel, but it doesn't mean that they can't lean in and move into a different squad and start working on like, I don't know, product marketing. It's the same way that I think about my people team, right? And I think for some people, folks and talent folks that the kind of scary concept is like, wait a second, man, I don't really know, but I wanna be doing those other things, so that can be hard for them. And it's also just hard, I think, to explain because the work goes from being so much less about, these are the tasks you have to do to stay on top of a task list. And so much more about, here is the ecosystem that it's your job to help make healthy by building things that keep it, you know, running and optimized. That's just, I think it's kind of sometimes going to be a really difficult thing to explain to people that haven't had to think about that way in your team, whereas the language you're using to explain it to a founder is much more aligned with the kind of way that they're thinking anyway about the products that they're building. The other second thing that I think can be very scary, and this one I think is actually sometimes a little bit more subliminal, is I think there is a fear that there's a kind of, what's the next job I do after this one, if this is how I am used to working? Like, are other companies also doing this? Is this skills I'm going to need? Is this like a reapplyable way of working? Or is this just us doing like a freak experiment? And some people aren't actually super keen. I think, I totally can point to you, but I think this has actually become like wildly more popular and I think pretty much any progressive people even now if they had a team member who's like, I used to work in a team that worked in people since the product, they'd be like, great, that's really interesting. Where I think he about that. But honestly, five years ago, when I first posted, published Bill for People, I had people in HR tell me in events, like this is ridiculous, it will never work, people will never go for this. And I think that again, that came from this place of like, it's like, kind of like it's a fear thing or like it doesn't really quite 100% make sense or there's still so much unclear about it or which way is the world going? I think HR's going to turn much more into this other thing. And I think a lot of that you really need to reassure by helping them understand that the core of their job is the same, it is just refined and different. Anyway, that's my little thing. It's more likely a team. - Oh my God, there's so many follow ups I have but I'm gonna stick to script because there we, I think this is a great segue and I think that fear and certainty or doubt, I think is real and I can see that how that also scales that fear to individuals on people teams that are on larger teams 'cause it's like we have so much organizational debt. We've done this for so many years, decades, long in New York life case like, you know, 100 years, I forget. It was like a crazy amount of time they've been around and we got a lot of questions about this and so I wanna call out Eric Perkins, the SVP of people at Airship and the question is how does people team structure and how do people team structures and roles evolve from zero to 200, 200 to 400, 500 to 800 and a thousand plus employees? And I think the real question is like, how do you pressure, how do you structure your team in a way that you will survive the pressure of having to scale so rapidly? Or if I'm already, you know, working with a big company, like how do we kind of find and replace or kind of swap these models out without breaking everything? - Yeah, wicked, lovely. Okay, so a couple of things. I'm obviously gonna be drawing from examples that I have within my network of other people. I know you guys also have a lot of examples of this as well so we can bring some of those in. I'm currently working in a team of zero to 200. The first place I implemented people upstairs, the product was a team of 2,000. We were looking after in the UK and my previous company was about 400. So I'm in that kind of like, I've done the 300 to 400, 1000 plus 500 to 800. I personally haven't been in that size but again, like these like brackets are somewhat arbitrary, like we're in those kinds of like, different areas. Cool. So the first thing is how would I structure people operations as a product team at like the most base level? Like let's just ignore the complexity of the number of people looking after a first. I can just think about like the way you structure a product team. So a product team generally has like a product manager and then people that are building what that product manager is kind of leading them towards building within a quarter, usually. So product manager maybe you go like two or three engineers, maybe you have a designer, maybe you have a user researcher, maybe you have consultant that's come in just to work on like a very specific compliance and data problem, I don't know, right? There's all these different like people that come together, come together in a squad to solve a problem or to address metric or whatever it is over a period of time. A people of this product team essentially works exactly the same as that. You'll have usually a person that's leading on the problem statement, the product manager of the product. So that might be a problem statement like, we've noticed that there is, consistent confusion about how managers could or should or shouldn't run a probationary process. So that's the problem that consistent problem is causing people to overlast over the probation. We have multiple performance-based exits that happen post month three or post month six. It's causing a lack of trust between leadership and all of these things are accumulating into like ultimately large volumes of time from the people operations team in month three to six and also a capital expenditure on poor performance just because of administrative oversight. Great. That's a problem statement that a group of people could come work on. I think like an old way of working usually you'd be like probation is bad. We're going to like rewrite the preliminary process. We'll have a HR admin like put it into the system. Someone sends out some kind of communication but ultimately the work is fairly siloed. Maybe people part of this kind of like it kind of gets like shared to everyone almost just in like internal press releases within the PR and the people team like hi I finished my policy document. Net your job now you go and put it into the HR system. I feel like it's my kind of bureaucratic or administrative. Whereas the people ops team would work together in that squad with different kind of roles hats on during that piece of work. So maybe one person is going out doing these research like really deeply like looking at the market data around probation. What's the kind of standard length of time looking at the comms reading through the previous data that we have about failed probation. What's been a trend is anything interesting we can put into our policies speaking to members of the team we've had to run probation successfully and successfully and really getting a good understanding of like what do you think is best going to solve this. You might have someone else like designing the experience so going through and stepping out the different stages of it writing the communications, going and testing those communications with people like do you understand or asking you to do here is it's clear. Someone might be taking more technical roles so implementing it into a HRIS, developing a workflow, triggering like Zapier connections, having things come through Slack maybe like automating and some kind of like nice legal documentation that needs to be signed at some point more of a technical role and everyone has like kind of parts to play in the roadmap of the delivery of this solution to this problem and then you launch it, you continue measuring whether it was successful or not and you move on to the next thing that you want to do. That's kind of like a standard kind of squad structure and everyone in that squad will have a kind of dual role. I would say like 50% of the time you should be working on this to like solving the problems that are going to move the organization forward and the other 50% of the time you're doing the things that I call human operations which we've talked about how to hate that word but human operations which ostensibly all of the work that supports your ability to do the product work. This is like maintenance. I'm so like updating a little bits of policies and things that you see they're like kind of crumbling apart. It's things like cost of support so reaching out to like having people message you I don't really know if I understand this again what we helped like use this like really could do this. It's things like advisory is how you do it almost like a kind of customer success type role like this is how you best manage someone and also just things like compliance blah blah blah. It's worth saying that in product engineering teams yes the proportion is going to be very different they're spending 80% of their time probably doing product building work but they still do have all that other stuff right they still have to get up in town hall and explain the product they build they still have to go and do their reporting they still have to respond back to tickets from people asking about things so they can go and sell things out to customers like this work still exists in the same kind of split in every other team. It's just that people of teams going to spend like a little more proportionally on that kind of maintenance human operations work but the good thing for us is all of the work we spend doing that is actually really valuable qualitative feedback that feeds back into what are our problem statements what do we need to solve very often that same benefit doesn't exist within product and engineering. They do a lot of like reporting and things that is kind of like it doesn't help them build a better product burst at the time because they're not actually talking to their customers they're actually just like doing things that keep the bills turning internally. So that's the kind of like standard structure I suggest I'm sorry this is going off for so long but I feel this is actually the most important question in the whole AMA how many people you have in your team is going to dictate how many people you have in your first squad and then how many squads you have thereafter right so zero to a hundred you might actually only have one small squad and then you bring in maybe some consultants or other experts at various points the people who are aware of two hats and you just do less right because you haven't got as many initiatives you need to be triggering but you start getting to that like 200 to 700 or whatever we got there that kind of scaling phase right so talentful is a great example of this we just had to have more people in our team we had like a very full squad and we were very busy we watched a multiple things going on at once but really this is where you start you're starting to have more squads working across more things so you might have one squad just focused on talent attraction and onboarding you might have one squad in the different funnel one squad just focused on performance and engagement one squad focused on retention so you do it funnel wise you can do it metric wise you could say one squad is just focused on optimizing our internal promotion retention rate getting more people growing and more people staying one might be focused more on ROI so how do we make people more performant and have like our cost of making the performance potentially lower or like more efficient whatever right you arrange your squads in some way people can move between them and then when you start getting to this a thousand employees plus space doubt Lindsay actually go and check out his podcast his writing his community has some really cool thoughts on this Googler and I actually also think this is also how Melanie and maybe even Zappia do this as well because they also adopt like people since product technologies if they start thinking about it as a multi product business so no longer you're just working on one thing you are now google making google search engine which is maybe TA and then you're also google making Gemini and there's two kind of different products that are being built there with different more squads working underneath them so again very similar to kind of how you would structure a product team and that's kind of the way that you would strike like you that's also the way that you would scale product team as your team got bigger but your users got more your tickets got more whatever you want to focus on gosh hey done I'm just curious what is the largest company that you've heard of not that you've necessarily worked with that is yeah that has done that has implemented people absence of product I'm just curious like what is the like top in a top in boundary that so far that you've heard of so I when my team was looking up to become a two thousand and you didn't know specifically about me we had 13,000 globally but I think only 2000 really touched this all structure that we had obviously dart as you google and I don't think I dropped a lot of the ideas around this there but I also want to fly like people upstairs of products is not like a you know when I wrote the blog post and then wrote the book it wasn't like I like kind of dreamed this up in a vacuum like this was being inspired by practical things that were happening at other companies like Netflix and Facebook and Goldman Sachs like a lot of some of these ideas were existing in these companies but maybe not being cold this maybe not a hundred percent aligned to squads like at Goldman Sachs we had strats and quants in our HR team that's a really people up to the product kind of thing to do we're in more of a shared services all design but yeah so I think I remember in like 2008 2009 going through a Goldman going through an an agile HR training and I remember all of us were like what is this what is it point taken there are a lot of big orgs that are doing this and so I want to keep moving well quick quick quick question so Jesse I love how you broke it down that you know you have squads and as you get bigger there's just more work and so you can separate the squads out by funnel you can do it by metric but you may have said this but what's the optimal size of a squad like at what point does the squad become too big I kind of always say it's like about six six seven if you want to bring like an external person into advice like if you do a comp project you might want to have the lead someone to do like market analytics to use research someone to do like communication design someone to do like maybe a radio connections really HR I s someone to be maybe doing like policy rewrites and communications those things and then you might want to say like okay we also want some of the comment actually knows a lot about comp that will help like really guide this project part time but yeah it's like six six is usually a good amount anything more than that it just has become like a kind of multi-headed team that has trouble keeping momentum I think and I did see a question on titles as well so like when you move to squads are like team members they have new titles like how does what is like how material is the team structure change if you can if there's a quick answer to that I personally really like to shift everyone like I said it's like a generic title the people and talent partner people in talent manager people and talent lead whatever it is I think that just it's moving in the direction that I think HR is moving towards anyway it's becoming well this is I think that I'm just I'm gonna pile on then because I was the answer I was hoping for and so Allison asked how does this flat title approach talent partner impact compensation benchmarking and so just curious real quick what your take is on that like how do you differentiate comp when you know we all have the same time or a generic title how do you look at that there's a moment that happens in a lot of companies someone will ask question like do we actually know what our total labor cost is right now and the answer is give me a day not because the data doesn't exist but because it's spread across payroll time tracking HR systems and a few spreadsheets that no one fully trusts and that lag adds up because decisions get delayed and opportunities get missed but the real issue isn't payroll it's that your workforce data isn't connected to how you run the business and that's where into it quick books payroll comes in it connects payroll time tracking team management and accounting all in one place. So you can actually see what's happening as it happens. In this summer, it's expanding into the full employee lifecycle, including hiring and onboarding directly into payroll, automated workflows for key moments like promotions and offboarding, centralized documents with eSagentures, invisibility into time benefits and performance alongside payroll. So instead of waiting for answers, you already have them. If you want to learn more, you can go to quickbooks.com/workforce. Yeah, I think that's a really fair question. God, calm. So first of all, I think it's actually becoming a very, very common title anyway. I think a lot of businesses are now moving towards kind of more generic, like HR partner or even like a couple of years ago, there was no title as like HR business partner. It was like you worked in like, "Comp and ban or reward or payroll or whatever. People was a new brand new title." So there's like this title shifting is like, it's not a completely new thing. And I don't know that obviously. I don't think Alison was suggesting that, like that's what I was saying, but just worth saying it. It is becoming more and more common now. So it does exist. The other thing as well that I think is like, maybe a slightly more controversial take is, I think if you're just going to a comp tool and Alison, I don't know, you're probably listening to this. I don't want you to feel like I'm like, "I'm just representing you, but I'm just more saying, as an idea, if you're going to a comp tool and just typing in a title because that's the title you pay your team and pressing enter and then looking at that number and being like, "Great, that's my comp range." Then I think you're understanding the actual value of compensation analytics. They are an aggregate of a bunch of other people kind of mapping against titles. It's about the kind of work that you're doing. And you have to be thinking more thoughtfully about comp benchmarks than just taking what is written in the words and what's on the generic mapping and then putting them onto your team. I am, okay, Alison, coming in, sorry. Yeah, okay, that's a good one. I appreciate it. I'll finish my little ramble about the comp thing. Obviously, I think at the moment we're also in the precipice of people doing work that didn't exist six months ago. We talk about Andrew at retail next to who's been building people in this chat vibe coding apps for their team. This is not a task that we had to hijab people a little while ago. How are we supposed to be compensating for these skills that we're requesting about team now? So this is an interesting question just generally about what do we think about when it comes to comp? I think now to Alison's point, it starts becoming much more about what does the team believe they should be paid and where they're getting that information. And this, I think, is where transparency and logic around your compensation starts becoming really important. I think if you're paying your team, so if you're asking your team to take a risk on you to some degree, I want you to come and join people my team doing people as a product, you're going to be having a more flat title. You're going to be working across projects that are going to have probably a little bit more breadth and depth than you might be if you were just a junior HR manager. For that, I want to make sure that we're paying you really competitively. I'm going to be holding you in a very high standards. And I'm also going to be making sure that we're making an effort to compensate you for skills that might not be a traditional HR toolset like building work flows and automations and understanding how zapier connections work and web hooks. So I think then what you need is the ability to say to them, this is how I've come up with your compensation. I look at the 75th percentile. I look at these four titles. I compare ourselves to companies that are around the same growth rate as us or the same kind of stages us. And this is the kind of broad range I look at. This is why I look at it this way. And this is what you need to do to get to the next compensation level that I think is necessary to have the mutual respect between the two of them. And then I think if you have that generally what I've found is my team doesn't go out and say, well, wait a second, I can find that I can get this other title somewhere else because they have the concept about why it's different or if they did bring me something like that. It was easy for us to have an open-erormous conversation about why I probably agreed or disagreed with them. So I think it comes out to that like some kind of logical thing you can stand by. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I'm going to keep this moving because I know there's the questions are now rolling in. So clearly we've opened up the conversation and this is what we can see. This is why we're doing this. One of the things that I went deep on vibe coding myself in AI so much so that I launched my own kind of content hub and that goes deep on vibe coding and all things AI for HR. And one of the trends that I noticed last year is that some of the most innovative work that I was shared with me last year around AI for HR was being driven by people like Andrew Golden, people like Thomas Forsner. So there were teams, they were HR leaders, they were operating their teams using this operating model. And I have a thesis belief that the future in the AI economy, people team, the future structure, well people lapses a product in this agile mentality is going to be the winning model in the future because of the way what organizations are going to require of HR teams, what we will be building, you know, in this kind of scale to one, you know, economy where with AI we can really build custom things specifically for our company. And so I would be remiss to not I've been waiting for this question. And so how do you structure your people team in a way that actually holds up as AI becomes a bigger, bigger part of how we work. And you know, just looking at this chat, it's happening, which is super exciting. AI becoming a bigger, bigger, bigger part of how we work. And so what's your take? I mean, I think the answer is questions like you should move to a team to be able to do products like I think that's basically it. I just like honestly, like I think the reason that we've probably heard more and more and more people talk about this way of working over the last like 24 months is because this is the way that makes most sense in the world that we're kind of like everyone now can be built as we're not building things. And like let's just think about this practically for a second, what was the conversation that I was having a transform with someone about work I used to do even like a year ago. And I mean, I always used to give this example like back when I was a grad, I used to have to scan letters of offer and mail them back to myself and upload them into people's software. And that wouldn't even been imaginable, you know, five, 10 years later, so many things have changed. Well, now we're in a situation where I like, I don't even people don't even read policies you're writing more people interact with their own little assistant that reads the policies for them and helps them understand how things work. So like if I'm not writing, I don't want my team. Those are team in my future all structure whose job is to go around and make sure all of the policies are updated with documentation. It's their job now to be able to create like an architecture that feeds the data, right? And that's like building your building of products now. You're not updating documents. Now, it's a kind of like potentially slightly bad example because there's no like HR services team whose job is just to go and update documents, but hopefully you understand the message like so many parts of the old HR structure start kind of like crumbling underneath us when we realize that like huge chunks, swathes of their work will be radically changed, optimized away. And then other teams will have huge amounts of new really interesting complex work to do. What do we do? Like we, we have to move everyone to that team. Well, then how are we going to do that? Well, it becomes then people upstairs of products. Like it just eventually evolves, I think to that point. And so I know I'm going to say, I got a more later, but yeah. But just a quickly quickly build. So Stephanie asked a question in an AI enabled people model. Do we still need a six person squad or can two to three high leverage roles deliver the same outcomes? And this is the second time in two days. This has come up for me because I met with an a founder of an AI music company. So think like if everyone could develop or create a song that was like Mark Ronson type of quality like top producer type quality, well, this is the app that the CEO was building. And you know, I asked him, he just raised two million in funding. And I was like, I'm curious like, how did you even like grow your company, you know, being AI first or AI native? Like what does that even look like anymore? And so his response was like, oh, well, I used to need like three people, but now I just need like one person who knows the AI can do all the things. So does that also exist to Stephanie's point in HR? Yes, it remains to be seen. Okay. I think he has a can be yes, absolutely. Okay. I think you can now produce like really high quality work very quickly with smaller groups of people. So the reason I say kind of six is because that's what has traditionally worked. I've ever want to have the hats. If you're going to have people work across more things, two or three and have the skill set in the awareness to do that, then like, I actually think it's extremely possible. I've got like some more comments more about like this kind of because really what you're talking about here is like can AI help us have better ROI with our HR team? Can we produce more with AI? And I've got some hypotheses here about how this could be thought about or what could happen out of it. So one is like this like efficiency play, right? AI tools almost act as feature upgrades to our team. It makes the whole product of people for the product improve. We can reduce touch product productivity for everyone in HR. The thing that I really want to see though is evidence that we can actually create more productivity within a business by using AI all the time. Like are the things we're actually doing creating more productivity or are we just creating more stuff? Like is it effective to be able to do those things? That's the first thing. The second thing is there is a kind of displacement place. I think maybe it doesn't make everyone faster, but it means we can hire more junior people that behave more like senior people So we're able to go in and get some really like really bright young folks who have not a lot of experience or people from other industries that are now being displaced by AI Someone that used to work in customer support get them into people operations and have them now support on You know people operations and customer support really in some ways aren't that different when you think about how you're able to like deal with difficult conversations you know there's lots of things like that of transferable skills So there's a displacement play there instead of just like we get more junior people and then we get you know same size teams and AI does level them up But they're both working together, but then we really want to be able to understand like are they actually able to perform with the way that we thought about This is all like so much to learn about whether any of these hypotheses I think is going to be the right one for your team and the third one is There is like a question for me about is Having less people producing more things always the right way to back to the like two or three people in a high leverage squad is like people using a lot of AI Maybe have more stuff being created But I think there's a chance it may also result in people feeling like things are less human Mm-hmm In a people operations team if you interact with a chatbot and you have ticketing systems and you have Welfare that on on board you and you don't really need to speak to anyone and you're just working on the call front of like I'm just like feeding my brain tickets into the machine that takes my take certain turns it back into more AI stuff that then feeds into someone else's brain I actually think that there is like a really high risk of like it's kind of like feature output Like disconnects that's going to emerge Where actually I think just having humans is actually like very valuable I Don't want to push aside the value of the human operations work I spoke about before Anyway, I think that was a bit of a rant but I think there's like there's different beliefs I have about this and I think any of them could play out I'm kind of hearing a yes possibly, but we need to be careful We need to do it tonight Right, but we're not just there to like produce Like I mean, I've got into like five coding world as well, right? Like I've gotten into like I feel some caution and I really love doing it But like everyone can become wildly productive with AI. I can produce wild amounts of stuff but producing wild amounts of stuff is not actually the use of a lot of people's jobs It also you'll find it the actual kind of AI music He may have been able to build that product really quickly and the products looks beautiful But someone he's still going to have to go out and like figure out the marketing plan and do that and speak to people and publish things and go to events and buy ad space and you know all that stuff you can't just have like What I don't want to live in a world either where we just have a bunch of computers like fully optimized clicking everything on our Hubs and I just sit here yelling at it like I'm not quite ready for that dystopia yet I still like getting on webinars until like you know it everyone on this webinar You could have all just gone onto Claude and typed in these questions and said give me the answer is if I was Jessica from from people and put it on audio and sat there I listen to it, but there's something kind of shitty about that, you know I don't know that's I'm now going to like a weird little dystopian hellhole, but like you know, thank you Stephanie really wicked question. I loved it I'm with you Jesse. I mean anybody can vibe good now and create all these different products But it takes so much time also. I mean at least right now like to build something so yeah, you can build that cool tool overnight but maintaining it and reprompting it and waiting and debugging It still takes a lot of time, but yeah, that's probably another topic that we can cover on the next day. Always better. Sometimes like actually it's nice to Yeah, produce things with slightly more human and slightly less I don't know. Yeah, anyway, that's my feature. Love it So we do have some questions in the Q&A and I'm going to start with a question from Cindy What do you think of breaking out your customers in different categories depending on what the topic might be or the problem? For example, I have scientific professionals and non-degree manufacturing folks who are sometimes buying a different work product Sometimes you're not Not completely agree. Love this. I have worked with people part of people leaders who have worked in companies like this where they have like a manufacturing location or a logistics hub was something like that and then they also have like a back office team I actually did some work with SoundCloud a couple of years ago who had like a very creative side of the business And then like product and engineering side of the business and those two teams have like very different things that they kind of subscribing to in some ways So these things exist. Yeah, I think it's totally fine to build different products with different teams. I think it's I'm like Think about like there are also companies like Apple This is probably not a great example because they're so broad, but I kind of think it's still six Apple has products that like Pretty much it's the same user they're selling to like a person that thinks computers are like they computer's kind of part of their identity It's really beautiful. They love the user interface. They want all their stuff in their house to connect I see that I see it with that match in the little AirPods. They're like ideal customer profile is probably like broadly the same across their products We don't know that's not 100% true, but you kind of probably moving with me on this one And then you have products where like toyota you've got a camera you've got a People mover for mom taking her kids with the soccer and the minivan you've got a big massive truck Like there's different people are buying those different things And when you watch ads for those different cars is a different user they're trying to bring in that there's probably like a different sales process that they think about There's probably a whole different approach to have that building the products with whether they're testing. I'm sure You know if you're driving a little Mini or something that's probably like a different amount of testing it goes through then if it's like a family sedan that they know We're gonna have baby seats in every chair like there's like different things that are going to be going through the testing process I think that's totally fine to do the same thing in people ops. I think there's like a kind of ethical echinus we feel about it Because there's so much of our job is and should be around a quality and fair treatment And I don't think we should ever subvert that ever obviously But I think you need to like logically challenge the echinus sometimes and think am I doing what's in the best? It's an interest of the business or is this actually to start a thing that feels like I've been trained to look out for Rightfully and this is actually a red herring good job good question. Sydney similar but different question How about global teams? So got a question from Peter who said the question is how about global teams? Geo-specific matrix on top of the metric slash funnel squad logic question mark Great question. I personally am not a Especially now everyone there's like so much more flicks push towards remote working I'm actually a big fan of having my teams work geopolitical Agnostic as much as it's possible time frames permitting like obviously having a team that's set in London and San Francisco Like Australia and San Francisco be really rough, but I think geo-agnostic is tends to be my preference However, if you have a business that operates fundamentally separately and they do exist like I just talked about mechan I company that I used to work at mechan UK Was a very different beast operationally the mechan Europe Difference the year different structure. I still did some work with mechan Europe, but I wasn't in mechan Europe We had people off this as a product operating in the UK and see we did not in Europe So I think yeah, it makes sense But if your company is operating globally if you've got a policy and approach tends to be more global I would say try to move it in that direction Yeah, all right. I'm gonna key there we We could have spent the whole time on org design and that is not surprising Because I remember in our cohort with you Jesse like there were just so many questions on team structure Organizing the team all the kind of permutations that exist out there in terms of how you know unique aspects of companies etc etc and so but we do want to touch on metrics before we wrap up for the day And so I'm hoping we can get through a question or two and we've done a full episode with you on on metrics that matter And so I have a feeling I know at least some of the answers you're gonna give me here, but curious if anything's evolved We got this question from Penny Scarple you know, hopefully I'm saying that right penny if you're on here at MMA financial group What should be the top three metrics for your people ops and why great question So I'm a huge fan of this is okay. I mean huge fan of cross functional metrics is the first one rather than just like focusing on a halt scoring I really like things that look across the dry correlations or like something Change let me explain myself. I'm not being very clear. What I've heard favorite metrics is internal promotion retention rate rather than just retention Of the people we think are great. We promote we want them to grow how long do they stay after their first year? That's a really good metric the reason I really like that one is because when people get promoted They're often like a little bit less effective You're kind of doing asking them to do something a little bit harder That's kind of new if you're doing promotions well if people being promoted. It's the exact same job and then there's no change and it's Easy for them then maybe you're kind of letting that go too long Don't promotion retention rate is a good one and I think what you would maybe see in a It a team where you were making it take too long I make people really drag out to get to that promotion is you might actually see quite a little churn after the promotions Because people like great. I got it finally now. I want to go somewhere else that could give me more growth and like let me do things quicker Doesn't you see one um, but yes, I think it's retention rates of fun one. I think things like LTV which I have written a lot about Barbara from Pendo's written a lot about I know we've spoken a lot about with beautiful Pete Fader who does did has a PhDs and Huge amounts of studies on this about Wharton Really really fun is the LTV. I know we're getting towards the close. That's two metrics. And the third one I like to look at. Oh, I like to look at regrettable nutrition, but I calculate it in a kind of weird way. I ask three questions. Would we fight to rehire this person? Even if you don't, you have a no counteroffer policy. Would we try? Would we want to? Like, do we feel like wrong about it? Second thing is, would we rehire them again in the future? So you may say, like, I actually don't really want to, like, fight to hot rehire this person right now, but in the future, I'd love to have them back. And then the third one is, do we have regrets about how this was handled? Did we give this person a promotion too late? Was this person super-agreved? Did we have to terminate this person in a way that felt like against our ethics? We had to like, sign a settlement agreement because something went awry. I ask all those three questions. If the answer to them is two, then they are regrettable. If the answer is one, then it, like, is a flag. Maybe, maybe you're regrettable. You know, we'll, since these are your three, five metrics, we'll try to get a little cheat sheet together for the attendees just in terms of how we calculate, you know, how to calculate. The 101 and how to calculate your top three metrics. I'm going to try to squeeze in one more question. And I believe Daniel, we're going to do there a couple of other traditions that we want to follow before we wrap up. Someone asks, how do you get the metrics that matter when there are no systems currently to measure them? And the data isn't reliable at best. So how do we drive clarity when there's not a lot of information? Yeah, I mean, you kind of have to start somewhere, right? I depends on what they are. If it's like, I feel like there's like baseline, a lot of the things that I've just mentioned, then total promotion retention rate, gradable and regrettable nutrition. Maybe you haven't been calculating the way that I've been calculating it. That's okay. You can still look at regrettable nutrition, though. You've been looking at it and ELTV. I think you can figure them. If you've got a HRIS and you're getting like the kind of minimum of day most HRISIS can do, you probably actually can't do a better job of getting the data than you think. Then the next thing is like, I don't think you need to want a big data audit. You don't need years of perfect data. It's only clean out. I think it's okay for you to acknowledge that in the past, there's been some gaps and you're making decisions based on smaller time horizons or information that we might be measuring slightly differently, but we're aware of that, right? Like, where are this really interesting? I was actually talking today about this really interesting blog from Ben Stancell who talked about all the time. I love his blog. It's on sub-site. Check it out. I was in the link and he was saying, summarizing, engineers use a lot of AI that use it all the time. They're constantly using AI to help them code and do all these things and have agents building on their behalf. Data analysts rarely do. This could either mean a, data analysts are lazy and stupid and they have no idea how to use AI or b, maybe data analysis actually not the best job always for AI. Don't get me wrong. LLM is very helpful supporting a human in a co-piling seat to do analysis. The reason why is because all human related data is difficult to measure and data is not reliable. There's qualitative data. There is context. There's information that's not hidden within the numbers. There is no world in which I am going to say to you, you have everything you need, probably in a HRIS or some kind of big information system. If you just could only connect your ATS and Slack and then you would be set. You can make all your decisions. No. You're always going to have big chunks of missing information that you're going to have to make rational decisions about what happened here, where did this go, either in the past or in the future. So don't put yourself up too much, even in the best of teams. They are still facing the same thing. Do a really good job of just like doing the best you can now in terms of your HRIS and the baseline information that you need. And then really invest in becoming data literate and critical about what's going on. And I think that's actually going to take you a really long way. Also, one other thing I'd say is all the metrics you know you cannot get, but you know that you need. Put them on a spreadsheet. Every single week, try to fill them in. And if you can't fill them in every week, then you have a running record of how long you have gone without information that you don't know how to get. And it will remind you to try and figure that out. Well, we have one question that just came in from Angelita. And I think we can squeeze it in as organizations increasingly leverage AI for efficiency. How do you recommend defining which works should remain human centric? And how do we measure and prove the impact of that human centered work? Beautiful question. This is why I feel like we talk a lot about the people, it's a product side to the building. And I think in this world, it's actually fun to talk about because we get to talk about like vibe coding and building integrations and like setting cool stuff out human operations, they're talking the analysis, the understanding, the problems, the really getting the context on things, all that stuff we just talked about the data, right? That is just as important. It is there's a reason that I don't suggest going above like 50% really building products is because your job is actually still so deeply moved forward by spending time out talking to human beings. You need that to build trust, you need that to be respected, you need that to be able to really understand what's happening on the front lines. So I would say make sure you're maintaining that split of your team spending like 50% of their time doing human operations, maybe 60% some week. And that means running really effective one-to-one's where you're asking good questions, not just rambly kind of chats with the team, not old school people partnering questions but really really thoughtful questions that are trying to get something deeper, that are trying to build user research based and helping people use the tools you're building. Actually going out and talking to managers was this helpful? Did it actually like, did you understand it? Did it feel impactful for you? Not everything is a survey, not everything is a you know an AI submit it for, not everything is a text analysis. You miss so much fidelity about the things that made you come into HR when you reduce everything to that and which is a dissatisfaction to yourself and you also reduce so much of the quality of the awesomeness of the work that you can do when you do that which is a service to your company. Jesse, I always feel like you end with like a mic drop and that was not one of them. So we have one last tradition and we have about one year, so hopefully we can get through it. One word close. So what's one word or a few words that are coming to mind for you as we end this out? And I'll go first, I'll say squad. I'll go next. I'm going to say never enough time. There's never enough time on these surveys. I would say move it and grooving. Shout out to like baby Lena with a little helmet. Shout out Lena. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today. I think you'll get a pop up when you leave this to join our wait list for our first MPL build cohort. We'll be doing that with Jesse probably in a couple two or three months. We haven't finalized it. But if you want to be the first person that finds out, click yes to that question. And that's a wrap. Thank you guys for joining. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks guys. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the modern people leader. We really, really appreciate it. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating. It would mean the world to us. And connect with us on LinkedIn. We want to know what you think about the show and you can find links to both of our profiles and the show notes. Thanks again for listening and see you on the next episode. [Music]