How using product principles will help us make more impact!
Last week we organized a meet-up at our office for the people community. We invited Luke O’Mahoney to talk about his favourite topic: Product Principles in HR.
Have you heard of this way of working? If you think it’s just the latest hype, think again. This way of working can make sure you transform the way you and your teamwork. It will save you from the endless day-to-day - and put you in the saddle to solve problems that are actually important to the business and your people!
At 7people, we believe it's time to borrow a page from the playbook of our friends in Product, UX, and Design. Let's dive into how embracing product principles can change how we work (and make an impact!) in HR.
Why Product Principles?
‘Product principles are the core values and guidelines that drive the development and management of products.
They ensure that every decision aligns with the overarching goals and user needs. Now, imagine applying that to HR.
Instead of siloed, slow-moving processes, we could have a dynamic, user-centered approach that adapts as quickly as our businesses do.’
Rapid Experimentation: Our Secret Sauce 🚀
One of the most exciting product principles is rapid experimentation. This means testing ideas quickly and efficiently to see what works (and what doesn’t) without the fear of failure. For HR, this could look like piloting a new onboarding process with one team before a full rollout or trying different formats for performance reviews to see what resonates best with employees.
Embracing rapid experimentation helps us identify high-impact initiatives and ditch the time-wasters, ensuring we're always delivering value where it counts. Plus, it keeps things fresh and exciting.
User-Centric Design: Putting People First
In product development, user experience is king. Applying a user-centric approach to HR means we start with the employee experience and work backwards. What do our people need to succeed? How can we make their work lives better, more productive, and more fulfilling?
Something clicked when we read Jessica’s Zwaan book ‘Built for People’, in which she refers to the employee experience as a subscription product. Think about it, for you to remain subscribed to Netflix, they need to keep on adding shows/movies that are relevant to you. In other words, they need to provide continuous & incremental value. The same goes for the employee experience.
When you join a company and ‘buy into’ the employee experience, you continue to make that purchasing decision on a regular basis. → Any month in which you choose to remain employed by a company is another month in which you are subscribing to that specific employee experience. The month you decide to hand in your notice is you canceling that subscription.
As Luke likes to say:
‘For people to remain subscribed, we need to make sure we engage, develop & delight them on an ongoing basis’.
This might mean redesigning training programs to be more interactive and engaging or creating more flexible policies that recognize the diverse needs of our workforce. By focusing on the 'user' experience of our employees, we can create more impactful, meaningful HR initiatives that truly make a difference in the employee experience.
Iterative Improvement: Always Be Optimizing
Products are never finished; they’re continuously improved based on user feedback and changing conditions. Similarly, HR practices should evolve. We should always be looking for ways to optimize our processes and policies to better serve our teams.
This could involve regular feedback sessions with employees, using new tools to streamline HR processes, or staying on top of the latest in HR technology and practices to ensure we're always at the cutting edge.
Let's Get Started!
Ready to start experimenting with product principles in your HR team? Here’s how you can begin:
Talk to your product person (e.g. Head of Product) about how they approach & prioritize their work. This will help you speak the same language + you’ll already have an internal ambassador for your new way of working!
Identify a small project: Choose a manageable HR initiative that could benefit from a fresh approach.
Next step: READ THE FULL BLOG
This is a somewhat serious topic, which requires a bit more in-depth explaining than usual. So we wrote a relatively long blog which outlines the exact 5 steps you need to take to tackle any HR topic this way. Hope you enjoy the read! If you don’t have time right now, save it for a rainy day, we’re sure you’ll enjoy this new way of working.
Moral of the story: Us ‘people people’ need to start thinking as ‘product people’, and create an EX that employees want to subscribe to.
It’s a cool new approach and will lead to…irresistible organisations 💖
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