Jessica Z.

<start of post>

The best thing any HR leader can do is promote themselves to Chief People Product Officer...

Of the People Experience

That's my key takeaway from Jessica Z.'s session this morning at Startup People Summit this morning.

Why?

Because every company builds three products.

The one you sell to customers (your actual product),

The one you sell to investors (your fiscal product), and

The one your people subscribe to every single day until they hand in their notice...

That third one is the experience of work. And most people teams still run it like a compliance function instead of owning it like a product.

Would you be willing to take this job description to your boss?

🧑‍💼 Chief People Product Officer

Reports to: the mission (not the org chart)

Owns: the single biggest line item in the company. Headcount is 60 to 70% of the P&L, often 10x the marketing budget. You are the custodian of that investment.

→ Treat the experience of work as a product. Being compliant and paying people correctly is the floor. It's the MVP, not the job.

→ Start every project from a real problem statement and a hypothesis, the kind your product team would recognise. "People submit too many expenses and it annoys the HR team" doesn't count. Whose problem are you actually solving?

→ Accomplish everything through others. Build systems people can self-serve, not policies you have to police.

→ Speak the language of the board. ROI, employee acquisition cost, internal promotion retention rate. Talk about your team's impact in those terms and watch how differently you get listened to in the room.

🚫 a service centre

🚫 the policy police

🚫 the team that ships things no one uses

The part I loved most: you don't need a reorg to do this. It's mostly a mindset change. Even a people team of one can work this way tomorrow.

Instead of structuring your work around talent, ops, and partnering identify the problems that are stopping your company from doing it's best work, and then setup cross-functional squads who test solutions to those problems.

Adam Axon and I have met some amazingly courageous folks who are willing to work this way through PX Dojo where we help folks start to learn these fundamental mindsets: Chloe Sesta-Jacobs, Sophia Byrne, Sharon Coutts, Tammie McDonald, Natalie Shahine, Nilly K., and Ambra P. to name a few.

But I also know Jennah Robichaud, Antonia Buckman, and Irene Geurtjens are all adopting a PX as a Product mindset as well.

Who else is has already starting working like a Chief People Product Officer in Australia and New Zealand? I want to know who to be watching.

<end of post>