People Experience as a Product

When looking at the People function, I’ve always categorised it into 4 product pillars - Attraction, Experience, Engagement and Performance.

The ethos can be summarised by working backwards from that list - the end goal most Founders want is a high performing team. Well, to get that they need the team to be engaged. For the team to be engaged they need to have a great experience. And if you get that right, you’ll be able to attract the best talent.

It’s a useful exercise for People teams (and Founders) to break these 4 pillars down and consider what are their key features (what they’re doing) and what’s on the roadmap (what they want to be doing) to enhance each one. Each product maturity will be relative to the stage you're in as a business.

For example, if we look at Attraction, at the Scale stage (just building out the fundamentals) then it could look like this:

For example, if we look at Performance, at the Establish stage (increased mix of strategic and execution) then it could look like this:

Doing a deep dive into all of the features helps form the ongoing roadmap. Ask questions like ‘Which area do we think will have the biggest impact?’ or ‘which people product are we neglecting’.

Often you’ll find in earlier stages all the work goes on Attraction, with limited efforts going into Experience. That’s not to say that’s right or wrong, the maturity of each bucket is usually correlated to business priorities at the time.

But, making sure you have an eye on all of them, being honest with yourself about how good each bucket really is, and building a roadmap that encompasses progress with all of them, will set you on the right path to building a high performing, engaged environment with the best talent having a great time.