FFC001 | Employee experience as a product.

In the world of product management, we talk a lot about how successful products, services and experiences do two things:

1. Solve problems for our users and customers in ways that they love

2. What we build (and how it gets built) must work for our business; financially, ethically, societally, environmentally, etc

When companies are able to do both of those two things consistently well, more often than not they go on to create loyal and happy customers, sustainable business models, and strong business performance.

A company as a three-sided shape

I’ve often thought of a business as a three-sided shape with different 'faces' that it presents to the world:

1. Customers: the people that use our products and services, (usually) in exchange for money

2. Business stakeholders: investors or other people that have a financial stake in our company, or have a wider interest in what we do, which might extend to how the brand is perceived in the market, or the company’s wider societal or environment impact

3. Employees - the people who exchange their talent, time and skills for compensation and other benefits

There are of course exceptions, such as voluntary organisations and some non-profits or community groups, but on the whole, in the commercial sphere I think that this assessment stands up to scrutiny.

Successful companies rightly obsess about their customer experience, must make money to remain viable, and are increasingly focussed on their positive impact to wider society and the environment.

We haven't solved the employee experience

But I think it’s fair to say that employee experience, and work in general, is a problem that has not yet been solved, despite all manner of investment and good-faith motivation to solve for work, experience and culture.

We hear all the time about societal and economic trends that impact employee engagement and satisfaction - quiet quitting, tensions about return to office, burnout, disengagement. There is a whole industry of technology solutions that purport to solve for the employee experience. It won’t take you long to find a big consulting firm who can show you their slides on employee engagement, or posts on LinkedIn with takes on the 5 ways to drive engagement.

Some companies have mostly figured out the technology part - finding a job, onboarding, getting paid, growing your career, connecting with a wider purpose, and enjoying the journey at best isn’t terrible, but I think this is still very much the exception rather than the rule.

In fact, I would wager that most people probably shudder when they think about ‘enterprise’ technology. Who actually likes using most HR systems? Who finds doing expenses easy? How often have you heard or thought ‘how does this help me?’ ‘how is this an efficient use of my time?' when presented with the latest initiative?

We are doing it wrong

Employee experiences are almost universally poor, especially when compared to consumer experiences. This includes the technology that companies deploy, how we design the work that people do, most modern corporate cultures, everything.

And it’s not because of a lack of incentives or motivations - research routinely shows that happy employees equal happy customers and strong results usually follow.

I think companies, and specifically HR as a collective global practice, haven’t got the ‘how’ right yet.

The solution is right in front of us

The most successful product companies solve problems for their customers with technology-powered solutions, in ways that also work for their business.

If we already know how to build successful products that work for our customers and our business, maybe we could think about our employee experiences, and more ambitiously - jobs and work - in the same way?

Maybe the solution is right there in front of us?

What if we focussed our efforts on achieving two things:

1. Creating employee value: solving problems for our users in ways they love (applicants, candidates, employees, contractors, retirees, alumni, etc)

2. Creating business value: ensuring that what gets build (and how it gets built) works for our business; financially, ethically, societally, environmentally, etc

For this idea to work we would need to think of our current, past and future employees as our ‘customers’, who participate in a value-exchange of their talent, time and skills.

Once we make this mental leap, the ‘how’ quickly resolves itself.

There are already proven operating models that companies use with phenomenal success to solve for customer value and business value - this model is called the ‘product model’.

But what would that look like?

A definition of the product operating model was detailed by Marty Cagan in his book ‘Transformed’, which proposed that successful product companies consistently share the following traits:

• Technology is the engine of growth, and there is no separation between 'tech' and 'the business'. Successful products solve equally for the customer, for the technology, and for the business.

• Teams are given a set of problems to solve and desired outcomes to achieve, and are accountable for results

• The whole organisation cares about understanding the challenges of their users, their buyers, the state of the product, and how well it works

Successful product companies consistently do the following things:

• Rigorous clarity in selecting the best opportunities to pursue, focusing on the threats to take seriously, and making the most out of their investments

• Teams are assigned problems to solve and a corresponding measure of success, are empowered to discover solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, viable, and are accountable for outcomes

• Small, frequent releases allow them to respond quickly to customer needs, prove that new capabilities deliver the necessary value, and detect and resolve problems quickly

Successful product companies consistently invest in the following skills:

• Product management: responsible for the value & viability of the product, relationships with every aspect of the business, and are accountable for results

• Design: 'how it works’, responsible for the usability of the product, accountable for the holistic experience of the product, both virtual and physical

• Engineers: empowered to create the right solution, responsible for feasibility, accountable for delivery of what the team builds

• Leadership: lead with context not control, stakeholder trust, coaching & staffing, vision, structure, strategy, team objectives, evangelism.

Successful product companies organise their work around these concepts:

• Strategy: focus, transparency, insights

• Teams: empowered to collaboratively discover solutions and accountable for results

• Discovery: minimise waste, manage risks, rapid experimentation, responsible tests

• Delivery: frequent releases, instrumentation, automation, technical monitoring

• Culture: principles over process, trust over control, innovation over predictability, learning over failure

A fundamental change to HR Technology and work

With some simple mental tweaks, we can adopt the same principles and make a transformational shift in how we think about our employee-facing experiences, and even how we design the work that people do.

I would define a product in this context as:

A coherent package of technology and process that solves for a user's pains, needs or desires.

I think there are 5 simple mindset shifts required that would lead to a profound change in how we approach the employee experience problem. Each of these bullets will warrant a full post to properly do it justice.

1. Technology is the business: the first mindset shift is abandoning the idea that "technology is here to serve the business", where there is a distinction between ‘technology’ and ‘the business’. In successful product companies 'technology is the business’, i.e. the primary engine of growth. In practical terms, this means moving past discrete HR and technology competencies to the same 'technology is the business' mindset. To say this a different way, your customer-facing products solve for the customer, the technology and the business, so your employee-facing products need to solve for the employee, the technology and the business. In this context, 'the business' means your HR processes, policies, practices, experiences, capabilities, programmes, etc. This means breaking down traditional departmental silos - technology teams must understand HR needs, HR teams must understand technology constraints, and leadership must ensure that both HR and technology are aligned with overall business goals.

2. Product management: This means that you need real product management, especially product leadership, as a discipline. At its core, the product management capability is about deeply understanding the needs of your customers, a deep understanding of all aspects of your business, and collaborating with other disciplines to solve that problem for the customer in a way that also works for the business. In the model where we think of employees as 'customers', we need to deeply understand their needs, and guided by focus from our product strategy, go about systematically discovering technology-powered solutions that also work for our business. This means no more ‘projects’ and leaving behind the idea of ‘COEs’ and ‘initiatives’. Instead we would focus exclusively on the outcomes that we want our solutions to drive, organised around a coherent set of products that we offer. So, if we are launching a new LMS, our success should be framed entirely around driving measurable improvements in employee skill development, satisfaction, and career growth, and not just whether the project completed on time.

3. The ability to build: In order to truly impact outcomes, you need to organise and empower your product teams to build solutions. Building does not mean that you have to take on the cost of creating new software from scratch, in fact it's entirely possible to 'build' exclusively with modern configurable 3rd-party tools. Most companies purchase employee-facing technology solutions to use from 3rd-party vendors - the HR technology market is probably about $20B a year (and growing) by most credible estimates, and there are countless providers. Almost exclusively, most companies will do some configuration and integration of these tools, and the employee is left to navigate the resulting chaos with inevitable poor results. Building means that your cross-functional technology teams must have the ability to create coherent technology solutions, so that you can assign the team a problem to solve, empower the team to collaboratively discover solutions that are valuable, viable, usable and feasible, and hold them accountable for achieving results. 

4. Continuous discovery: discovery is a method of small, frequent research activities throughout the product development lifecycle, which infuses customer feedback into all decisions, instead of as a one-time activity. We perform discovery continuously to validate that our solutions create value for our customers and our business, to move from shipping features to delivering outcomes and performance, to reduce the cycle-time between customer touch-points, and to quickly determine which ideas will work and which ones won’t. I think there is a maturity curve idea for discovery capability, which we can probably break in to three parts:

   1) in its simplest form discovery can help us validate that the opportunities we are pursuing are valuable, and that our solutions improve day-day experiences (e.g. we want to increase learning discovery - does this solution make it easier for you to find the learning course you want?)

   2) a more mature discovery approach extends beyond the IT 'systems' we ask our employees to work with and encapsulates the physical and emotional environment; the workplace, the equipment, the hidden 'costs' that employees consider when 'buying' our product such as their commute or the opportunity cost of not taking on other work

   3) in its most mature form we can use these techniques to discover what people really want from their jobs, and design roles that help people find work that adds value to the business AND plays to individual and team strengths

5. Small, frequent releases: we want to be responsive, to test our solutions safely, and validate that what we build is useful. For example, rather than a one-time overhaul of the performance management system, a company might start by piloting a new feedback capability in one department, gather data on how it’s working, and then refine and expand it based on that feedback. This iterative process helps ensure that what’s built actually meets the needs of employees and the business, and allows the company to pivot or make adjustments if something isn’t working. By extension, we need to be able to measure impact, which means thinking differently about what we measure, and how frequently we take the pulse of the organisation

Changing systemic structures

Now, while employees as customers is a helpful metaphor, employees are bound by systemic and hierarchical dynamics that are not completely analogous to customer-product interactions - they aren’t actually customers.

Ultimately, creating better technology experiences is only part of the challenge. Intrinsic motivations like purpose, belonging, and autonomy, are vital to meaningful work experiences, and true employee empowerment requires more than better-designed tools and processes. It involves rethinking power dynamics and giving employees real agency in decision-making.  Problems like burnout, disengagement, and toxic workplace dynamics stem largely from leadership failures, organisational structures, and societal expectations, not a lack of effective technology or processes - for instance, no amount of “small, frequent releases” can fix issues like pay inequity or lack of diversity in leadership.

But - if we can at least give employees a comparable technology experience to what they get outside of your business, then I think it’s a start.