FFC006 | Mindset Shift #3: The ability to build

Abandon the idea that buying tools guarantees solving employee problems.

This post continues to explore the ideas from my post on Employee experience as a product.

Why HR Technology Investments Often Miss the Mark

Every year, organisations spend billions on HR technology. These tools and platforms are designed to streamline processes, improve employee engagement, and drive business outcomes. Yet, despite this massive investment, the reality for employees often falls short.

Instead of seamless, user-friendly experiences, employees often encounter fragmented systems. The problem isn’t the tools themselves, but how they’re configured, integrated, and aligned with employee needs.

This disconnect stems from a common misconception that: simply buying and implementing the right tools is enough. But technology alone doesn’t solve problems.

To truly impact outcomes, organisations must move beyond treating technology as a one-time implementation project. Instead, they must embrace a mindset of building.

By building, I mean creating coherent, user-centric solutions through cross-functional collaboration and iterative design. Building doesn’t mean coding software from scratch; it means empowering teams to transform a patchwork of tools into an intentional, seamless experience.

This philosophy aligns with the principles of the Product Operating Model, which views technology solutions as evolving products designed to deliver continuous value to employees and organisations alike.

In this post, I want to explore why building is essential, what it truly means in the context of HR technology, and how organisations can shift from chaos to coherence to deliver results that matter.

The Challenge: Why Current Approaches Fall Short

A $20 Billion Spend That Misses the Mark

The HR technology market is booming, with organisations worldwide investing over $20 billion annually in employee-facing tools, and projections that the market will continue to grow to $30B over the coming years.

There is a tool for everything, from the big HRIS platforms through to best-of-breed small players.

Yet, despite this abundance of choice, employees often face multiple systems that don’t connect, workflows that feel counterintuitive, and tools that create friction rather than value.

Most companies approach HR technology as a procurement exercise. They focus on buying tools, configuring basic requirements, and integrating at a surface level. While this ensures the tools technically function, it rarely delivers a seamless experience for employees.

The Consequences: Poor Results Despite High Costs

This fragmented approach carries significant costs:

• Wasted Investments: Underused or misused technology delivers poor ROI.

• Employee Disengagement: Confusing systems frustrate employees and undermine productivity.

• Operational Inefficiency: Fixing broken workflows or navigating complex systems wastes valuable time.

To create meaningful outcomes, organisations must rethink their approach to HR technology. Instead of relying on tools alone, they need to focus on the human and operational systems that make technology effective.

These challenges highlight a deeper issue: the way organisations think about technology. To deliver real results, it’s time to move beyond implementation to building solutions with employees at the centre.

Reframing ‘Building’: It’s Not About Writing Code

Debunking the Myth: Building ≠ Coding

When most people think of “building” technology, they picture software engineers writing lines of code to create something entirely new. But in today’s HR technology landscape, that’s rarely necessary or even practical. Modern, off-the-shelf tools have made it possible to achieve sophisticated outcomes without writing a single line of code. The key lies in how these tools are used.

The Modern Opportunity: Configurable, Off-the-Shelf Solutions

With the rise of configurable SaaS platforms, companies have access to an incredible range of pre-built capabilities. These tools offer flexibility through advanced configuration, allowing organisations to tailor workflows, user experiences, and integrations to fit their unique needs.

Building in this context doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Instead, it’s about using these tools intentionally, creating solutions that feel seamless and coherent to employees. This approach unlocks the potential of modern technology without the heavy burden of custom software development.

Rethinking Building as Journey Design

At its core, building isn’t about ticking off tasks like configuring workflows or connecting systems. It’s about starting with a deep understanding of the employee journey and designing solutions that create “coherence” across touch-points.

Rather than serving process A with system A and process X with system X, organisations must ask:

• What is the employee trying to achieve across these systems?

• How does it feel to transition between them?

• How can we create an end-to-end experience that feels seamless, intuitive, and supportive?

Building in this context requires applying design thinking and cross-functional collaboration to craft a journey that works, not just for a single process or tool, but for the broader employee experience.

What It Means to Truly Build

From Silos to Seamless: Designing for the Employee Journey

To move beyond chaotic implementations, organisations need to embrace a new mindset: building solutions that centre on the employee journey. This means understanding how employees interact with different systems across their lifecycle, identifying pain points, and intentionally crafting experiences that feel connected and coherent.

Here’s what it means to truly build:

1. Assign Problems, Not Solutions

Building starts with clarity about the challenge you’re trying to solve. Instead of dictating that a team “implement System A,” assign them a problem like, “Reduce the time it takes for new hires to feel productive.” This empowers the team to think holistically about how to achieve the outcome, rather than getting locked into narrow, tool-specific solutions.

2. Empower Cross-Functional Teams

A coherent experience requires collaboration across disciplines: HR for process expertise, IT for technical know-how, UX for design thinking, and business leaders for strategic alignment. By bringing these perspectives together, you can break down silos and design solutions that work across the organisation.

3. Design for the 4 big product risks: Value, Viability, Usability, and Feasibility

Teams must evaluate potential solutions through four lenses:

• Value: Does this meet the needs of employees?

• Viability: Does this align with business goals and priorities?

• Usability: Is this intuitive and frictionless for employees?

• Feasibility: Is this technically and operationally achievable?

This approach ensures that solutions are both effective and realistic.

Bringing It to Life: A Practical Example

Imagine a team tasked with improving the internal mobility experience for employees, helping them find and transition into new roles within the organisation.

A siloed approach might involve focusing on individual systems: using the HRIS for job postings, a learning management system (LMS) for skill-building courses, and separate tools for performance and career development discussions. Each system is configured independently, with little regard for how employees experience the process as a whole.

A truly cross-functional team, however, would start with the employee journey:

• What motivates an employee to seek a new role internally?

• How do they identify opportunities and assess their fit?

• What support do they need to prepare for and transition into their new role?

By mapping the journey, the team might discover critical pain points: employees struggle to find relevant internal roles, don’t know which skills to build for advancement, or lack visibility into career paths.

The team could then experiment and test various solutions using lightweight prototypes and assumption testing methods:

• A personalised career portal that combines job opportunities, skill gap analysis, and tailored learning recommendations in one place.

• Automated workflows that connect managers, HR, and employees during the transition process to ensure smooth handoffs and clear expectations.

• Notifications and guidance for employees to proactively track career milestones and prepare for growth opportunities.

The focus is always on the outcome: creating a seamless, supportive process that empowers employees to navigate their careers within the organisation confidently.

The Ingredients of Coherent Technology Solutions

Designing for the Employee, Not the System

Creating coherent technology solutions isn’t about implementing tools in isolation. It’s about starting with the employee’s needs and building outward. This requires a shift from thinking about individual processes or systems to focusing on the broader journey an employee experiences as they navigate their work.

Here are the key ingredients to get it right:

1. Understand Employee Journeys

• Start by interviewing your users and mapping their journey across key moments. Try to not think about traditional “HR” processes like onboarding and performance reviews, instead use the employee’s own language. You might hear the employee describe moments like “I have an interview”, “I have received an offer”, “it’s my first day”

• Use design methods like persona development, experience mapping, and pain point analysis to uncover where transitions break down or systems fail to deliver value.

Example: Rather than designing onboarding as a standalone task, think about how it transitions into role-specific learning and early feedback. The result might be an integrated experience that connects new hire onboarding with tailored learning paths and manager check-ins.

2. Think Holistically About Systems and Touch-points

Employee experiences don’t exist in silos, and neither should the systems and processes that support them. While HR platforms may play a central role, the full journey often spans Finance tools (e.g., expense reporting), IT systems (e.g., helpdesk ticketing), and operational processes (e.g., receiving security badges or laptops).

To create a seamless experience, organisations must step back and view these touch-points as interconnected elements of a broader journey.

Ask:

• How do employees move between these systems?

• Are there unnecessary barriers or inconsistencies in the experience?

• What would it look like to remove friction and deliver a unified solution?

Achieving this level of integration requires buy-in from all stakeholders involved: HR, IT, Finance, Facilities, and beyond. Collaboration and shared accountability are critical to designing solutions that work across the organisation and avoid the pitfalls of fragmented ownership.

Example: Consider the onboarding process. It’s not just about setting up payroll in an HRIS or configuring an onboarding workflow. A holistic approach considers every touchpoint, from Finance tools for expense setup to IT systems for laptop provisioning, and even Facilities processes like issuing security badges.

Achieving this requires input from all stakeholders: HR, IT, Finance, and Facilities. A siloed approach might result in employees navigating separate portals or waiting weeks for essential resources.

In contrast, a cross-functional team could design an integrated onboarding experience where:

• New hires receive their security badge and laptop on day one.

• Payroll and expense systems are pre-configured before the start date.

• Managers and IT receive automated reminders to ensure all equipment and systems are ready.

The result is a single, seamless process that reduces frustration and improves time-to-productivity for new employees.

3. Apply an Iterative Mindset

• Build in stages: prototype, test, and refine.

• Use employee feedback as a guide to improve solutions over time.

• Focus on solving the biggest pain points first, then layer on additional functionality as confidence grows.

Example: When launching a new platform, start with a pilot for a single department. Gather feedback on usability and outcomes, and iterate before scaling the solution organisation-wide.

4. Measure What Matters

• Define clear success metrics tied to employee outcomes, not just system usage.

• Measure adoption, satisfaction, and efficiency improvements to ensure the solution is delivering value.

Example: Instead of only tracking how many employees use a new self-service portal, measure whether it reduces HR ticket volume and improves employees’ ability to complete tasks independently.

The Product Operating Model in Action

These ingredients are the foundation of a product operating model: a philosophy that treats technology solutions as evolving products designed to meet employee needs. By aligning systems, processes, and people around this mindset, organisations can replace chaos with coherence, delivering experiences that truly drive engagement and business results.

The Payoff: Delivering Outcomes That Matter

When organisations embrace the mindset of “building” and focus on designing coherent experiences, the impact is transformational. Instead of frustrating, disconnected interactions, employees gain seamless journeys that enable them to focus on what matters: their work.

Here’s what happens when you shift from chaos to coherence:

• Employees who interact with well-designed systems are more likely to feel valued and supported. This boosts morale, reduces frustration, and increases engagement.

• Unified experiences reduce duplication and eliminate inefficiencies. Employees spend less time navigating systems and more time on meaningful work.

• Engaged employees and efficient systems directly contribute to improved productivity, retention, and organisational agility.

• Companies that master this approach gain a powerful edge. By treating technology as an enabler of experiences rather than a collection of tools, they attract and retain top talent, reduce operational waste, and foster a culture of innovation.

• The journey to coherence begins with one decision: to rethink how technology supports employee experiences. Start by examining a single employee journey, like onboarding or internal mobility, and asking:

  • Are we solving the right problems?

  • Are our solutions connected and user-centric?

By shifting focus to employee journeys and building intentionally, you’ll not only improve outcomes but also create the foundation for lasting transformation.