This is the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people. If you think traditional HR practices are stale and out of touch, you have found your People🤘

Learn how product principles and design thinking can transform your People function into a growth driver… all in the time it takes to drink your morning coffee☕

Whether you’re a PX newbie or already a pro, here you’ll find actionable tools and tactics to get full leadership buy-in and make an impact from day 1 🚀

P.S …mine’s a Cortado with oat if you’re buying 😉

Read time: 3 minutes

Hey Reader 👋🏻

A few years ago, “product-led” People teams were a rare sight. You’d hear whispers about a Head of People running A/B tests or building an onboarding flow in Notion, but that was about it.

Fast forward to today, and the shift is happening. More and more progressive People teams – especially in start-ups and scale-ups – are thinking and working like Product teams. Which honestly… is really f’in cool to see 🤘🏻

I’ve been building community around this way of working for over 3 years now, inspired by some of the OGs in systems thinking and product-led PX (JooBee Yeow, Dart Lindsley, Jessica Zwaan, Perry Timms – to name a few). And it’s been amazing to watch this go from fringe idea to something far more mainstream.

There’s no “one right way” to do product-led People Ops, but so far I’ve seen three main schools of thought emerge:

1. Productisation of HR – treating HR services as products.
2. People “products” – building individual products for internal users.
3. Work as a Product / PX as a Product – treating the experience of work itself like a subscription product.

All three approaches have huge value, but I lean towards PX as a Product because it forces you to think end-to-end. From attraction and onboarding, through retention, to offboarding and even win-back. Traditional HR siloes actively work against this level of coherent and connected employee experience. Breaking the siloes down is where the real magic starts to happen.

I’ve been iterating my PX Subscription Lifecycle model (over many months and many coffees 😆), now at version 1.3 – 4 stages, 3 flywheels, and 1 funnel – My hope is that this helps People teams map the full employee “customer” journey and provides a visual framework to help People teams communicate the product-led PX approach to internal stakeholders, as well as socialising the concept within People Teams themselves.

Today’s newsletter is a high-level walkthrough of the model so you can see how the pieces fit together – and hopefully start using it in your own work (if you do, let me know!).

Ok, let's walk it through.

The PX Subscription Lifecycle v1.3

note: I am going to use employees, users, subscribers and customers interchangeably in this walk through - for the purposes of this model, they are one and the same.

Think of your employee experience like a subscription product. People don’t just “join” and “stay” - they subscribe, renew, upgrade, pause, cancel, and sometimes they come back! Personally, when I was a Head of People, boomerang hires were the most satisfying hires of all and the the hires that gave the strongest indication that we were building a People Experience of real value.

Generally, you will have a combination of highly engaged customers, some passive users, and some actively disengaged and at risk employees. This is true whether you treat PX as a subscription or not, but by consciously applying the subscription product lens you have a MUCH higher chance of understanding which employees fall into each bucket and where the opportunities are across the full employee customer journey (which starts before they join) to create value, drive engagement and retain the best* subscribers over a longer period of time.

*best = those employees returning recurring value equal to or greater than their cost of acquisition and retention

This could be a very long newsletter if I go too deep on each element of this model, so for brevity I will keep this high-level, but let me know if you want me to run a webinar to do a deeper dive:

Ok, here’s the visual and walk through:

🔗Download the model as a PNG: The PX Product Lifecyle v 1.3.png​

💡Closed-Loop PX - Growth through Advocacy

The first thing to note is that this is a "closed-loop" model, with each stage engineered to generate advocacy through flywheels of value. At the heart of all great product growth is customer advocacy. The very best products create advocates for life, even after they cancel their subscription or no longer use the product. That's what we are aiming at, lifelong advocacy and non-user referrals.

Some of the best hires I have made have been referrals from unsuccessful candidates... yes, really! A no doesn't need to be a negative. With a carefully crafted experience, a potential detractor can become a promoter. This is a subject for another newsletter, so let's get back to the core model and have quick look at the 4 main stages.

Stage 1 – Talent Go To Market (GTM)

Every product needs a solid go to market approach, your PX product is no different. The truth is, your employee customer journey starts long before they come on board. This is an important point. The best brands know this to be true of customer acquisition, that's why they spend so much time building community around their brand, not simply marketing their products.

Apple has been a classic example of this over the years (anti status-quo), as has Nike (for those who do) and more recently - and closer to home for me - the UK founded gym lifestyle brand Gymshark has been exceptional at community building > product marketing - they even state clearly that they exist to unite the conditioning community.

Of course, you do need to market your product as well, marketing and brand co-exist, but it's far easier to market to an engaged customer community who are ready to buy. That's the goal with your talent GTM, build community around your employer brand, then build funnels which convert high quality and highly relevant talent. You should be able to dial talent conversion up and down as needed, the difference in PX product however is that demand is driven by you as the employer, scalable supply is achieved through access to an engaged talent community.

Stage 2 – Employee Onboarding + Activation

Again, employee experience begins before day one. If your employee customers experience a lack of communication, clunky processes, and friction leading up to their first day you are setting the expectation for what they are going to experience once they formally come on board. This can lead to drop off before you even get chance to onboard and you are also accelerating the rate of churn if they do make it through onboarding.

Onboarding is a critical stage of the employee customer lifecycle, it can often times determine the long term success of the hire. Don't leave it to chance! Put extra effort into designing a really smooth and enjoyable onboarding experience.

Once onboarded you enter the next most critical phase; Activation

In product, customer activation that magic moment when a new user first experiences the core value of your product - the "aha moment" is how it is often described. The earlier a customer experiences this moment, the more likely they are to stick around and the more likely they are to advocate for your product.

In PX Activation, we need to aim for this same objective. Onboarding isn't activation, it is activity. Activation for PX is when they’ve had their first ‘real’ success, or built a meaningful relationship, or seen how their work connects to something bigger etc it's about that "aha, I am in the right place" feeling.

If you nail activation in PX, you shorten the time to impact (productivity), boost retention rates, and set the tone for their entire employee journey.

Stage 3 – The PX Product (Core Experience)

This is the actual product - the day to day experience of work for an employee, the value it creates for them, the value they create through it, the growth it provides, or the stability - it's what your employees subscribe to.

This is where the most nuance exists, individual users are going to be engaging with your PX subscription for a variety of "jobs to be done" - but what sits central to the core value proposition is what I call the PX Flywheel:

Engage - In product terms, high customer engagement means users are interacting with your product frequently, deeply, and in ways that align with the value it’s designed to deliver. Guess what? the same is true for our PX product. We want employees to feel deeply connected and aligned, as well as taking value from their experience as an employee. It's well documented (Gallup run an annual global engagement at work survey, worth digging into those numbers) that high engagement leads to higher retention, higher productivity, higher advocacy, and higher profitability.

Develop - Create a sense of ongoing potential for growth. The moment stagnation sets in it's likely that the road to churn has begun. Whether its career progression, skill acquisition, or access to opportunities and experiences, employees need to feel a sense of progress - which doesn't mean promotions for all! that's not what this is about - it's more to do with providing a sense of ongoing value and that growth is always an option.

Delight - Create moments and experiences which exceed expectation and remind employees why they love to be here! These moments of delight can be low-key or blockbuster, but they essentially tap back in to that initial "aha" feeling. I have talked about my love for the Kano Model of product development previously which focuses on user delight (non-essential features which lead to disproportionate increases in user satisfaction) whilst balancing the needs of basic features (essential features for the product to work) and performance features (high potential to increase user satisfaction) - I would encourage you to think about your your PX Product features in this way too:

• Basic - must haves for the employee experience to work
• Performance - features which are growth enablers for people and business
• Delight - experiences leading to a disproportionate increase in satisfaction, retention and advocacy

If you can nail these 3 components you will have a better than average retention rate, higher productivity, and you will unlock compounding growth through advocacy.

Stage 4 – Churn + Win-Back

Ok, final stage - swap goodbyes for see you laters.

Employee churn is inevitable. Hopefully most of that attrition is positive and growth related (it can't always be of course) but there is enormous upside to carefully curating the offboarding experience and maintaining an active and engaged alumni community (there's that word again, community- there is a reason it keeps coming up). Your employee alumni can be a rich source of talent referrals, customer referrals (in the true sense), partnerships, and of course win-backs (or boomerang hires).

Again, the best brands understand this from a customer acquisition perspective and go to great lengths to keep in touch, re-engage and re-convert previous customers. Worth noting that we don't want to rehire everyone who leaves, but we do want to keep a positive relationship with as many as possible so they; a) speak positively about their experience working with us and refer their friends and peers, and b) there is the possibility of re-hiring the regrettable leavers at a later date.

Most companies are terrible at managing this stage of the employee lifecycle which means it's absolutely packed for differentiation opportunity for those who do 👀

Why it matters

I promised a high-level walk through, so I will stop with these descriptions of the key stages. Happy to do a deeper dive and get into the technicalities of execution at each stage, but will save that for another day (and format). I hope this walkthrough has given you food for thought and a place to start (or expand) your PX Product conversations.

When you start thinking of PX as a subscription product, you stop seeing “employee experience” as a set of disconnected programmes and start treating it as a continuous and connected journey.

The PX subscription lifecycle forces you to:

• Work cross-functionally, breaking HR siloes.
• Focus on value creation at every stage.
• Measure adoption, engagement, and advocacy like a product team would.

With this approach, you’ll have clearer success metrics, stronger business alignment, and a People Experience that compounds in value over time.

This is how People teams become growth drivers, not cost centres.

OK, that’s a wrap for this week.

Grab your coffee and open up your inbox same time next week for more insights, tips, and resource flags on how to smash HR silos, add strategic value and turn your People function into a growth driver 🚀

With love,

Luke ✌🏻

PS, when you are ready you might like...

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