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 🚀

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Read time: 3 minutes

Hey Reader 👋🏻

Work is broken. Product can fix it.

This is a phrase I have started to use more and more as I introduce People teams to product-led ways of thinking and working. It’s a phrase that I am going to anchor all of my work on in 2026. It’s a phrase I feel very strongly about and one I think can help us take the next practical step forward in - what up until now - I have described as the Post-HR Generation.

If you’re reading this, chances are you already believe something many organisations are only just beginning to grasp:

People aren't disengaged with Work because the don’t care. They are disengaged because the experience of work is poorly designed.

For the last few years, a growing group of People leaders, operators, and product thinkers have been quietly challenging the default assumptions of HR (you are likely among them which is why you are here!🙏🏻). We’ve questioned why internal systems feel harder to use than consumer apps. Why engagement initiatives rarely change behaviour. Why the experience of work is an afterthought, not something to intentionally design.

This shift towards product-led and agile HR teams has been an important first step. But I think we’re now entering the next stage of maturity for this movement. It isn't HR than needs to be fixed. It’s work itself. And fixing work requires us to think beyond HR entirely.

You don’t need convincing that something is off. You see it every day. You feel it everyday.

I have been following global engagement trends for the last 5 years and I've done the deep research on the decades preceding them too, the evidence of a broken "work product" are clear to see every year in the data. Fairly consistently year on year we see that only one in five employees globally is engaged at work.

That means the majority are actively or passively disengaged, doing what’s required but disconnected from purpose and progress. There is a very human cost to all this, that's present in the data too. Burnout is rife, physical and mental wellbeing is suffering, people's sense of live fulfilment is reaching new lows (ref. Gallup's annual "Thriving" score). On top of that, for those who need financial incentive to change, the economic cost of this work engagement crisis - measured in lost productivity - runs into the trillions each year.

But for those of us working in and around HR and People teams, the more interesting insight isn’t the scale of the problem. It’s why the problem persists. Because disengagement isn’t random. It’s a predictable outcome of how work is designed.

Why this isn’t an HR problem

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most organisations are still running work on operating models designed for a different century.

Traditional HR models optimised for consistency, efficiency, and risk reduction. They were never meant to design complex, adaptive, human-centred systems of work. That’s not a failure of intent. It’s a mismatch of scope.

When onboarding is confusing, it’s framed as a training issue.
When performance systems don’t drive growth, it’s framed as a policy issue.
When managers burn out, it’s framed as a capability issue.

But these are not isolated HR challenges. They are systemic design failures. Which is why doing “HR differently” was never going to be enough. What’s required is a new approach to the design of work itself - how work is structured, experienced, enabled, and evolved over time.

And that responsibility cannot sit with HR alone.

Product-Led People Teams

Product-Led People Teams are the future, not because they modernise HR, but because they introduce a fundamentally different way of thinking about and designing the experience of work. How work flows. How work is shaped. How work is sold.

Product thinking assumes that:

• Experiences are never finished
• Value is defined by outcomes, not activity
• Real needs must be discovered, not assumed
• Systems improve through fast feedback and iteration

When applied to work, this reframes People teams from service providers into work designers, collaborating across the organisation to solve real employee and business problems.

What is also clear in the global engagement data is that teams that experience meaningful engagement are more productive, more profitable, and far more resilient. They churn less, waste less energy, and adapt faster to change.

This isn't because the induvial in those teams just happen to be more engaged, it's because the systems of work around them function better.

Many of you reading this are already practising elements of this shift.

• You’re problem-led rather than solution-led.
• You measure outcomes, not outputs.
• You work cross-functionally rather than in HR silos.
• You treat employee experience as something to be designed, not rolled out.

The next challenge is scale and coherence.

Because product-led people teams cannot thrive as isolated pockets of innovation. They require a broader product operating model for work - one where strategy, tooling, and ways of working all sit on top of product thinking, not the other way around. This is the difference between experimenting at the edges of work, and redesigning the core of how work is experienced.

The white paper is coming…

In January, Chris Metcalfe and I will be publishing a white paper, working title (TBC):

Work Is Broken. Product Can Fix It: The Case for Product Transformation for People Teams.

I can tell you now, it's not a call to “do HR better”.

It’s an attempt to articulate what many early pioneers are already sensing: that we need a shared, more mature frame for how work is designed - one that sits alongside product, technology, and business strategy, rather than underneath them.

If the first wave of product-led people teams asked “what if we applied product thinking to HR?”, this next phase asks a bigger question:

What if work itself is a product we deliberately design, steward, and evolve?

This isn't about product thinking for better HR. It's product thinking for better work. Better experiences. Better outcomes. This is product-led design for people and business growth.

Today's newsletter is intended as a pre-read for what's to come, the deeper research and recommended way forward comes next in the full white paper.

Strap yourselves in – 2026 could be a HUGE turning point in how work is designed forever.

As a reader of this newsletter, you are right there at the front of this movement.

Let’s build something better in 2026. Together.

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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