Why Product Managers, not HR professionals, will be the next batch of leaders within People Operations
There is a massive shift underway that I believe will become glaringly obvious within 2-3 years.
People from Product Management will make a massive move into People Ops.
Here’s why:
The past explosion of Product Managers created supply: The number of Product Managers exploded ~6 years ago. It was motivated by a number of factors including (1) The HBS/Ivy League boom of graduates shifting from banking and consulting to Product Management, (2) a glamour of influence surrounding Product that pulled domain experts from other disciplines (primarily Analytics and Acquisition Marketing) into the Product domain, and (3) a pre-existing base of PM’s continuing on with their career.
The current explosion of People Ops roles has created demand: At the same time, over the past five years, there has been an explosion of roles within People Ops. No longer is People Ops seen as HR or Recruiting, but a wide spectrum of roles covering the entire Employee Lifecycle. From individuals who focus on employer branding, to employee engagement, to DEI, to People Analytics, to recruiting, to compensation, to HR, to onboarding, to L&D, to superconnectors, to employer advocates, to this, to that. Companies are starting to hire People Ops leaders in their first 10 employees instead of their first 100, and the domain discipline is finally getting the respect it deserves.
You put supply and demand together within a domain discipline with increasingly aligning skillsets… magic baby: Product Managers are picking up what People Ops is putting down. Said another way: Product Managers are buying what People Ops be selling.
More than any other org that I’ve seen to date, their ability to have “the pulse” on how their company is performing, how their fellow teammates are performing, and how to leverage the skillsets across departments to win is strong to very strong.
When I talk to people within Product, I am consistently impressed by their ability to understand and dominate expertise areas like the following:
Organizational structure: The ability to understand and predict what high-functioning departments should look like at scale.
Business fundamentals & opportunity sizing: They know how to narrow focus by tying customers to the business.
Resource allocation: Where to make tradeoffs in terms of headcount, how to organize teams internally towards the right goals and initiatives, and how responsibilities should evolve as the org grows.
The role Purpose/Mission/Values plays in the success of the business: They are often culture warriors.
The ability to inspire and lead: They often are seen as leaders within the org due to their cross-department responsibilities.
A consumer-centric approach to treating employees like customers using quant and qual: From qualitative customer interviews to quantitative assessment of performance, productiveness, and happiness.
The ability to hire and onboard employees the way they would customers: With care.
Building process and internal products/tools to scale: As builders, Product Managers are always looking for ways to automate, scale, etc.
Attention to detail: The best PM’s have insane attention to detail. How couldn’t they after QAing all those A/B tests? haha.
Provided that Product leaders do not take the “People” empathetic nature out of “People Ops,” there will be big opportunities for this growing base of interested persons.
I’m bullish on the shifting landscape and believe it will help evolve People teams and propel their org even further into a dominant role within an organization.
After all… as every CEO likes to say… “People… are our GREATEST asset.” 😉
