> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.peoplealliance.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Restructuring people operations as a product: Proving the ROI of people decisions - URL: https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/restructuring-people-operations-as-a-product-proving-the-roi-of-people-decisions/ - Published: 2026-08-10T11:30:01.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-10T11:30:01.000Z - Description: What would you build first if your team could build anything, if people weren't bound to their roles, and if everyone were focused purely on value? - Author: Shannon Janke - Tags: People operations, Articles For the past two years, I've been sitting on one question: what if we applied the same rigor, user obsession, and iteration discipline the best product teams use to how we run [people operations](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/what-is-people-operations-everything-you-need-to-know/)? This is the story of how we tried to answer that at Lufthansa Digital Hangar, where I'm head of people operations, part of the Lufthansa Group. Digital Hangar oversees Lufthansa's digital experiences, from payments and chat AIs to the app, website, and ground operations. My background is in [learning and talent development](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/what-is-people-development/), and I've been here a little more than two years. ## **The starting condition nobody wanted to name** You've probably seen the headlines: IBM, Klarna, and others cutting hundreds of HR roles, freezing hiring, or quietly reducing [headcount](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/hr-analytics-is-reshaping-workforce-planning/) through attrition, stories that now show up in every CFO deck built to justify leaner people teams. What rarely makes headlines are the companies where that playbook backfired. Talk to people leaders running two- or three-person teams for organizations of three hundred or fifteen hundred people, and the common thread is that headcount decisions were made before the operations got redesigned: a [tool gets purchased](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/top-workforce-planning-tools/), a business case gets built to run leaner, the tool goes live, and the work that used to move through people now backs up. Traditional HR structures weren't built badly, they were built for a different world, one where specialization was a competitive advantage and strategic HR partnership didn't mean what it means today. [People operations vs HR: Top differences and similaritiesThe reality is that most companies need both people operations and HR, even if the same small team is currently doing everything under one title.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-ceeb7910-6a7b-4a45-88f6-0f4b92211c15.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--11--48ee3423-3187-4f13-8631-037b61f18e34.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/people-operations-vs-hr/) The world changed, the structure didn't. Most people teams I've encountered, including my own when I arrived, were organized around individual expertise: the recruiter recruited, the L&D person trained, the [HR business partner](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-hr-business-partner/)\-managed relationships. Everyone worked hard, but no one knew what anyone else was building, and the business assumed we were administrators. That's not a [talent](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/employer-branding-examples/) problem, it's a structural one, and structure is something we can fix. ## **Reframing HR as a product** I came across a line in Jesse Huang's book *Built for People* that stuck with me: if your employees are your users, then everything you build in HR is actually a product. [Onboarding journeys](https://www.peoplealliance.com/employee-onboarding-and-integration-framework/), [performance processes](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-write-a-performance-review/), and learning programs should be designed around the user, then iterated, measured, and improved, not built once and defended forever. This felt natural given my background in learning experience design, close to UX design, where the ADDIE model is essentially a UX framework. Ironically, the rest of Digital Hangar had already restructured around value streams and communities of practice, a version of the Spotify model well established in engineering and product, while HR sat entirely outside it, still hierarchical and siloed, on the unspoken assumption that we were too relational, or too restricted by compliance, to work that way. I don't think that's true, and it's one reason HR remains a support function in organizations that claim they want us working differently. [Why HR holds the key to sales performanceThis blog explores the powerful yet often overlooked connection between employee engagement and sales performance, highlighting how HR can play a pivotal role in driving revenue by supporting and empowering sales teams.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-0ac4bdcd-1596-44e6-9098-0bf5bb28be04.png)People AllianceShannon Fischer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Author_Highlight--7--47e5d6d0-3858-48f7-b560-8e71351937f6.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/why-hr-holds-the-key-to-sales-performance/) ## **What the shift actually looks like** In a classical structure, you organize around who you are: the [recruitment](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/diversity-recruiting-best-practices/) team recruits, the L&D team trains, each managing its own backlog, and the coordination cost between teams is enormous and mostly invisible. A value stream organizes around what you deliver instead. We built four product clusters, [acquisition](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/talent-acquisition-best-practices-for-people-leaders/), development, impact, and experience, each defining an outcome for both employee and business, and organized this way, it becomes obvious when work is misaligned with value. The question I get most from other HR leaders is about expertise: if I'm an L&D manager, how does this work on a team with a recruiter and a generalist? That's where communities of practice come in. They aren't delivery structures, they're knowledge structures, where a specialist keeps their practice fresh, while the product team is where they apply it. You don't lose expertise moving into this format; you liberate it, by giving specialists both delivery context and a knowledge [community](https://www.peoplealliance.com/join-the-pa-slack-community/). This asks something harder, too: identity. In traditional HR, your role tends to be your identity, I am the culture manager, the L&D manager, the HR VP for engineering. This model asks you to hold expertise as something you bring to shared work rather than something you protect. The goal isn't to make everyone a generalist, it's to build specialists who contribute beyond their own lane. [Talent acquisition best practices for people leadersStrong talent practices correlate with higher revenue growth, stronger profitability, faster hiring cycles, better retention, and improved engagement.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-bed0c18f-21fa-4dbe-8221-892fb0cc4fba.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--20--494cae54-dec9-46b8-817f-33b90b4770cf.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/talent-acquisition-best-practices-for-people-leaders/) ## **Making it real** We mapped the work we were responsible for into our four product areas, then built a role and capability inventory of what each person owned and where knowledge was thin. We defined the clusters first, based on outcomes, and only then looked at what we needed to execute them, which surfaced hidden and duplicated work and real skills gaps. From there we assigned squads and squad roles per planning interval, standard product vocabulary for a quarter. Someone might be a product owner for one squad and a contributing specialist on another the next. The assignment changes. The expertise never does. One genuine wrinkle was navigating German works councils and varied employment contracts across Lufthansa entities, solved by separating the employment contract entirely from the operating model: someone might hold a contractual title in Germany but functionally operate as a business analyst in a product team. It took conviction, and eventually employee buy-in, since a resume listing "product manager" is simply more marketable than a narrower specialist title. One squad redesigned our entire job rotation program and released it to five thousand employees within two quarters, work that would have taken at least a year under the old model. We also adopted the business's own vocabulary and cadence: a visible yearly roadmap, OKRs, two-week sprints, and quarterly playback sessions with stakeholders. [How to launch recognition programs fairlyGet recognition programs right and you make every employee, not just the loudest or most visible ones, feel genuinely seen for the work they put in.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-7eda472a-deda-4493-99c9-b02fd17ed609.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--36--cd3965d0-9708-47a7-b478-d18d0fdc1fc2.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-launch-recognition-programs-fairly-real-examples/) ## **Knowing where you stand, and why KPIs and OKRs aren't the same** Before redesigning anything, we built an HR scorecard for ourselves and mapped how our time was really spent. The answer was humbling: most of our capacity went to operational work, not because it wasn't important, but because we hadn't built systems to run it efficiently. Strategic work happened in the gaps, or not at all, and we had almost no real measurement, plenty of activity but little insight the business could use. That's tied to a distinction many less product-mature HR teams get wrong. KPIs are your vital signs, telling you continuously whether the operation is healthy. OKRs are your ambition, answering what you'll build this quarter that doesn't exist yet. When I took over, my team had no KPIs, only OKRs, because they'd seen the business use them, and fifteen people had twelve OKRs between them, essentially one per person. It made no sense. We got strict about the distinction, and it changed how [leadership](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/7-ways-to-grow-people-leaders-not-just-people-managers/) saw us. We built a KPI dashboard covering cost, time, quantity, quality, and reaction across each cluster, reported quarterly to the executive board, and joined the business in OKR tracking sessions. Some resistance was real, mostly framed as "why am I being tracked when we're an agile team?" That resistance was mostly internal to my own team; the wider product organization thinks we don't track rigorously enough. Shifting the framing from individual [performance](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-document-a-verbal-warning-tips-template/) to team outcome helped. When we didn't speak the business's language, we didn't have a seat at the strategic table. Now we do. [Top 20 employee performance metrics to trackYour go-to guide for tracking, improving, and understanding employee performance - including 20 employee performance metrics to start tracking right away!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-c5e49b95-0fd4-4300-908c-311edb24b65a.png)People AllianceSabrinthia Donnelly![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/employee-performance-metrics-821c6e75-859f-4e95-ae44-a26bf90072b8.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/employee-performance-metrics/) ## **Habits have to come before structure** People got excited about the structure itself, the squads, the roadmap, the OKRs. What we underestimated was how much habit-building had to come first. A sprint cadence only works if a team has already built certain reflexes: documenting decisions as they're made, treating stand-ups as useful, flagging blockers early, and sharing unfinished work because transparency beats perfection. For a lot of my team, the instinct was the opposite, only show it once it's perfect, an instinct that kills iteration and comes from a fear that every conversation had become an exam. Traditional HR rewards responsiveness and heroics, not strategic thinking, so we had to replace that with a quieter discipline: if it isn't documented, it doesn't exist. The most contentious change was protecting squad day, every Thursday, reserved entirely for strategic work, no operational catch-up, no ad hoc requests. The pushback was real: we don't have time, it feels indulgent when the inbox is full. My answer stayed the same: the inbox will always be full, and the question is whether we'll ever build something that empties it, or keep responding forever. Everyone on my team said they wanted to work more strategically, but they needed convincing that answering simple employee questions manually wasn't the best use of their time, even though they believed that's how they built relationships. Habits have to come before structure, always. [Scaling with soul: Embedding culture and purpose post-mergerScaling with soul means building a company where people feel connected to each other, connected to the mission, and connected to the future we are creating together.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-8274920a-8436-41ad-9b38-037ea85ff56f.png)People AllianceErin McAuley![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/PA_Website_Article_Images_Author_Highlight--2--3177903a-c040-402a-a80b-973f5afc7d80.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/culture-and-purpose-post-merger/) ## **Systems before tools** The operating model only creates strategic capacity if the operational load has somewhere else to go. Before buying a single tool, we mapped that load in detail: what questions came in weekly, what was manual that shouldn't be, and where institutional knowledge lived. It was unglamorous but made every later decision defensible, and it's why I pushed back on an AI-first approach to HR transformation. Companies getting this right started with operations and treated the tool as the last decision, not the first, because [AI potential](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/from-ai-hype-to-people-outcomes/) and performance run on very different timelines, and the gap between them is filled by people doing judgment work that can't yet be automated. Strong systems aren't the opposite of human HR; people shouldn't fear losing their job to an agent, they should feel encouraged to strengthen their strategic contribution by using it well. [How to change workplace culture (+ real-life example)Culture change isn’t about choosing between performance and people, but about designing an environment where both can exist.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-28cfc85c-3379-413c-be13-fc9a148730fd.png)People AllianceTeresa Garanhel![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/Copy-of-PA_Website_Article_Images_Doodles--24--2684a5e2-109f-4592-8b89-0ccda0cb6982.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/articles/how-to-change-workplace-culture/) ## **What I want to leave you with** This kind of change takes real time and commitment. Analytics was the hardest stretch for most of my team; HR professionals are overwhelmingly people-oriented, and standing in front of leadership with a dashboard felt exposing. My answer had to be: if we can't measure it, it didn't happen. Not because the work wasn't real, but because without data we stay invisible, and invisible teams don't get investment or a seat at the table. One thing I truly believe: everything I've described, the user focus, the iteration, the feedback loops, HR professionals already do versions of it. We've just never applied it at the operating model level. An L&D professional building a program is already doing product design. An HRBP listening to manager needs before designing an intervention is doing user research. We're not starting from zero; we're translating instincts we already have into something more structured, visible, and scalable. I want to leave you with the question I've sat with for two years. It isn't a framework or a checklist. What would you build first if your team could build anything, if people weren't bound to their roles, and if everyone were focused purely on value? --- [**Become an Insider member**](https://www.peoplealliance.com/insider-membership-plan/) **at no cost and get access to exclusive content from top leaders at global companies.** [Free People Alliance membership: Join the communityJoin 1,000s of HR and people leaders for free. Access expert insights, templates, events & career advice. Your gateway to thriving workplace cultures.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/icon/PA-ICON-c96706bb-0dd1-4f74-9e9b-08b41b6f5429.png)People AlliancePeople Alliance![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/24/23/2423d333-71de-46b8-81af-b10b80c517c9/content/images/thumbnail/pa-insider-membership-plan-meta-50f02876-3d7f-46a5-8f26-f04f00c4d6a4.png)](https://www.peoplealliance.com/insider-membership-plan/)