Friends,

It’s been one of those weeks here where it does. not. stop. raining 🌧. Sometimes I love the rain. Sometimes I find it incredibly hard to be motivated and want it to change.

Are you a rain lover, or do you prefer those blue skies?

Speaking of change — let’s talk about the People function — because arguably it’s the function that’s seen the most change over the past five years (anyone remember Covid? ahuh). And if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, there’s more change ahead (sorry).

In this issue we’re unpacking how the role is looking in the future, how companies are making AI the People team’s problem too (but I kinda understand this one) and how you can position yourself for maximum impact.

Enjoy ✌

Matt

PS: if you’re reading this in London (and I know a bunch of you are) then you should get yourself along to Shapes in Town, on the 25th of June. I went to their last event, and I’m not being over the top when I say they’re unmissable.

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PAVE

Most teams sign their comp data vendor in a rush. The business grows past it, and the gap goes unnoticed.

Until it costs you.

I worked with a CPO this year whose comp data had drifted out of step with the market. 

Recruiters and hiring managers were screaming on one end, unable to make offers. 

The CFO was getting cranky on the other side, with inflated headcount costs and no justification.

The CPO was caught in the middle (eep).

Pave is the comp data platform built for companies hiring across multiple geographies, with the sample sizes and refresh frequency to back it up.

I worked with their team to write the playbook on how to make the switch.

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

This edition is based on the latest episode of the FNDN Series podcast, with Shani Brusilovsky.

Shani Brusilovsky is a Product Lead with a background in UX and service design, currently leading product at Shapes. She has worked across startups and global products, including fintech and digital health, focusing on building AI-powered products and scaling product processes and teams. Alongside her work in tech, Shani is pursuing an MA in Behavioural Economics, exploring the intersection of language, behaviour, and AI.

Most of us are trying to keep up with AI by chasing the tools.

A new model here, a new feature there, another link saved for later (I have more tutorials saved than I could ever watch in a lifetime).

So with the world running amok, I wanted to talk to someone who has an outside vantage. 

Someone who speaks to Chief People Officers and Heads of People regularly, and can see the challenges they’re facing across companies (and industries).

So I sat down with Shani Brusilovsky, who leads AI on the product side at Shapes, and because she builds these systems for a living, she sees something the rest of us are too busy to notice: the job itself is changing shape, and new tools are the smallest part of it.

And the shape of that change is already visible if you know where to look.

The pace of AI right now is faster than anything we have seen, the kind of stretch where everything feels new at once (reference: above image).

The instinct is to treat that as a technology problem, and to keep up by consuming every release. That instinct is the trap

(I dunno about you, but this is one I sadly keep falling into—and is its own problem that needs addressing).

A more useful lens comes from behavioural economics, the field Shani is studying for her master's. Technology will keep changing, and we cannot predict how. Human behaviour, however—what motivates people and how they make decisions—stays constant.

The smart move is to build on the part that does not shift (or certainly not as fast as AI does, anyway).

That is why organisations themselves are shifting, and the team equipped to lead that change is the People team, it just hasn’t been the obvious choice.

But this is the change we’re seeing now.

Atlassian recently put its entire AI transformation under the People team.

Zapier handed the same remit to its CPO.

And recent guest of FNDN Series, Sarika Lamont is doing the same inside Vidyard.

These are not outliers anymore.

The challenge sitting underneath is that People teams have to lead the change for everyone else while going through it themselves. 

The default bias is one of the most reliable findings in behavioural economics: people do not want to change (which is where we come in).

Leading a shift you are also living through, mid-wave, with no map, is hard. In their copious research and interviewing of People teams, Shani sees the teams pulling ahead are the ones that share a mindset more than a checklist. 

They have gotten comfortable not knowing exactly where this lands. 

This is where the future gets concrete, and just one example of the ways in which the People function is being dramatically re-envisioned by these kinds of leaders.

Think about how a People team traditionally runs: Performance reviews twice a year, comp once a year, the engagement survey was cyclical, too.

We treat those cadences as fixed because they’ve had to be.

But in reality, they were never about good practice. They started because of operational limits. 

Collecting the data, running the analysis and working through the comp implications took weeks, so these initiatives are batched into a cycle the People team could effectively run, and that the business could absorb.

The cost of that is hindsight. By the time the engagement survey results come back, the person you might have kept has often already resigned (or is irretrievably close). You found out too late because the timing was dictated by what the old systems could process, long after the moment to act had passed.

Strip that limit away and the shape of the People function (and the work it does) changes dramatically. 

Real-time data instead of an annual snapshot. Quick feedback loops, smart nudges when someone has not filled something in, an alert the moment a number looks off and you can still act on it. 

People digging into their own data and asking questions, rather than waiting days for an analyst to return the few things they thought to measure.

And the honest part is that most current HR tech cannot deliver this yet. Here’s the three main one’s Shani see’s.

This is the gap Shapes is building to close, so the software does the work instead of stopping at the output. 

(a16z called a version of this "Workday's last Workday?", and it is worth a read if you want the venture-scale version of the argument.)

Shani’s advice for people leaders who want to avoid getting caught flat-footed is sets a low bar (in a good way). 

Just start.

Play with it. Don't be intimidated because it is labelled AI or because the tech crowd got there first. 

And don't wait until someone tells you that you have to change, because by then you are already behind.

For now though, the pack isn’t that far ahead.

A recent report from the World Economic Forums Chief People Officer’s Outlook placed most companies in the exploratory/experimental stage of AI. But in the next 6-12 months, many expect to be scaling.

This is the change people teams are increasingly being charged with leading.

And while you don't need a household of agents running your function as step one, you do need to start talking to the tools. The skill won’t be that new for you. It is the same question you would hand an analyst and wait days for, except now you can just ask AI.

The resources are everywhere if you want to learn. Here are the best one’s we discussed: Lenny's Podcast, How to AI, MIT's Advancing Humans with AI research, and the product team at Anthropic who openly publish how they use this stuff.

The role of the future is not arriving on a date you can put in the calendar. It is being built right now, in the gap between the teams treating AI as a faster way to do the old job and the teams rethinking what the job is. Shapes is betting on the second group, and after this conversation, so am I.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.

A roundup of the most interesting news from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
Building compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive for startups.

3. Startup People Summit
A 1-day virtual event focused on creating the playbook for startup People practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to the newsletter to join the next event.