PX Espresso☕with Luke O'Mahoney

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In this episode, Luke discusses his experience as a solopreneur in the field of people ops. He talks about the challenges and insecurities he faces as he transitions from an operational practitioner to a researcher and creator. Luke shares his business goals and his plan to scale his revenue to one million pounds annually. He also explains his growth hacking strategy and the importance of identifying growth levers. Luke reflects on the mistakes he made in branding and website design and emphasizes the importance of building to learn. He discusses the process of launching his digital course and his plans for future product development. Luke also mentions his focus on content creation, systematization, and optimization, as well as his upcoming live event.

Contact Luke:
Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn

Support for this episode of PX Expresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is the end-to-end learning platform for modern people teams. Combining the best of an LMS and LXP with collaborative authoring and a built-in virtual classroom, Sana has helped pioneering companies like kry/livi and Svea Solar simplify and scale their learning initiatives. Employees love learning and sharing knowledge on Sana because the experience is intuitive and interactive, while L&D saves countless hours of manual work thanks to flexible integrations, AI-powered analytics, and smart automations.

Take a look👀: Unlocking knowledge with AI | Sana (sanalabs.com)

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Summary:

Luke and Rita discuss the importance of creating exceptional learning experiences through a problem-led approach. They emphasize the need to focus on the big idea and the evidence of learning, rather than just the content. They also highlight the importance of interactivity and personalization in learning experiences.

Rita shares her journey from working in an NGO to L&D and her current role at Sana, an AI tool for learning. They also touch on the concept of finding one's zone of genius and the joy of the journey in attaining it. The conversation explores the importance of focusing on the problem rather than the solution, and how human-centered design and AI can help in this process. It emphasizes the need for HR and L&D professionals to be commercially savvy and align their initiatives with the top priorities of the organization.

The potential of AI in democratizing access to knowledge and personalizing learning experiences is discussed. The conversation ends on an optimistic note, highlighting the opportunity for AI to free up human capacity for uniquely human tasks.

Key Takeaways:

• Exceptional learning experiences are created through a problem-led approach, focusing on the big idea and the evidence of learning.
• Interactivity and personalization are key elements in engaging learners and making learning experiences exceptional.
• Finding one's zone of genius and pursuing work that aligns with passion and purpose can lead to a fulfilling career.
• The joy of the journey and the process of attaining goals is often more important than the end result.
• Reflecting on one's own motivations and purpose can help guide career choices and enable personal growth. Focus on the problem rather than the solution
• Be commercially savvy and align initiatives with organizational priorities
• AI has the potential to democratize access to knowledge
• AI can personalize learning experiences
• AI frees up human capacity for uniquely human tasks

Guest Bio:

Rita has a decade of experience in designing and implementing impactful learning experiences with the latest technologies. In her previous role as Head of Learning at Klarna, she led the process of procuring and rolling out learning tools used by over 3000 employees in 18 markets.

Today, Rita advises over 30 scaleups and enterprises as Strategic Learning Partner Manager at Sana, the Swedish-born scaleup on a mission to transform workplace learning and knowledge sharing with AI. Passionate about the intersection of learning and technology, Rita believes the future of L&D depends on its professionals having a rich understanding of both.

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Rita Azevedo | LinkedIn

Host Bio:

A former Start-up Head of People, Luke is the founder of Sapienˣ, a platform of content, courses and community for The Post HR Generation.

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
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Support for this episode of PX Espresso Hour comes from Sana, the end-to-end learning platform for modern people teams.

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Takeaways

• Camel organizations, which are sustainable and self-sufficient, are becoming more important than unicorn organizations with high valuations but high burn rates.
• Characteristics of camel organizations include intentional design, co-creation, effective communication, and a focus on business goals.
• HR professionals should prioritize and focus on business goals, understand numbers and data, and tell compelling stories to showcase the impact of their work.
• Building credibility is essential for HR professionals to be seen as essential rather than expendable.
• Networking within the organization and building strong relationships can help HR professionals stay on the front foot and address problems before they arise. Empower managers to handle people matters instead of relying solely on HR.
• Avoid HR teams becoming the police and centralizing all people-related decisions.
• Enable the business by focusing on meaningful conversations and involving stakeholders.
• Define performance and performance philosophy to align with the organization's goals.
• Leverage technical teams for technical implementations and projects.
• Understand stakeholder personas and tailor approaches to their specific needs.
• Build bridges with stakeholders and actively listen to their pain points and feedback.
• Take action and find joy in the work of the people function.

Guest Bio:

Founder of People consultancy, RorCas  and Fractional Chief People & Culture Officer, Geraldine is an expert in organizational development, HR / People Ops, and Leadership, within startups and scale-ups. Geraldine has a background health tech, fintech, and has worked at some awesome organisations including, PayPal.

Contact Geraldine:
Email: [email protected]  
LinkedIn: Geraldine Butler-Wright | LinkedIn

Host Bio:

Luke is the founder of Sapienˣ, a platform of  content, courses and community for The Post HR Generation.

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso
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Support for this episode of PX Espresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is the end-to-end learning platform for modern people teams. 

Miro's Ex-Head of People AJ Josephson has recently said that Sana is "driving the leading edge of AI-powered learning to enable teams to find, create, and share knowledge in new ways." 

And that three elements won over the sceptic in him: "the ability to build courses from scratch faster than anywhere else, automatic summaries of live meetings, and smart integrations with other apps into their learning space."

Go check them out!👀: https://sanalabs.com/pxespresso

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Summary:

In this conversation, Rita discusses her experience in People Operations within small businesses and startup / scale-ups. She emphasizes the importance of building a strong foundation in HR and the unique challenges and opportunities that come with being a small and lean organization.

Rita also shares insights into the recent acquisition of her company and the potential for growth and change. The conversation highlights the need for trust, clear communication, and a focus on culture as organizations scale.

In this conversation, Luke and Rita discuss various topics related to HR and people management. They explore the importance of creating ownership and agency within organizations, the role of cultural foundations and co-creation in driving success, and the significance of supporting work-life balance.

They also discuss the inclusion of people leaders in decision making, the investment in employee well-being, and the need for a proactive HR function. Additionally, they touch on the superpower of small businesses, the potential drawbacks of businesses getting too big, and the importance of enabling individuals to find joy in their work. They conclude by reflecting on the future of HR and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Guest Bio:

Rita is hands-on People Leader with a focus on building people-centric workplaces. She loves shaping and driving the people experience forward in international start-up environments setting up the complete employee experience from scratch by building and designing processes, tools, and frameworks for the whole employee lifecycle in a way that makes employees wanna stick around!

Rita is also the Co-founder of the People Ops Community NL, a slack workspace for like-minded HR and PX professionals in the Netherlands to share resources, ideas, and information.

Currently: Director of People at Homerun. Homerun is a radically easy to use hiring tool aimed small to medium sized businesses. We help business to organise and streamline their hiring process even without internal knowledge or a recruiter at hand.

Contact Rita:
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Rita Wittek-Verbeek | LinkedIn

Host Bio:

Luke is the founder of Sapienˣ, a platform which creates content, courses and community for The Post HR Generation.

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso
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Support for this episode of PX Espresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is an AI company transforming how organizations learn and access knowledge. Their learning platform and knowledge assistant are trusted by the world’s most pioneering companies—from Electrolux and Merck to Alan and Svea Solar.

Backed by world-leading investors including EQT Ventures, Menlo Ventures, NEA, and Workday Ventures, Sana has raised over $80m to date.

Take a look👀: Augmenting human intelligence | Sana (sanalabs.com)

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Key Takeaways (Ai Generated):

• Effective learning programs start with analysis and discovery to understand the needs of individuals and the organization.
• Design principles should focus on a holistic approach, spaced learning, and interactive experiences.
• Consider individual learning styles and create programs that cater to different preferences.
• Focus on behavioral change and creating a supportive learning environment to drive results. 
• Create sticky learning experiences to ensure knowledge retention and application.
• Challenge training requests to identify the root cause of performance problems.
• Conduct a thorough discovery phase to gather relevant data and understand the needs of learners.
• Utilize existing data and generative AI to gain insights and inform training solutions.
• Balance human interaction and technology in learning experiences.
• Promote self-awareness in leadership programs to align behavior with values.
• Encourage continuous learning and provide opportunities for both bite-sized and deep immersive learning.
• Develop personal action plans and foster accountability for learning outcomes.
• Recognize the role of ego in learning and cultivate a mindset of curiosity and openness.
• Explore the psychology of learning to enhance the effectiveness of training programs.

Guest Bio(s):

Becki & Jess are the AWESOME Co-Founders of Wonderful Brilliant. They specialise in Culture, Engagement & Learning. They are on a mission to build a world where wonderful people, teams and whole organisations are energised. Shifting the dial to a more human approach to life and work, where businesses are set up for their people to thrive and drive brilliant outcomes.

Wonderful Brilliant; People Consultancy specialising in Culture, Engagement and Leadership Development (wonderful-brilliant.com)

Becki Nazareth
Email: [email protected]
Becki Nazareth | LinkedIn

Jessamine Ringer
Email: [email protected]
Jessamine Ringer | LinkedIn

Contact Luke:

Luke is the founder of Sapienˣ which is a platform of content, courses and community The Post HR Generation. Sapienˣ is for People people who think like product people.

Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso

Support for this episode of PX Expresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is the end-to-end learning platform for modern people teams. Combining the best of an LMS and LXP with collaborative authoring and a built-in virtual classroom, Sana has helped pioneering companies like kry/livi and Svea Solar simplify and scale their learning initiatives. Employees love learning and sharing knowledge on Sana because the experience is intuitive and interactive, while L&D saves countless hours of manual work thanks to flexible integrations, AI-powered analytics, and smart automations.

Take a look👀: Augmenting human intelligence | Sana (sanalabs.com)

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

Send us Fan Mail

 Booooom 💥

This week is a Solocast, part of the Diary of a People Ops Solopreneur subseries, where I share my experience of building and scaling a business of one in the People / HR space.

In Vol. 3, I talk about:

• Using LinkedIn to build an audience (10 month content update)
• 2023 Product Retro
• Lessons Learned from building and launching 2 cohort based programmes
• Beta launch of my first fully async digital course
• Scaling a Newsletter from 0 to 2,000+ subscribers in 32 weeks
• My plans to maximise the value and reach of my newsletter & podcast

If you are budding Solopreneur or just curious about the business model, I hope me sharing my experience openly proves to be valuable to you.

If you have any questions about the process, feel free to email me and I will get back to you directly and cover the most popular questions in future solocast episodes 👍🏻

Contact Luke:
Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn

Support for this episode of PX Expresso Hour comes from Sana.

Sana is the end-to-end learning platform for modern people teams. Combining the best of an LMS and LXP with collaborative authoring and a built-in virtual classroom, Sana has helped pioneering companies like kry/livi and Svea Solar simplify and scale their learning initiatives. Employees love learning and sharing knowledge on Sana because the experience is intuitive and interactive, while L&D saves countless hours of manual work thanks to flexible integrations, AI-powered analytics, and smart automations.

Take a look👀: Augmenting human intelligence | Sana (sanalabs.com)

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

Send us Fan Mail

Episode Summary:

• Understanding your People Product and the role you are there to play as a the People Lead
• Defining and operationalising organisational health
• "Fixing the roof whilst the sun shines" to survive the inevitable crises which will come!
• "SLT first approach" - Recognising that SLT need to operate like a team, not a group of individuals who manage other teams
• Preparing the Leadership Team to operate as the crisis response unit
• Securing buy in from Founder / CEO for People initiatives... or not
• Creating and operationalising values  

Guest Bio:

Thomas is currently building a world-class People & Talent function at Juro, a VC backed AI start-up. Juro's AI contract collaboration platform empowers businesses to create, agree and manage contracts up to 90% faster than traditional tools. Juro works with some of the world's leading companies like Deliveroo, Remote and Trustpilot to accelerate legal workflow, automate routine contract tasks and gain better visibility into contract data.

Contact Thomas:

Email: t[email protected]
Thomas Forstner | LinkedIn

Contact Luke:

Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Episode Summary:

• Fundamentals of AI and how to start engaging with it
• What are GPTs and how should we use them?
• Democratising access and the benefits of generative AI
• Creating organisational guardrails around the use of AI
• Potential impact of AI for Job Seekers
• How to start using AI in People OPs / HR

As always, I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you do too!

Guest Bio:

Amanda has 15+ years of experience building, operating, consulting, and advising over 50 diverse companies, including Google, Warburg Pincus, Jane Technologies, and LifeLabs Learning. In 2021 she founded Mindful Growth Partners with a mission to transform individuals, teams, and organisations into future-ready, adaptive systems that thrive amidst constant change.She specialises in equipping people and businesses with the skills, processes, and tools to be future-ready, sustainable organisations. Her approach is anchored in fostering transparency, adaptability, and conscious decision-making, ensuring individuals and teams not only navigate but excel amidst change.

Contact Amanda:

Email: [email protected]
Amanda Halle | LinkedIn
Newsletter: Unravelling AI

Contact Luke:

Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn
Newsletter: PX Espresso

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

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Episode Summary:

• Transitioning from IC to People Manager
• How Frieda got past her biggest bottle neck... Herself!
• Finding confidence as a Leader
• Getting started with Product Led People Ops
• Co-creating a PX vision: Company Behaving Awesomely

If you are just starting out as a first time Head of People OR first time People Manager, this was such a refreshing conversation.

It's REALLY hard to transition from an individual contributor role to managing people. Most of us struggle with it, I know I did!

I have spend a lot time with Frieda over the last few months and have always been struck by her bias for action and conviction in her work. It was interesting (and comforting) to hear that this didn't come naturally to Frieda either, it's something she has actively worked on following some tough feedback!

Frieda also shares how she is co-creating the vision and ways of working with her time to switch from traditional HR to Product Led People OPs, so if you are also curious about how to get started with that, you will love this chat!

As always, I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you do too!

Contact Frieda:

Email: [email protected]
Frieda Möcker | LinkedIn

Contact Luke:

Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay

Send us Fan Mail

Booooom 💥

The second instalment of the Diary of a People Ops Solopreneur subseries, where I share my experience of building and scaling a business of one in the People / HR space.

In Vol. 2, I talk about:

• Content strategy and updates on audience and community growth (including the top line numbers follower count, impressions and engagement etc)
• Upcoming rebrand and core brand messaging update
• Product Development: How I have evolved the current cohort programme over the last 12 months, digital courses soon to be released, newsletter, podcast and other products planned for release in 2024

If you are budding Solopreneur or just curious about the business model, I hope me sharing my experience openly proves to be valuable to you.

If you have any questions about the process, feel free to email me and I will get back to you directly and cover the most popular questions in future solocast episodes 👍🏻

Contact Luke:

Email: [email protected]
Luke O'Mahoney | LinkedIn

🎵Music Credit: Anton Vlasov from Pixabay🎵 

If you like the podcast, you may want to sign up to the PX Espresso Newsletter ☕ the weekly newsletter for People people who think like Product people.

Music by Rockot from Pixabay