The 90-Day Playbook to Launch your HR Product Council

Here's a practical plan to launch your HR Product Council in three months. Adaptable to reflect your own terminology and any standards or best practices your Product team may have in place for their work.

Weeks 1-2: Lay the foundation

• Write your 1-page charter. Include a clear purpose, decision rights, what's in/out of scope, operating cadence, and quorum rules.

• List out your HR products. Yours could include onboarding, performance management, compensation, learning, talent acquisition/recruiting, job architecture, etc.

• Set the team members and elect a facilitator. The team will likely include the CHRO (chair), HR product owners, HRIS/people tech, Finance, Legal, People Analytics, plus ERG representation and a rotating leader from outside HR.

• Choose your outcome tracking system. OKRs can work well here, portoflio OKRs + product-level OKRs. One source of truth that's stored accessible to the whole team.

• Create an intake form. Identify where it will be available, and how new responses will be captured and aggregated as necessary.

Weeks 3-4: Set the mechanics

• Define your stage gates. Each stage should have entry and exit criteria that's short and testable. Good stages to start with are: Idea, Discovery, Beta, General Availability, and Sunset.

• Create a prioritization apprach that is realistic, and human. Strictly mathematical frameworks are great, but make sure it's combined with real people and their time.

• Identify the tooling your already have to support the work. Use Jira or Linear? Great, there's your roadmap and Kanban board. For OKR tracking, Notion works well, but so can a well structured Google Sheet or Excel doc! Find a place you can repeatedly publish your change log and release note.

Weeks 5-6: Pilot the Council

• Run two pilot meeting sessions with just one or two products. Maybe a pay transparency rollout or new performance bonus structure.

• Decide, don't discuss. Approve OKRs, move work through the stages, assign owners, and make sure your notes are published expediently.

• Take note of how data will be collected for OKR measurement. Which systems can be integrated, where can automations pull data directly?

• Host a retro on the sessions. Does more/less time need to be allocated relative to other topics? Was the evidence clear to move between stages?

Weeks 7-8: Communicate and scale

• Publish the roadmap and an FAQ on your intranet or culture ops workspace.

• Review release notes and change logs. Provide training for product owners to eusre the notes are consice and useful. At a minimum, they should address what's changed, why, who's impacted, and where to follow-up if you need help.

• Launch the intake form so new ideas aren't sent via DM and hidden from sight.

Weeks 9-12: Launch time!

• Official quarterly council sessions #1! Confirm portfolio OKRs, set capacity across the team, deprioritize or sunset low-value work.

• Schedule the monthly review rythym. These will be used to review releases and risks, clear blockers, and update the roadmap and change log.

A simple agenda example*

1. Portfolio OKR check (10 mins)

2. Open decisions and stage gates (25 mins)

3. Risks and dependencies (10 mins)

4. Releases and change log review (10 mins)

5. Actions and parking lot (5 mins)

*Note: adjust meeting time to fit cultural norms (e.g., 50 mins, 60 mins, 80 mins, etc.) and modify accordingly while maintaining sufficient time to address each topic.

Common traps to avoid

1. Measuring activity, not outcomes. Keeping coming back to your OKRs, they were established for this reason.

2. Saying "we'll share that later." If something shipped and nobody knows, that's not progress - it didn't ship.

3. Stage gate theatrics. Nothing moves forward without evidence.

4. Over-inviting to Council meetings. Keeping it tight means faster decisions.

Sample metrics to show it's working

• Adoption or usage of shipped changes

• Time to publish release notes after a change is implemented

• The percent of HR work tied to portfolio OKRs (estimated using FTEs assigned to product work)

• Average duration between stages

We're here to help if you're looking to get started with your own HR Product Council. We would love to speak with you to help you reach your goals!

Grab some time with us, we look forward to meeting you!