E7 - Product Thinking for HR: The 'How' Everyone Skips - with Chief Product Officer, Seb Hochmuth

What if HR stopped acting like a support function, and started operating like a product team? In this episode of HR Unfiltered, Dean and Sue are joined by Seb Hochmuth, a product and technology leader with 15 years’ experience scaling startups, to break down exactly how product thinking can transform modern HR. Dean and Sue try to adopt the 'consciously incompetent' mindset to get the most out of Seb's brain to share with our wonderful fellow professionals. 

Ultimately, this is not another episode about mindset or buzzwords. It’s a practical, step-by-step conversation about execution.

Together, we explore:

• How HR accumulates process debt in the same way tech teams accumulate tech debt, and how product teams actually fix it;

• How HR can use discovery, user journeys and problem statements to stop solving the wrong problems;

• What an MVP looks like for HR processes like onboarding, performance management and hiring;

• How to prioritise ruthlessly when leadership noise, opinion and bias get in the way;

• Why behaviour change beats frameworks, and how product teams diagnose it;

• Which metrics HR should track if it wants credibility with CEOs and CFOs;

• How to test, learn and iterate without betting the whole organisation on a 12-month transformation programme.

If you’re tired of HR advice that sounds good but doesn’t ship, this episode gives you the tools, methods and language to build people systems that actually work.

Dean and Sue have been doing it this way for a while and we're happy to share thoughts and guidance in both our follow-up article, and if you want to get in touch, please do!