#5: Turn Engagement and Commercial Data to Actionable Outcomes

Hey folks, so fresh off the bat from running my lighting lesson yesterday, I felt inspired to give more video a try… so today, you’ll get a whole new approach - you can read my deep dive, or watch me run through the workflow end to end!

I tried this on Monday for a Linkedin post, and hated doing it, but felt it was a useful skill, so there we are…

Do lmk what you think of my new approach in the comments, always love to hear from folks - I make this newsletter to help people learn, so anything I can do to make that better - lmk 🥳

This week, I’m going to focus on:

• Taking engagement and commercial data and combining them into a clear roadmap to use for yourselves, your founders and wider business leaders 🤯 (this one has yet to fail to impress founders I work with on my projects).

• A roadmap to action this from the data

• A product I’m building to replace Carta for small companies

• A couple of interesting news pieces including Manus (insane Chinese Agent tool)

📰 BIG NEWS:

PeoplexAI - This is going to be my core focus, I am going all in

1. Consulting - My classic work on Progression, Levelling, Comp & Reward, Equity structuring, performance and manager dev programmes, all with an AI assistance, but me leading the projects, bringing experience from scaling over 150 companies.

2. Training Split into two core areas:

Companies - I am now offering training for CPOs / VPs / Directors of People etc for their teams to transform and deploy AI safely, quickly and effectively across their workflows. Helping you save huge amounts of time, money and effort.

Individuals - (Course live on Maven) which starts next week and of course my newsletter and open sourcing tools and processes for you all 🥳

3. Products and Processes - adding all of the work I have been building and sharing into one open sourced spot for you all to access.

New site incoming - peoplexai.com - will be live this week

New email coming too, but for any of the above, message me at: [email protected] 

PS - Atlas Partners - RIP for now 💀, since it’s clear there’s much more interest elsewhere

🎯 Deep Dive of the Week

So I promised that this week I would do part two of my performance deep dive, but since I’m working with Sophie directly, that’s going to take a little longer.

But fret not.

This week, you get the most high value guide I have created yet ❤️‍🔥

The Challenge:

Building a roadmap and strategy which combines the people and commercial aspects is hard, time consuming, and often not backed up by data. Nor does it have a clear plan of action and action assignments - i.e. Leaders, Managers, People Ops.

Working in People Ops, we have access to plenty of data from engagement surveys, as well as elsewhere, but what should we do with it?

Step 1: What you need

First, we need some tools and some data to run through them. Now important security point here - PLEASE ANONYMISE YOUR SPREADSHEETS - make sure no names, company names etc.

For this run through I will use the same company I have in the past, good old FinEdge, our 50 person Fintech SaaS company.

• Engagement Data - Spreadsheet format (csv)

• Company Performance Data - Spreadsheet format (csv)

• An LLM - Grok / OpenAI / Claude

• An output format - Notion

Step 2: Let’s get thoughts on the Engagement Data

We start by going to our LLM of choice, and uploading our engagement data, then giving it this prompt:

I want you to assess the results of an employee engagement survey and create a report for the CEO and CTO in order for them to understand the cultural challenges within the business and what areas to focus on short, medium and long term to improve our commercial outcomes through our people.

I ran a company pulse survey, results attached in the tab tabs of the attached spreadsheet. I want you to return it in a format which can easily be pasted into Notion.

The report should contain:
High level insights and introduction, with clear quantitative markers for the best and worst performing areas.
Deep Dives: This should look to analyse and group responses by type in a way that gives useful insights, explaining likely causes. I want it to be broken down in the best way possible.
Suggested quick wins - this should focus on what to solve first and some small steps to make quick improvements.
Longer term solutions to low scoring areas - this should focus on the longer term, more challenging recommendations. 
Conclusion - this should wrap it all up

Please ensure that each core area receives your review and insight work. Also bear in my with any planned recommendations that we are a startup and resources are constrained.

The report should be detailed, accurate and written as if coming from a very commercial chief people officer for a YC backed data business with offices in SF and many remote team in India.

I want to ensure this is a top quality piece of work of the standard expected from a global CHRO in a scaling business.

Now the output of this alone as pretty useful! A clear breakdown of engagement pros and cons and a clear action plan:

Step 3: Let’s combine this with the commercial data

Which brings us to Prompt number two. This time, you upload your commercial spreadsheet as well - just attach it - then add the following prompt:

(PLEASE OF COURSE EDIT THE PROMPT TO REFLECT YOUR BUSINESS)

I’ve provided you with an employee engagement survey report for FinEdge AI (previously shared) and now dummy commercial data for FinEdge AI, a 50-person fintech company with $3,000,000 ARR, as of March 11, 2025. The commercial data is in a table format and includes metrics like ARR, MRR, customer count, CAC, LTV, churn, team sizes, runway, and more.
I want you to create a roadmap report for the CEO, CTO, and leadership team (including managers and HR), integrating the engagement survey insights with this commercial data to align cultural improvements with business outcomes. This is for a class I run to show how people data and commercial data can drive actionable strategies.
The report should contain:  
Introduction: Explain the value of combining people and commercial data, with a high-level summary of key engagement and commercial challenges.  

Integrated Insights: Analyze how engagement themes (e.g., transparency, career growth, compensation) intersect with commercial metrics (e.g., churn, ARR growth, delivery time), identifying root causes and business impacts.  

Roadmap for Leadership & Managers: Provide a 12-month plan with phased actions (short-term: 0-3 months, medium-term: 4-6 months, long-term: 7-12 months) for leadership and managers to address cultural and commercial gaps. Include specific responsibilities.  

HR Actions: Outline HR-specific initiatives to support the roadmap, focusing on resource-constrained solutions for a startup.  

Expected Outcomes: Quantify potential business improvements (e.g., revenue, retention) tied to the roadmap.  

Conclusion: Summarize the approach and next steps.

Format the report for easy pasting into Notion, with clear headings and bullets. Ensure it’s detailed, actionable, and written as if from a Chief People Officer for a YC-backed fintech startup, balancing cultural and commercial priorities. Resources are limited, so prioritize cost-effective solutions. Aim for top-quality work, as expected from a global CHRO in a scaling business.

This then gave me a great output combining both areas, and showing the interactions and challenges:

You can see the full example of this here

Step 4: Synthesise and Refine

Now we have a great report, we might want to add some flair.

Maybe some nice visuals for it, for example. Again - we can just ask Claude or Grok to pull out the ones which add the most value

Please come up with engaging visuals for each of the reports key areas. Return format should be clarity of the graph or chart type, alongside steps to create those visuals.

Then, once you have done this, you have your full report, ready to go, and you can see the one I created for FinEdge below:

Conclusion: An incredibly useful output in minutes not hours

We have gone from raw data to a great report in minutes. Now you can refine it, edit it and ensure that your leadership team knows just how valuable you are to setting the commercial and people strategy for the business.

🤯 PS - I created all of the above in under 20 minutes…

If you want to build the capability to run fast and get great work done in People Ops, using AI for Day to Day, Project Deliver or Analysis, join the other people leaders taking my course, starting on Maven, 17th March.

I want to help as many folks in the space build their skills as much as possible over the next year.

It’s critical to do so, as we’re at an inflection point. 20% of people will continue to grow because they use AI effectively, but 80% will stagnate.

I want to get as many people into the top 20% as possible - so they don’t get left behind.

You can find the detailed syllabus below, sign up today as spaces limited to 20 people… We currently have a few slots left…

💡 Quick Win of the Week

I decided to stay on theme this week… So data’s only half the battle—action is what counts.

Here’s a Manager’s Guide & Checklist to take your own insights and build a 90-day roadmap that sticks.

Designed for Notion, it’s packed with steps, templates, and a checklist to rally your team.

Paste it in, customize it, and watch your managers turn numbers into results. Let me know how it lands!

🧠 Product Updates

Pulse App

All will be revealed this week, finally… I pinky promise.

Equity Hub

I got annoyed by Carta when I was working with a client this week, so started building this instead. If you would like to chat about your challenges with managing equity, lmk!

📰 News That Matters for HR

Microsoft launches an amazing course on GenAI

Why this matters?

If you want to start trying to build your own tools it can be kind of daunting. Microsoft have launched a really useful course. I’m going through it right now and it’s fascinating.

Manus Launch

Why it matters?

Agents are about to change the way we do everything. China is having another DeepSeek moment this week with Manus.

It can analyse, research, login, beat captchas etc lol.

For People Ops? EVERYTHING is about to become agentic - go watch the videos on Manus to get inspired about how this will change your work.

👋 Let's Connect!

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Remember: AI in HR doesn't have to be complicated. Let's figure it out together, one practical step at a time.