Your team doesn’t need another framework. It needs a new way of operating. In 90 days, we’ll help your People function adopt the habits, operating rhythms and product practices needed to solve real organisational problems.
90-DAY ACTIVATION
You don’t need to transform your entire People function to start working differently.
Activate helps one People team adopt product-led ways of working around a real organisational challenge. In 90 days, you’ll build new habits, demonstrate measurable value and create momentum that others want to follow.
THE CHALLENGE
Every request feels urgent. Every stakeholder has a priority.
Teams are expected to be strategic, commercial, employee-centred, data-informed and endlessly responsive, often at the same time.
The result? Busy teams doing valuable work, but without a shared way to decide what matters most, where to invest their time, or how to measure success.
Activate introduces a product operating model that helps your team prioritise, solve the right problems and create measurable impact.
The Activation Questions
THE TEAM
Team activation doesn’t happen through the model alone.
SapienX, in partnership with Red Oak, deliver product team activation where impact is most noticeable. This partnership is designed to give organisations the right blend of strategic challenge & direction, product expertise, coaching, facilitation and hands-on support.
Chris Metcalfe
FOUNDER, RED OAK
Product Leadership &
Operating Models
Luke O’Mahoney
FOUNDER, SAPIENX
People Experience &
PX Product Transformation
WHO WE WORK WITH
Activate is designed for People teams that know the old way isn’t scaling. Whether you’re building capability in a growing company or driving change inside a larger organisation, we help your team focus on the problems that matter most.
Startup & Scaleup Teams
Teams of 3-8 people supporting a growing business, close to the most important organisational bottlenecks, but too stretched to solve them.
Activate helps the team step back, align on the highest-value problems, and create a way of working that turns limited capacity into focused progress.
Teams Inside Larger Orgs
Teams embedded within a larger HR function, expected to drive change but without the scale or mandate for enterprise-wide transformation.
Activate helps the team focus on one meaningful problem, prove a better way of working, and create momentum that spreads across the wider organisation.
FROM PROBLEM TO PROOF
Activate is a 90-day engagement that helps People teams move from identifying the right problem to delivering measurable business impact.
1
Align the team and key stakeholders around the business context, strategic priorities, and value the team needs to create.
2
Define the problem space, success measures, and agree the scope before the team begins solving anything to avoid jumping to solutions.
3
Establish the core team with clear roles and understanding of how they contribute, how the team works, and how decisions get made.
4
The team starts to function in product-mode on live work, establishing core operating rhythms, rituals and practices.
5
Measure outcomes, celebrate what worked, surface what didn’t, capture learnings, and decide what to improve in the next cycle.
ENGAGEMENT MODEL
Our goal is simple: make ourselves unnecessary. We guide the activation, but your team develops the habits, confidence and operating model to continue without us.
What we provide
+ Product Expertise
+ Capability Building
+ Tools & Frameworks
+ Coaching & Support
What you own
→ Defining the problems
→ Making the decisions
→ Applying the model
→ Scaling what works
Clarity on the right problem
Teams aligned
Product squad operating
Live experiments shipped
Decisions backed by evidence
Better stakeholder conversations
Repeatable operating rhythms
Measurable business impact
Momentum beyond 90 days
The biggest change isn’t what your team knows. It’s how they operate. Problems become products. Assumptions become experiments. Activity becomes measurable impact.
COMMON QUESTIONS
No. Training may be part of the activation, but only in service of live application.
Activate is about changing how a team works around a real problem space. It is not standalone product training or a workshop series.
No. Activate is designed for both startup and scaleup People teams, and small teams inside larger HR organisations.
The common factor is not company size. The common factor is a lean team that wants to organise around a meaningful problem and work in a more focused, product-led way.
No. But the team does need protected time and permission to work differently.
The activation works best when the selected team can make the product-mode pilot a meaningful part of their real work for the 90-day period.
Not necessarily. The activation includes alignment and definition work to help identify and shape the right problem space.
Some teams arrive with a clear challenge in mind. Others know they need to work differently, but need support to decide where to focus first. Both are fine.
No. Activate is local, team-level, and 90 days.
Transform is a larger 12–18 month operating model shift across the People function.
Activate helps one team start working differently.
Transform helps the wider function redesign how People work is prioritised, organised, delivered, measured, and scaled.
The team reviews what worked, adapts the model, and continues independently.
Additional coaching or support can be added if useful, but the core goal is to reduce dependency and help the team keep going without needing SapienX support long term.
If your team is stretched, reactive, and ready to focus on the problems that matter most, let’s explore what a 90-day activation could look like.
