80 - Jessica Zwaan (COO, Whereby) on people ops as a product & recent layoffs in the news

Jessica Zwaan, COO at Whereby, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about the recent layoffs in the news, how we can raise the CPO role to be looked at as more commercial, and why you should treat people ops as a product. Timestamps: why we should be jealous she gets to work at Whereby (6:01), layoffs this week (8:35), the domino effect leading up to layoffs (17:15), outside of the CPO role, women only make up 20% of the other C-Suite roles (20:15), raising the people role to be more commercial (23:49), there are 3 products a company is building at one time (30:35), you need a unique selling point for employees to really stand out in the market (38:35), 2 biggest challenges when trying to move to this new way of working (44:07), how she defines a Modern People Leader (52:51), the advice she’d give to her 22-year-old self (53:51), and the people problem she would fix with a magic wand (56:24). Get notified when Built for People is available for pre-order: https://form.typeform.com/to/VwL5AxNj Subscribe to the MPL Weekly Digest: https://forms.gle/qdt6YaWULfoEHb6n8 Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-modern-people-leader