I keep seeing the same pattern: when people leaders try to be the “CEO of culture,” they stall. When they act like product managers, culture scales. In a recent deep-dive with Colleen McCreary, the Chief People Officer at Credit Karma, I explored exactly how to operationalize that mindset to drive durable results and employee retention at startups.
With more than 20 years of experience in HR, operations, recruiting and M&A, Colleen has headed up the people function at companies such as Vevo, The Climate Corporation, and Zynga. She’s also seen the early-stages and scaled through multiple IPOs and acquisitions, which means she has a great perspective on the people problems founders tend to run into as their businesses grow.
What stood out immediately is her operating system: she designs for the 80% and focuses on clarity, context, and consistency when building people organizations and crafting culture. As a product management leader, this resonates deeply with how we approach product roadmapping and sprint planning, as well as outcomes vs output OKRs — optimize for the majority use cases, make intent unambiguous, and deliver predictably.
She walks us through some really tactical examples of that work, including how her team approaches compensation at Credit Karma and the reason they do promotions quarterly. In my experience, this cadence functions like a product release train for your startup compensation strategy — reducing ad-hoc exceptions, creating transparent expectations, and reinforcing fairness. The result is higher trust and healthier decision velocity when headcount scales.
Equally powerful is her reframing of the role itself: she views the Chief People Officer not as the CEO of culture, but rather the product manager of the systems and tools that run the company. That shift unlocks rigorous thinking — requirements, trade-offs, user research, and iterative launches — for everything from onboarding and performance to recognition programs. Treating culture as a portfolio of interdependent systems turns soft notions into measurable, improvable products.
We also examined how rewards and recognition were incredibly different at Zynga and Credit Karma, and why career growth isn’t just about a promotion. I’ve seen teams accelerate growth by expanding scope, deepening skills, and enabling lateral moves — especially during the IC to manager transition — instead of over-indexing on title changes. When you define multiple growth paths, you give top performers more ways to win without distorting your org design.
Finally, we discussed whether to double down on strengths or focus on correcting weaknesses when it comes to performance. My playbook mirrors hers: set outcomes, coach to amplify superpowers, and shore up only the critical deficits that block those outcomes. This keeps the conversation anchored in impact rather than activity and aligns incentives across managers and teams.
If you’re a first-time founder or an early people leader, the takeaway is clear: stop looking for a cultural silver bullet. Build an operating system for people the same way you’d build a great product — define the problems, prioritize, ship incrementally, and measure what matters. When you do, culture stops being a slogan and starts becoming your most reliable growth engine.
Inspired by this post on First Round.
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