The Core Idea
1.
Every organization
is a multi-sided business
External customers pay with money; employees pay with time, energy, and talent. Both deserve a product designed to earn that payment.
2.
Work is a product, and it can be designed
The work experience is not an accident. It's the result of decisions that have or haven't been made. It can be understood, assessed, and improved.
3.
Engagement and resilience are design outcomes
You can’t manage your way to an engaged, resilient workforce. You have to design your way there. Engagement, trust, and resilience follows when work is structured to earn it.
4.
People support
what they helped
to create
Magic happens when employees are part of designing change. Co-creation is the only reliable path to adoption.
What does it actually mean to
treat work as a product?
The phrase "work as a product" is evocative but easily misunderstood. It doesn't mean making work feel fun, gamifying performance, or rebranding HR initiatives.
It means applying the same disciplined, customer-centered design process your best product teams use to the work itself. Understanding it. Designing it. Testing it. Iterating.
Work /wɝːk/
Work is the product that employees subscribe to with their time, energy, creativity, and judgment. Like any product, it has features, friction, utility, and emotional resonance. It can be designed well or badly. And, the quality of that design determines whether people bring their full capacity to it.
A product-centric framework for
redesigning work…
1. Understand the Work
What work is being done, why, and who does it serve? Our product approach makes needs of the business, employees and managers visible so they can act rather than guess.
2. Redesign the Work
Rebuild the work like a product. Map work across dimensions. Co-design improvements with the people most knowledgeable: those doing the work
3. Build and Sustain It
Make the product real, then iterate. Surface existing norms that conflict with the new design, and co-create the practices that make it durable.
Value to the Business
Does this work matter to the business? Why is it valuable? Do people care?
Fit to Strengths
Is this a match for who we are? Does it ask for our best?
Attention Allocation
Does this feel worth doing? Are we finding real meaning and forward motion?
Meaning and Motivation
Does this feel worth doing? Are we finding real meaning and forward motion?
…that maximizes value
for your business, teams,
and people.
A different model,
not a another program.
MULTI-SIDED MANAGEMENT
The Old Way
Change management
Involve people before decisions are made. People support what they help create.
Communicate the plan. Manage resistance. Monitor compliance.
AI transformation
Redesign roles with employees at the center and build the trust that makes change possible.
Identify tasks that can be automated. Manage the disruption.
Engagement
Design the work to earn engagement. The score follows.
Measure sentiment once a year. Run programs to move the score.
Underlying model
Employees are customers who pay with time, energy, and talent.
Employees are inputs to manage for output.
Understand the work
You cannot design what you cannot see. The diagnostic stage produces a task-level picture of where human effort creates value.
Team/Role
The Work Diagnostic: 11fold Bubble Chart
11fold's proprietary instrument. Fast, visual, built to produce a decision. The most common entry point for an engagement.
Practice
Practice Diagnostic
A rigorous assessment of a specific people practice to surface friction, misalignment, or invisible cost.
Role
Work Reality Audit
Shadowing, interviewing, and observing to understand what a role actually looks like from the inside.
Org / Brand
Work Product / Brand Reality Assessment
A clear-eyed study of the gap between your employer brand and the actual experience of working for you.
Redesign
the Work
The diagnostic tells you where the work has drifted. Design is where you close that gap, with both sides of the work relationship in view.
Org
Org Design with a Multi-Sided Lens
An operating model designed to design and deliver great work and better business outcomes.
Org/Brand
Work Product / Brand Architecture
Translating the brand reality assessment into a designed work experience.
Role
Work Redesign
Redesigning workflows and decision rights, embedding Needfinding so teams can sustain the design.
Practice
Practice Redesign
Hands-on redesign of a specific HR practice with its leaders.
Org
Normfinding
Surfaces and builds the norms the organization needs to operate with a design mindset.
Build the capability
to sustain it
Org
Organizational Change Management
Stakeholder alignment, communication architecture, transition planning, adoption measurement.
Org / Brand
Living the Brand
Equipping leaders to talk authentically about what's changing and why.
Role / Org
Leadership & Manager Capability Building
Developing the capabilities managers need to move from controlling resources to orchestrating the flow of value between two customers.
Designed work only holds if the organization has the management capability and cultural infrastructure to maintain it.
Org
Multi-Sided Enablement
We embed design principles into your change approach and build internal capability.
Practice
Work Systems Alignment
Ensures your full suite of HR practices supports the new design rather than undermining it.
Individual
Multi-Sided Coaching
One-on-one coaching for executives and leaders with a multi-sided management lens.
Operating principles that run through every engagement
Co-design over communication
Employees shape the work experience with their managers, not receive it from them.
Continuous iteration
Work and what people want from work changes. The organization's capacity to keep redesigning it is the durable advantage.
Both sides, always
Every decision about work is evaluated against its benefit to paying and working customers, and is it generating profit for owners.
Specificity over programs
Engagement is built through individual work design conversations rather than programs that sit on top of the work.
Business outcomes, not HR metrics
The goal is to measure like any subscription business: is our product attracting and holding the attention of customers.
Trust as infrastructure
Genuine trust between managers and employees is the mechanism by which organizations change.
Ready to see what
multi-sided
management
looks like in your organization?
Start with a conversation. We'll tell you where this fits, where it doesn't, and what a realistic engagement looks like.