Authors: Vitor Cintra and Ana Ikeoka

Everyone in HR knows that: the traditional HR Operating Model often results in a fragmented employee experience, posing a significant risk to talent engagement and productivity in high-growth companies. This article details how Nubank, one of the largest digital financial services platforms in the world, successfully addressed this challenge by fundamentally rethinking its HR, aka People & Culture, operating model. The experiment was: create and give autonomy to the P&C3D initiative, a strategic team responsible to pivot to a product-centric model that treats the employee lifecycle offerings as a product to be managed with the same rigor as a customer-facing solution.

By adopting product, design, and user-centric best practices — including Nubank’s internal product methodology (Nu3D) — P&C3D systematically mapped the employee journey, utilized a P&C Readiness Assessment to measure product maturity, and embedded specialized Product & Design talent directly into HR teams. The results were positive:

  • The readiness assessment score grew from 2.5 to 3.6 out of 5, indicating greater confidence in applying product principles.
  • The headcount of Product and Design specialists grew from 2 to 20, representing 7% of the total P&C workforce.
  • Vibe coding enabled the deployment of a product management tool called the P&C Solution Portfolio, creating a single source of truth with essential information about all active employee-facing products and supporting better decision-making.
  • The Product and Design community within P&C showed higher levels of collaboration (+2.6 pp) and a stronger sense of belonging (+13.6 pp) compared to peers outside P&C.

This transformation offers a blueprint for all organizations seeking to evolve HR from an administrative function into a strategic, data-driven, and employee-obsessed engine for business impact.

Introduction

As rapidly scaling organizations navigate fiercely competitive markets, the role of HR has never been more critical—or more complex. For a company like Nubank, a global leader in financial technology, delivering an exceptional and seamless employee experience became mission-critical not just for engagement, but for driving talent performance and business impact.

Yet, like many high-growth firms, Nubank’s People & Culture (P&C) team initially operated under a classic HR Operating Model. This expert- and generalist-driven structure, despite its best intentions, generated a common challenge: designing solutions (products and services) that overlook employee pain points reflects a non-user-centric methodology, which inevitably disrupts the cohesion of the employee experience. Learnings from core business operations, analytics, and technology were being integrated, but the lack of an interdependent portfolio strategy and a core product-centric outlook hindered the ability to achieve full synergy.

In 2022, Nubank made a radical decision: to stop viewing HR as a series of administrative processes and start treating the Employee Journey as a framework to uncover real pain points and gaps, allowing us to build the essential products and services that drive value for both our employees and the business. A dedicated team, P&C3D (3D stands for Discover, Deliver and Delight), was formed with a mandate to test and build the path to support the entire structure to manage and develop products that truly address the employees’ pain points and needs.

By delivering this value, we foster a seamless and friction-free experience throughout their lifecycle, ultimately aiming to ensure that Nubankers “experience the best job of their lives delivering superior business results”, connecting directly with our Employee Value Proposition. The strategic question at the core of this pivot was: How can HR successfully adopt a world-class product development mindset—embracing scientific rigor, user-centric methods, and continuous experimentation—to deliver superior employee solutions?

Check our job opportunities

The strategy: adopting the product mindset in HR

The P&C3D initiative represented a fundamental shift from an “inside-out” HR model to an “outside-in” user-centric model. The strategy was to evolve how P&C builds and improves solutions by mirroring the very best practices of Nubank’s core business product teams.

This evolution was anchored in the Nu Product Development Model (Nu3D), Nubank’s guiding light for product teams. By adopting Nu3D’s principles, P&C was encouraged to move beyond incremental improvements and focus on building fundamentally different solutions—a mindset captured by the phrase, “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”

The initial phases established the foundation for this transformation:

  • Team Setup: The P&C3D team was intentionally composed of members with strong backgrounds in product management and design, ensuring the right skills were in place to adapt the product approach to the HR reality.
  • Journey Discovery: This phase was paramount. Service design experts conducted an in-depth mapping of the entire Nubanker lifecycle, identifying key touchpoints and, crucially, the real pain points employees were experiencing. This comprehensive material allowed P&C leaders to assess and prioritize opportunities based on data, not assumptions.

Execution and scaling: the journey to embedded capability

With the foundation set, P&C3D transitioned to embedding this new operating model into the broader P&C structure, trying to make product, design and user centricity being capilar across P&C areas. The team’s strategy focused on governance, capability building, and rigor in execution.

P&C3D Team was deployed into HR multidisciplinary teams to directly tackle opportunities identified in the Discovery phase. This included:

  • Measuring maturity: A critical step was the development of the P&C Readiness Assessment (in partnership with the internal Product and Design Center of Excellence). This tool established a baseline and measured P&C teams’ progress in applying product principles in their daily work, ensuring accountability to the new methodology.
  • Fostering a learning culture: Knowledge centers, customer research repositories, and synchronous touchpoints like Mentoring Sessions with Product & Design Experts were created. These avenues reinforced product best practices, utilizing user-centric tools and ensuring the team remained responsive to emerging needs.
  • Influencing the talent mix growth: P&C3D team supported other P&C areas to identify Product and Design needs in order to create impact at scale and ensure the sustainability of the product principles applications in the long run.
  • Building mechanisms for the long term: Driving and leading initiatives to support the continuous deployment of the product principles and application, unlocking better discussion based on management tools to support product evaluation and impact.

By influencing the way P&C managed its product and services portfolio in alignment with the employee journey, P&C3D ensured a user-focused strategy remained at the core. The success of this effort was not about sustaining a centralized unit indefinitely, but about making the product and design foundations robust enough to support structural and operational consistency across the entire P&C organization.

The impact: our product-led results

The ultimate test of P&C3D’s transformation journey was the ability to deliver measurable, sustainable impact. The evidence demonstrates a successful pivot across talent, culture, and operational rigor:

Capability and scalability: the P&C3D area sunset

The most powerful indicator of success was the strategic decision for the P&C3D Area Sunset after 2.5 years. This was not a failure but the intended outcome: the core mission was to improve product and design maturity within P&C, not to become a permanent, central dependency. The team successfully expanded product best practices, analytical thinking, and management tool deployment, enabling P&C’s next phase of business impact.

Our key metric, Readiness Assessment Score, moved from 2.5 to 3.6 out of 5, giving us confidence we achieved a level of maturity to decentralize our team into other HR areas in order to keep moving the transformation from within.

Product and design talent growth and impact

P&C3D successfully embedded and scaled expertise:

  • Talent growth: Product & Design headcount grew 10x, with this specialized talent now spread across various P&C Business Areas, ensuring product mindset is capilar and not centralized;
  • Community engagement: The P&C Product & Design community demonstrated a powerful cultural dividend, significantly showing engagement with HR environment and transformational mindset:
    • Collaboration improved 10p.p. 
    • While Sense of Belonging grew 13p.p.

The shift in mindset, driven by the embedded Product and Design talent within teams, led directly to an important increase in operational rigor and data-driven management. What we are seeing is that solutions created from scratch or live solutions who received a new member from these expertise have more clarity on what the team is solving for, for whom, and with clear success metrics. In the majority, teams are able to balance Product Market Fit, Adoption, and Customer Effort Score as drivers, directly changing the set of metrics P&C were using before the change.

P&C portfolio management excellence

The rigor of this new approach is evident in the results:

  • Metric quality: The proportion of active solutions with key metrics defined and validated soared from 26% to 89% (+63pp), fundamentally changing how P&C measured success.
  • Efficiency and focus: The new portfolio management approach allowed the organization to apply ruthless prioritization, leading to the sunset of +3 low-value solutions.
  • Visibility and accountability: 100% of active solutions were mapped with clear ownership, target employees, defined problem statements, and analytics monitoring. Furthermore, a central public webpage for monitoring active P&C Solutions was deployed, enhancing management and visibility.

Conclusion and lessons learned: your HR blueprint

The Nubank P&C3D journey provides a powerful case study for any enterprise seeking to evolve its Human Resources function. The introduction and eventual sunset of the dedicated P&C3D team confirmed the successful transformation of P&C’s mindset and operating model. By treating the employee experience as a product, P&C built a mechanism robust enough to support structural and operational consistency, ensuring decisions are rooted in a deep understanding of Nubankers’ expectations derived from continuous UX Research.

The ultimate success is not just enhanced employee experience, but a higher capacity for the P&C team to sustain business results through data-driven, user-centric solution delivery.

For any senior leader looking to initiate a similar transformation, Nubank’s experience offers prescriptive lessons:

  • Secure senior sponsorship: A senior leader committed to the journey is fundamental, as significant, lasting results take time to materialize.
  • Start with the right mix: Establish a small, centralized team with product and design members to ensure the product approach is correctly adapted to the HR reality.
  • Prioritize rigor over speed: Focus the narrative on learning and experimentation to reduce barriers to change and avoid ‘discovery/experimentation paralysis.’
  • Empower and align: Address sustainability risks by empowering multidisciplinary teams and ensuring individual goals are aligned with their solution’s results.
  • Embed data as a core competency: Ensure all solutions have key metrics and health indicators, and foster a culture of testing and experimentation to build a continuous learning loop about user needs.

What we’ve learned

Capacity and scalability

Managing capacity in multidisciplinary teams requires active prioritization. Teams need to proactively balance workload and avoid accumulating additional expectations that dilute focus and slow delivery. Clear alignment with owners, sponsors, and key stakeholders is essential to prevent friction caused by misaligned expectations. Over time, each team should be encouraged to find the right balance between governance and delivery, adapting structure without compromising speed or quality.

Operating model: engagement and mindset

Strong engagement starts with clear roles and active participation across teams. Creating space for discussion, healthy challenge, and diverse perspectives, especially from owners and multidisciplinary teams, helps surface better solutions and avoid assumption-driven decisions. Democratizing product processes within People & Culture, supported by agile ways of working and clear role definitions, is key to scaling a product mindset.

Sustaining this mindset requires continuous learning and deliberate investment in core competencies. Addressing skepticism and frustration around product methods early helps build shared understanding and trust. Well-designed rituals, routines, and ways of working prevent siloed execution and reinforce continuous improvement. Clear communication channels and regular feedback loops further strengthen alignment.

Finally, recognizing and rewarding teams that work with hypotheses and measurable outcomes reinforces the right behaviors. Normalizing “failing fast” by encouraging teams to pivot, merge, or sunset initiatives that no longer deliver value removes the fear of admitting mistakes and ensures capacity is not wasted on invalidated solutions.

Stakeholder management

Effective stakeholder management depends on strong alignment and open communication between owners, sponsors, and key stakeholders. Teams should be empowered to make informed decisions, using sponsors as enablers for fast and decisive trade-offs. Sponsors play a critical role throughout solution development, balancing product strategy with business demands to keep teams focused in the right direction.

Data and analysis

Building a data-driven organization goes beyond dashboards. Teams need to continuously strengthen data analysis capabilities and ensure every solution has clear key metrics and health indicators. Investing in research and experimentation platforms enables continuous learning about user needs and creates a feedback loop that informs better decisions. Fostering a culture of testing and experimentation ensures insights translate into action, not just reporting.

Check our job opportunities