Case Study
£1.9m in estimated annual productivity gains through better HR delivery
Experian’s Talent & Learning team was already busy delivering across a complex global organisation. But growing demand, competing priorities and rapidly changing business needs called for more than simply delivering more programmes.
The team needed a better way to decide what mattered most, what to stop, what to build and how to prove value earlier.
Agile HR Community became Experian’s capability-building partner, helping Talent & Learning develop the practical skills, operating rhythms and product mindset to move from traditional programme delivery towards a more adaptive, user-centred and evidence-led model.
Today, Agile HR is embedded in how the team plans, prioritises, designs and delivers people products across Experian — supporting 25,000 employees globally. The impact is visible in everything from 12-week planning cycles and cross-functional product squads to the redesign of performance enablement, which contributed to 5,000 more employees setting goals and an estimated increase of £1.9m in annual productivity value.
The team needed a better way to decide what mattered most, what to stop, what to build and how to prove value earlier.
Agile HR Community became Experian’s capability-building partner, helping Talent & Learning develop the practical skills, operating rhythms and product mindset to move from traditional programme delivery towards a more adaptive, user-centred and evidence-led model.
Today, Agile HR is embedded in how the team plans, prioritises, designs and delivers people products across Experian — supporting 25,000 employees globally. The impact is visible in everything from 12-week planning cycles and cross-functional product squads to the redesign of performance enablement, which contributed to 5,000 more employees setting goals and an estimated increase of £1.9m in annual productivity value.
- Client: Experian Talent & Learning — supporting a global organisation of approximately 25,000 employees and $8.4bn revenue.
- Challenge: Build a more responsive way for Talent & Learning to translate business strategy into clear priorities, focus scarce capacity on the right people problems, and design and release solutions that could keep pace with a changing global business.
- Work: Built Agile HR capability inside Talent & Learning, combining practical upskilling with hands-on coaching in prioritisation, product ownership, discovery, testing and iterative delivery.
- Outcome: Agile HR embedded into the operating model, including 12-week planning cycles, product-led delivery and cross-functional squads, alongside measurable performance outcomes including 5,000 more employees setting goals and an indicative 2100% ROI on the capability investment.
CLIENT CONTEXT
The challenge: Apply Agile ways of working to people products
Experian’s Talent & Learning team was operating in a familiar HR environment: lots of valuable work, multiple projects, competing priorities and constant pressure to respond to new business needs.
At the same time, teams elsewhere in Experian were already using Agile approaches to build products. That raised an important question: could the same principles help Talent & Learning create better value for the business?
The challenge was translation.
Traditional Agile language and methods were rooted heavily in technology and software development. Experian did not need its HR teams to imitate engineering. It needed a practical way to apply Agile thinking to people products, business problems and the realities of a global Talent function.
Agile HR Community helped bridge that gap.
Rather than introducing Agile as a standalone methodology or learning programme, the focus was on building an internal capability Experian could own: customer discovery, prioritisation, multidisciplinary squads, product ownership, prototyping, testing and iterative delivery.
The capability build included 43 Agile HR Certified Practitioners, 57 Agile HR Mindset participants and 41 Certified Agile HR Product Owners, alongside deeper capability in prioritisation and portfolio management.
That investment began to change the operating model itself.
Talent & Learning moved away from disconnected programme and regional delivery towards a more business-centric, user- and product-led approach. Work is now prioritised against global People OKRs, framed around business problems rather than predetermined solutions and delivered through Product Heads, Product Managers, Regional Talent Partners and cross-functional skills squads.
Annual planning has also given way to a 12-week planning cycle, allowing the team to respond more quickly as priorities change. Release planning creates visibility across major initiatives, helping the function actively manage organisational load rather than continually adding more work.
And because the capability sits inside Experian, the model has been able to spread. Colleagues across regions now use the same approaches within global squads and their local teams, with Agile HR shaping the development of Talent & Learning products across the organisation.
At the same time, teams elsewhere in Experian were already using Agile approaches to build products. That raised an important question: could the same principles help Talent & Learning create better value for the business?
The challenge was translation.
Traditional Agile language and methods were rooted heavily in technology and software development. Experian did not need its HR teams to imitate engineering. It needed a practical way to apply Agile thinking to people products, business problems and the realities of a global Talent function.
Agile HR Community helped bridge that gap.
Rather than introducing Agile as a standalone methodology or learning programme, the focus was on building an internal capability Experian could own: customer discovery, prioritisation, multidisciplinary squads, product ownership, prototyping, testing and iterative delivery.
The capability build included 43 Agile HR Certified Practitioners, 57 Agile HR Mindset participants and 41 Certified Agile HR Product Owners, alongside deeper capability in prioritisation and portfolio management.
That investment began to change the operating model itself.
Talent & Learning moved away from disconnected programme and regional delivery towards a more business-centric, user- and product-led approach. Work is now prioritised against global People OKRs, framed around business problems rather than predetermined solutions and delivered through Product Heads, Product Managers, Regional Talent Partners and cross-functional skills squads.
Annual planning has also given way to a 12-week planning cycle, allowing the team to respond more quickly as priorities change. Release planning creates visibility across major initiatives, helping the function actively manage organisational load rather than continually adding more work.
And because the capability sits inside Experian, the model has been able to spread. Colleagues across regions now use the same approaches within global squads and their local teams, with Agile HR shaping the development of Talent & Learning products across the organisation.
Using Agile ways of working, Experian developed a new AI Leadership course from concept to a test-ready solution in just seven days — showing that speed came from tighter feedback loops and clearer decisions, not from cutting corners.
OUTCOMES
Measurable outcomes
The partnership built more than Agile knowledge. It created an internal operating capability Experian can continue using, adapting and scaling without becoming dependent on external consultants.
5,000
Additional employees setting goals, increasing from 71% to 91% over two years.
£1.9m
A conservative estimate of annual productivity value increase, based on improved productivity linked to stronger goal-setting.
2 weeks
An intensive co-located two week sprint replaced what would previously have involved 6 months of sequential performance-management project work.
+5%
On-time performance reviews increase.
83%
Great Place to Work (GPTW) leadership effectiveness rose from 78% to 83% over three years, putting Experian in the top 10 places in the world for leaders.
7 days
A complete AI Leadership course was taken from concept to a test-ready solution through a one-week sprint.
Capability outcomes
- Agile HR embedded into how Talent & Learning develops people products across the global organisation.
- A 12-week planning rhythm replacing over-reliance on a fixed annual plan.
- Clearer prioritisation against global People OKRs and stronger visibility of organisational capacity.
- A product-led operating model with clearer ownership, multidisciplinary squads and faster decision-making.
- Greater use of discovery, prototyping, minimum viable experiences and user testing before committing significant investment.
- Fewer disconnected initiatives and clearer trade-offs about what the function should — and should not — work on.
- Globally consistent solutions designed with enough flexibility to remain locally relevant.
- Agile HR capability spreading beyond the original Talent & Learning team into regional and adjacent HR teams.
- Leadership development increasingly built alongside people products, helping new processes translate into day-to-day management behaviour.
- Internal teams able to run planning, prioritisation, discovery, squads and delivery themselves — reducing dependency on external consultants.
TAKE HOMES
What others can learn from this
01
Agile works in HR when you translate it, not transplant it.
Experian didn’t try to make HR behave like a software team. The value came from adapting Agile principles — discovery, prioritisation, product ownership, testing and iteration — to real people challenges and the way HR actually operates.
02
Agility is as much about what you stop as what you start.
Experian used prioritisation and clearer product ownership to cut through competing demands and focus teams on the work with the strongest business value. The lesson: moving faster starts with making better choices about where not to spend time.
Too much HR work competing for too little capacity?
We help HR teams build the operating model, skills and practical Agile HR capability to turn business priorities into better people products — without creating long-term consultancy dependency.
