Morakinyo (Akin) Isaac-Olaniyi is an HR and talent leader with close to two decades of experience across multinational and complex organisations. As Associate Director, Talent Development at IHS Towers, he works on enterprise talent and organisational development. His wider career has exposed him to HR systems implementation, workforce analytics, performance management, employee journeys and organisational transformation.
In recent years, he has increasingly applied this experience to Product development, using his understanding of how HR teams, managers and employees actually work to inform the design of more practical workplace technology.
Morakinyo Isaac-Olaniyi, known to colleagues as Akin, spent two decades inside HR departments before he began building the software that HR departments use. Today he serves as Associate Director of Talent Development and Performance Management at IHS Towers, a role that sits at the meeting point of people practice and product design. His path from practitioner to builder shapes almost everything he says about the systems organisations rely on to manage their workforce.
Ask Isaac-Olaniyi what HR software gets wrong, and he does not point to missing features. He points to a mismatch between how processes are drawn on paper and how people behave once they sit down to do the work.
Morakinyo’s path from practitioner to builder shapes almost everything he says about the systems organisations rely on to manage their workforce.
“A process map can look perfectly logical,” he says. “A request starts here, an approval happens there, HR reviews it, and Finance completes the transaction. On paper, everything works, then you enter a real organisation and discover that a manager approves things on WhatsApp, somebody keeps a spreadsheet because they do not fully trust the system, and HR spends Friday afternoon reconciling information that supposedly already exists digitally.”
For him, these workarounds are not failures of discipline among staff. They are signals. “People do not normally create extra work for themselves without a reason,” he says. “If somebody repeatedly leaves your system to complete the job somewhere else, that behaviour is telling you something about the product.” The lesson he draws is one of humility for anyone designing HR tools: watch what people do, not only what the policy says they should do.
Two decades in HR could easily tempt a product leader to assume he already knows the answer before a customer finishes the question. Isaac-Olaniyi describes learning to resist that pull. “If an HR manager tells me payroll takes two days every month, my background allows me to ask fairly specific questions quite quickly,” he explains, listing the kind he reaches for: where the employee information comes from, which part is reconciled by hand, who approves changes, where errors tend to occur.
Yet he is quick to draw a boundary around what that background can and cannot do. “One of the most useful things Product taught me is that twenty years of HR experience does not make me the customer,” he says. “It simply means I may recognise certain patterns faster and know which areas deserve further investigation. I use the experience to improve discovery rather than replace it.”
If somebody repeatedly leaves your system to complete the job somewhere else, that behaviour is telling you something about the product.
Every organisation insists its processes are unique, and HR technology often buckles under the weight of that claim. Isaac-Olaniyi treats “our process is different” as a starting question rather than an instruction. “If you customise the product around every customer’s existing process, eventually you stop having one product,” he says. “You end up with multiple versions that Engineering has to maintain, support becomes more difficult, and improvements become harder to roll out consistently.”
Some differences deserve accommodation, he notes, particularly where regulation or operating model demands it. Others persist simply because nobody has questioned them. “If we are about to build six approval stages simply because six stages have always existed, it is worth asking what risk each approval actually manages and whether the same control can be achieved more simply.”
HR products answer to several audiences at once, and Isaac-Olaniyi is candid about the tension that creates. “The business owner may care about cost and visibility. Finance is usually concerned with accuracy, control and reconciliation. HR wants the administration to be manageable and the information reliable. The employee may simply want to know that their salary is correct,” he says, adding a caution: “a product can satisfy the person who bought it and still frustrate the people using it every month.”
His approach is to name the trade-off rather than pretend it away. “Sometimes an additional approval may inconvenience the administrator but materially reduce financial or compliance risk, so keeping it makes sense. Another approval may exist simply because nobody has questioned it in years, in which case the better Product decision may be to remove it.”
If a system tells a manager that an employee appears to have a high probability of leaving, that can be useful information to investigate
Given his background in performance, talent and workforce planning, questions about artificial intelligence draw out perhaps his most considered position. He welcomes what AI can remove from HR’s plate, but distinguishes prediction from judgement.
“If a system tells a manager that an employee appears to have a high probability of leaving, that can be useful information to investigate,” he says. “But if the organisation takes that prediction and begins denying the employee opportunities because the system says they may leave, then the technology has moved from informing a decision to influencing someone’s career based on a prediction.”
His standard for any automated recommendation touching employment, compensation or career is consistent: someone must remain accountable when the system is wrong.
Asked, after everything, what makes a genuinely good HR product, Isaac-Olaniyi returns to a single measure. “A genuinely good HR product makes work easier without making the organisation less thoughtful about its people,” he says. “Technology should support the judgement that exists inside an organisation rather than pretending that judgement is no longer necessary.”
It is a fitting summary from someone who spent twenty years on one side of the desk before crossing to the other, carrying the questions of HR practice into the discipline of product.
