About

Two operators, not a consulting pyramid

People by Design was built around one combination: someone who has built growing companies from the inside, and someone who makes People systems work in practice. Most People problems sit exactly where those two meet.

Positioning

Why the combination matters

People consulting tends to produce frameworks that are well designed and impossible to use. Operations consulting tends to produce structures that ignore how managers actually behave. Both fail for the same reason: treating the organisation and its people as two separate problems.

They are one. Structure sets roles, roles set expectations, expectations drive performance, performance connects to progression and pay — and managers operate all of it. Working on one piece without the others is why so many People projects get rebuilt within two years.

People by Design is deliberately small, and senior because of the experience it brings. The people you meet are the people who do the work. There is no team of analysts behind the proposal.

What we bring together

Performance
Culture and values
Careers and compensation
Leadership and management
Organisation and operations
People metrics

Ana Reis

Co-founder — People & Management

Ana has spent the last years building and improving the People foundations of growing companies, working closely with leadership teams through change, growth and professionalisation. Her work has been about turning loosely defined needs into systems, processes and ways of working that are clearer, simpler and usable day to day.

Along the way she developed an approach centred on implementation: it is not enough for a framework to be well designed on paper. It has to fit into a real week, work in the conversations that matter, and be clear enough that managers can use it without depending on whoever built it.

That is precisely where she contributes: making sure every solution is designed for the reality of the company, tested with the people who will use it, and supported until it works in practice. From the diagnosis through the first weeks of use, she works to reduce friction, increase adoption and turn decisions into management habits.

Areas of work

Performance cycles
Careers and progression
Management routines
Values and behaviours
Implementation and adoption

Articles by Ana

Francisco Campos

Co-founder — Organisation & Operations

Francisco spent his career inside growing companies, taking responsibility for the results rather than advising from outside. He was the first employee at Onport and left as COO, after helping grow the company from around €100k to €2.5M in annual revenue and through its strategic acquisition by Farfetch.

At Rovo and Assembly, as SVP of Revenue & Operations, he was responsible for revenue, operations, finance and organisational structure — leading more than forty people across functions and building the commercial organisation from scratch.

His contribution to most projects is sequencing and evidence: which change makes the others possible, what it will cost in management attention, and which small set of indicators tells the leadership team whether it worked.

Areas of work

Organisation and structure
Scaling
Management systems
People metrics
Commercial and operational alignment

Articles by Francisco

Practice

How we work

Fixed scope, fixed price

Every proposal states what we will solve, what you will receive, how long it takes and what it costs. We do not sell consulting days.

We stay for the implementation

The project ends when the system is being used — managers trained, documents approved, an owner named inside the company. Not when the deck is delivered.

Built for your size

Everything is sized to the company you are, not to a reference model from a much larger one. A process nobody has time to run is not a process.

Clear from the first conversation

You get our read on the problem before anything is signed: what we would prioritise, what can wait, and what it would take.

The best place to start is a structured conversation

Tell us where the organisation is. We reply with an honest read on whether we can help.

Book a People Diagnostic See how we work