For the CHRO
During a transformation engagement, a Fortune 100 client asked us what we knew about their Workday instance for a $15-25M Workday project they had. We produced a business case in an hour. From the same knowledge store, we produced two more. They told us the consulting equivalent would have cost $100,000 each.
Here is how that works.
Led by former Heads of People Analytics and HR technology leaders from Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Meta, Nike, and Expedia.
The situation
The 2030 mandate from your board and CEO is a credible, funded plan that compounds across every budget cycle between now and then — not a vision deck. 14 quarters sounds long enough to plan and short enough to miss. Most CHROs will lose the first two of them to discovery: mapping what the function actually does, where the friction is, what AI can plausibly absorb.
The big consultancies will quote you eight figures and eighteen months to do that discovery and hand back an off-the-shelf recommendation. Your team could do it internally on top of their day jobs. Neither path lands you in front of the board this year.
Ikona runs that discovery in 90 days. You walk into your next board meeting with the current-state map, the business cases, and the roadmap — generated from evidence inside your own organization. The evidence base compounds every quarter between now and 2030, and your team can hold direct access to it under a subscription.
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What you walk away with
You have the business cases, process maps, and roadmaps your CFO and board are asking for, generated from your own organization rather than a consultant’s template. You can answer the follow-up questions because the evidence is yours.
The evidence base stays live and maintained. Dozens of stakeholder interviews, captured, cleaned, and structured into 1,700+ pages of evidence. A new question produces a new answer from the same evidence, at near-zero marginal cost. The investment compounds every one of the 13 quarters after discovery wraps.
The Workday case in the hero came off the evidence base rather than a new round of interviews. Every question you put to the same evidence afterward becomes another business case, another roadmap, another board deck.
Why this is possible
The reason a traditional consulting team takes a quarter to produce a business case is that they are starting with fresh consultants each time. They send junior generalists who learn your domain while they bill you. We bring industry leaders with a methodology and a system that solves your biggest problems.
Our founders ran people analytics at Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Meta, Nike, and Expedia. We have built and rebuilt the function the CHRO is now trying to redesign. You are not paying us to learn your domain.
Each interview builds on everything every prior interview has established. Our system decomposes a research question into dozens of structured sub-questions, routed across our library of assessment questions, then sends each one to the person most likely to answer it. By interview thirty, the marginal interview produces more signal than interview one did, not less. Nobody starts from nothing.
Interviews are captured, cleaned, and structured into an evidence base, so the artifacts at the end of the engagement are generated from evidence, not memory or notes. A new question against the same evidence produces a new answer without a new round of discovery. The work was done during the capture, and it stays done.
Practitioners, not generalists
Co-founder and CEO
Former head of people analytics at Amazon (1M+ employees), JPMorgan Chase, and Google. 20+ years building enterprise analytics functions at scale.
Co-founder and CTO
Former machine learning product leader at Amazon and Expedia. Leads Ikona’s platform and the knowledge store infrastructure that makes the methodology run at scale.
Co-founder and CPO
Built people analytics at Meta, Uber, Nike, and Argo AI, then served as VP of People Analytics Strategy at One Model. HR Tech 100 honoree.
Beyond the three founders
Three founders run every engagement. Behind them is a marketplace of senior people analytics practitioners we pull in when the question demands specific expertise. Compensation benchmarking. Workforce planning at scale. DEI measurement. Specific HCM platforms. Anyone we add has held the role. No analysts billing at partner rates.
We do not pretend to be experts in everything. We know the people who are: compensation, talent mobility, HR tech selection, org design. Every specialist we bring in has done the job at enterprise scale.
Scope expands mid-engagement and the bench expands with it. Scope tightens and we stop billing for bodies you do not need. No new SOW, no renegotiation, no second firm.
Whoever we pull in works from the same structured evidence your engagement is building, so nobody arrives cold. Nobody starts from scratch. Nobody duplicates questions.
Before you book the call
A Big4 Consulting firm sends a team of twenty generalists for eighteen months. We send three expert practitioners who have done the job you are trying to redesign, supported by a system that compresses the discovery a large team would spend months on. Our founders have run people analytics at Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Meta, Nike, and Expedia. We are not learning your domain on your dime, and we are not staffing a pyramid.
They could, in theory. The practical problem is time. Your team is already running the function; discovery at this depth is a three-month sprint on top of their day jobs, and the methodology and system behind it took us years to build. We show up as the capacity they do not have, and we leave behind an evidence base that keeps producing answers, and a subscription if they want to pull them directly.
A typical Ikona engagement costs a fraction of what a big consultancy charges for the same scope, and the evidence base it produces keeps working afterward. The return shows up in two places. First, the artifacts themselves, each one traceable back to the interviews behind it and defensible in the room you have to walk into. Second, every question you put to the same evidence afterward is answered without paying for discovery again.
Spend it with us, and the other 13 compound.
Thirty minutes with a founder. No deck. No pitch. A conversation about the artifact you walk into the board meeting holding.
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