In this episode of Heart of The Brand, host Roman Kirsch interviews Oana Breen, Director of People Operations and Culture at Interactive Strength. Interactive Strength scaled from 15 to 100 employees in four years while navigating the unique challenge of building culture across two distinct workforces: corporate teams and customer-facing personal trainers. Oana’s approach centers on a counterintuitive insight: culture must evolve with every new hire, not remain static. With a master’s degree in organizational culture and leadership, she brings a rare academic foundation to startup people operations, focusing on intentional culture evolution rather than rigid culture preservation. Her framework uses customer feedback as a direct input for talent decisions, creating a measurable connection between hiring choices and business outcomes that most people leaders overlook.

Topics Discussed

• Building intentional culture evolution frameworks that allow strategic change while maintaining core values during hypergrowth
• Scaling people operations from 15 to 100 employees while managing two distinct talent pools with different success metrics
• Using customer feedback data as primary input for talent acquisition and performance evaluation in service-based businesses
• Evaluating mid-market HR technology solutions and calculating ROI on people operations tools for 100-person companies
• Managing cultural integration when hiring internationally versus building globally distributed teams for US-based operations
• Implementing listening frameworks that uncover organizational needs across departments, verticals, and individual growth trajectories
• Balancing AI automation in recruiting while preserving human judgment for culture fit and customer-facing roles
• Designing talent acquisition processes that serve diverse customer bases without creating discriminatory hiring practices