Plume Appoints Lorie Boyd Chief People Officer — What This Signals for Culture, Execution, and ISP Partnerships

The leadership move behind the product roadmap

When a scaling technology company elevates its people function, it isn’t just filling a role it’s setting an operating cadence. With its Dec 5, 2025 announcement, Plume named Lorie Boyd Chief People Officer to lead global talent strategy, culture, and organizational development as the company advances cloud-managed Wi-Fi, security, and smart-home services for ISPs. The decision underscores a broader industry truth: in markets where product velocity is non-negotiable and partner expectations are high, culture is infrastructure.

“As we scale Plume and deliver the next generation of market-defining connectivity technology, building a world-class team is central to our strategy.” — Dan Herscovici, CEO, Plume

Boyd’s remit aligns with what executive communicators and HR leaders are seeing across high-growth tech: the CPO role has become a growth lever—integrating talent systems, leadership behaviors, and communication rituals with customer outcomes.

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Why a CPO appointment is a strategy announcement

From compliance to competitive edge. Modern people leadership extends far beyond benefits, comp, and recruiting. The mandate now includes workforce architecture, manager enablement, skills intelligence, and culture design—each directly tied to product quality and time-to-value.

Signal to partners and the market. For Plume’s ISP ecosystem, a strengthened people function communicates reliability: consistent performance, faster learning loops, and field-ready teams who can support deployments and subscriber experience.

Trust as the multiplier. Trust compounds when leaders show how talent strategy supports the roadmap. Publishing clear goals, listening at scale, and closing feedback loops turn values into operating constraints—improving execution and reducing friction in moments of rapid change.

Turning people strategy into an operating system

1) Talent architecture that mirrors the roadmap.Map critical skills to product bets and partner commitments. Align role design, career paths, and internal mobility to those skills so that staffing follows strategy—not the other way around.

2) Manager enablement as the throughput constraint.The manager experience is the subscriber experience—two steps removed. Equip managers with conversation guides, decision rights, and simple rituals (weekly priorities, monthly retros, quarterly talent reviews) that keep teams focused and emotionally safe during scale.

3) Learning that is observable, not just assigned.Shift from “courses completed” to practice observed: code reviews, mock customer sessions, launch debriefs, and peer teaching. Reward behaviors that improve latency between insight and action.

4) People analytics that leaders actually use.Tie engagement, readiness, and quality signals to core business metrics (churn, NPS, cycle time). Display them on the same dashboard executives use for product and go-to-market so tradeoffs are explicit.

Communications moves for the first 100 days of a new CPO

Craft the mandate in public. Publish a one-page brief that connects culture, capabilities, and the product roadmap. Name 3–5 behaviors the company will reward.

Stand up listening channels. Rotate AMAs with the CEO/CPO, use pulse surveys with transparent close-out notes, and create a cross-functional “voice of employee” guild to surface friction before it becomes attrition.

Operationalize the story. Provide a manager comms kit: talking points, a “you’ll hear/you’ll see” change grid, and a 30-minute team ritual that reinforces priorities and psychological safety.

Show proof early. Pick two visible workflows (e.g., incident response, partner onboarding) and demonstrate how the new talent mechanisms reduce cycle time or error rate. Tell that story internally and to partners.

The takeaway for leaders

CPO appointments are change-communications moments. Treat them as strategy announcements: clarify outcomes, connect talent to customer value, and make the feedback loop visible. In connectivity markets, where execution speed and reliability define the brand, a well-communicated people strategy isn’t a nice-to-have it’s competitive infrastructure.

Call to Insight

If you announced a new people leader tomorrow, could every manager explain—clearly how the culture you want will improve the customer moments that matter?

About AdvoCast

AdvoCast is a strategic communications consultancy anchored by the Human Impact Blueprint™ (HIB)—a framework for embedding authentic human connection into organizational communication and culture. We help executives align narrative, behavior, and systems so trust becomes a measurable business advantage.