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Melanie Naranjo
Melanie Naranjo is Chief People Officer at Ethena, a compliance training platform, where she has led people and culture initiatives since 2021 and helps organizations navigate modern challenges in compliance, learning, and AI adoption. She also serves on Lattice's CPO Council and holds an advisory role with TroopHR.
Building HR Policy Other Companies Are Afraid to Try
Melanie has spearheaded some of Ethena's most talked-about people policies, including a no-negotiations offer policy designed to reward candidates for the role's actual worth rather than their negotiating skill, and a decision to remove salary band caps for tenured high performers. She has also built a color-coded feedback system (yellow, orange, red) so managers and employees have shared, unambiguous language for how serious a piece of feedback really is, delivered through mandatory biweekly feedback sessions that alternate with regular one-on-ones. Her most provocative public argument is that the future of the CPO role is really the COO role: she pushes HR leaders to start every people initiative from the business problem rather than from HR orthodoxy, and to prove out ideas with the same rigor a business case would require. Before Ethena, she spent more than six years in people and culture leadership at Insider Inc. She has built a following of more than 60,000 on LinkedIn by sharing candid, business-forward HR perspectives.
Topics Melanie speaks on
- Why the future of the CPO is really the COO
- Pay transparency and no-negotiation offer policies
- Building a color-coded feedback system managers actually use
- Why managers avoid addressing underperformance
- AI adoption inside HR and compliance functions
Sessions with Achieve
Melanie is featured in "The Transform Dialogues Featuring Melanie Naranjo" (February 17, 2026), an Achieve resource recorded live at the Transform conference in partnership with Engagedly. In it, she walks through Ethena's biweekly feedback ritual and color-coded severity system in detail, and makes her case that an effective CPO today has to operate like a COO, starting every people initiative from a business problem rather than a generic HR playbook.
Connect
Want more on what it actually takes to build HR policy bold enough to change how people get paid? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.