Canadian HR Expert Series: Shawna Stewart

We launched this series to highlight Canadian HR leaders who shape culture, leadership, and how we work.

At the intersection of people, product, and performance sits Shawna Stewart, a Toronto-based leader whose career bridges HR strategy and product innovation. Currently the Director of Product at FIS, Shawna also serves as an HR Advisor at DMZ and a Leadership Development Coach at Unicorn Labs.

Before her transition into product, she was VP of People and Operations at Railz, where she guided the company’s rapid growth and eventual acquisition by FIS Global, a worldwide leader in financial technology. Today, she connects the dots between HR, product, and go-to-market strategy, acting as the “glue” that helps teams move faster, smarter, and with purpose.

From Psychology to People to Product

Shawna’s story begins with an early fascination for organizational behaviour. After studying psychology and exploring clinical work, she realized her passion was less about diagnosing individuals and more about understanding how people learn, communicate, and perform within systems.

Starting as an office coordinator at a tech startup, she quickly found herself managing payroll, recruiting, and every operational challenge that came her way. That curiosity became her launchpad, first into HR generalist roles, then into the VP seat.

Her background in psychology became her edge: learning how to set expectations, match people to roles, and shape environments where teams can thrive. Those same instincts now power her approach to product leadership.

Railz to FIS: Scaling with Purpose

When Railz was acquired by FIS Global, Shawna led people and operations through the transition ensuring employees, systems, and culture moved in lockstep. After the acquisition, she joined FIS as the Railz Director of Product, continuing to steward the very platform and team she helped build.

Her daily mission? Be the glue. Be strategic.  Shape the roadmap. Ship consistently. Train sales. Partner with marketing on playbooks. Win executive buy-in. And above all, help a global enterprise evangelize the value of open banking and how to monetize APIs, all while keeping the people side front and centre.

Why HR Still Matters, Deeply

For Shawna, HR was never about policy for policy’s sake. It’s about strategy, aligning business goals with human capability. She’s motivated by change at two levels: individual careers and company performance.

Early in her career, she even set a personal BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal): help 50 people land their dream jobs. She’s at 17 and counting, and the thank-you notes from former colleagues are proof that the impact lasts.

Bring HR in Early

Some of Shawna’s toughest moments have come when leadership made a decision and brought HR in at the eleventh hour. Her stance is simple:

“When HR has a seat at the table early, you plan better, execute smarter, and communicate with credibility.”

She advocates for financial visibility in restructuring plans, contingency planning, and budgeting for outplacement and retention programs. Early partnership protects both people and performance, a message she’s carried into every boardroom since.

What Non-HR Leaders Should Know About HR

Shawna believes HR is one of the most underutilized strategic levers in business. Too often, teams bring HR in reactively, to handle performance plans or terminations instead of proactively shaping strategy.

Her advice: give HR full context. Let them see the work behind sales, product, and engineering. Only then can they design compensation, enablement, and performance frameworks that move the metrics that matter.

Her Signature “Business Audit”

Whenever Shawna joins a new team, she starts with three purposely simple questions:

1. What are you working on right now?
   
   
2. What’s getting in your way?
   
   
3. If you could change one tool or process, what would it be, and why?
   
   

The answers uncover hidden friction, quick wins, and automation ideas that teams often stop voicing simply because no one thought to ask.

AI in HR: Ethics and Enablement

Shawna approaches AI with both enthusiasm and caution. She sees two responsibilities for leaders:

1. Use it ethically: be vigilant about bias, privacy, and fairness, especially in people programs.
   
   
2. Enable it organization-wide: build literacy and adoption through training, clear parameters, and measurable outcomes
   

Used responsibly, she says, AI can accelerate audits, analyze surveys, and free teams to focus on human judgment and strategy.

Collage HR in Practice

Shawna has been a Collage champion since 2017, crediting its intuitive design and accessible pricing for quick adoption across her teams. Over the years, her product feedback has helped shape features that HR teams use today, from custom 1:1 templates and 360 reviews to onboarding workflows, ATS-to-HRIS integrations, and contractor management across international teams.

“It’s the kind of platform that lets HR focus on strategy instead of spreadsheets,” she notes.

Translating HR Skills to Product Leadership

Shawna is living proof that HR skills travel. Shawna didn’t pivot to product so much as she reframed what she was already doing.

“I was already running People Ops like a PM,” she explains.

Employees became end users.
Policies turned into products to prototype, pilot, and iterate.
Engagement surveys served as customer research.
Roadmaps, backlogs, and trade-offs mirrored everyday operations.
Scaling programs felt like shipping features that stick.
And mission and culture functioned as the product vision guiding the employee experience.

The leap into product wasn’t about starting from scratch, though it came with its fair share of growing pains, it was about translating those operational muscles to a new domain.

Her human-first approach continues to ground her product work today. She still obsesses over user feedback, iteration, and experience, only now, the “users” are customers and partners, not just employees.

For HR professionals looking to pivot, her career is a case study in how to translate people-centric disciplines into scalable business leadership.

Coaching, Community, and a North Star

Alongside her corporate role, Shawna continues to advise startups at DMZ and coach leaders at Unicorn Labs, always with the same mission: build learning cultures, remove friction, and help people step into work that aligns with who they are.

Her philosophy is simple but powerful:

“When you connect people, process, and product with clarity, you don’t just avoid mistakes, you accelerate progress.”

Shawna’s journey illustrates what happens when you stop treating people, product, and performance as separate functions and start seeing them as parts of the same operating system. Her work is proof that the human side of business isn’t a department, it’s the infrastructure that makes everything else work.

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