Every company has a vision — and it’s up to product teams to put that vision into action.
To accomplish this, product teams lean on guidance from leaders, such as Aida Vezzosi-Otero, a senior manager of product management at home improvement company Lowe’s. She strives to empower product managers to own their products and make informed decisions, while challenging their thinking, sharpening priorities, surfacing dependencies and risks, and ensuring they stay grounded in the “why” behind the work.
“When competing priorities or decisions require broader organizational alignment, I help elevate those conversations to the right leadership forums, drive alignment and remove roadblocks — enabling the team to confidently lead their products forward,” Vezzosi-Otero said.
Collaboration is key to product teams’ success. At maintenance, repair and operating products distributor Grainger, product, engineering and design teams share customer stories, research, user journeys and examples from the field, which can involve reviewing conversations or discussing the day-to-day working conditions of the company’s salespeople.
“When we’re tackling a new capability, we start by bringing everyone into the same room,” Senior Product Manager Grace Tolan Wood said.
It’s equally critical to know how to maintain alignment and foster creativity. Product Lead Ido Alhassid and his peers at Riskified, an AI-powered fraud and risk intelligence platform provider, do that through tight feedback loops and trust.
“As initiatives grow, we anchor teams to a shared definition of success so alignment doesn’t require micromanaging every decision,” Alhassid said.
Below, Vezzosi-Otero, Tolan Wood, Alhassid and five other product leaders share more about how they translate company strategy into actionable goals, collaborate effectively and maintain alignment and creativity when launching new initiatives.
Lowe’s offers a suite of home improvement products and services for both professionals and consumers.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
As a leader within a Fortune 100 organization, one of my primary responsibilities is creating a clear connection between our broader company strategy and the work my product managers lead within their respective areas.
I spend time with leadership understanding our strategic priorities, the outcomes we’re trying to achieve and where our order management system fits into those objectives. My responsibility is then to bring that context back to my team and help connect their roadmaps and priorities to those larger outcomes.
I empower my PMs to take ownership of their products and make informed day-to-day decisions, while providing the coaching, context and support they need to be successful. I challenge their thinking, help sharpen priorities, surface dependencies and risks, and ensure we stay grounded in the “why” behind the work. When competing priorities or decisions require broader organizational alignment, I help elevate those conversations to the right leadership forums, drive alignment and remove roadblocks — enabling the team to confidently lead their products forward.
“I challenge their thinking, help sharpen priorities, surface dependencies and risks, and ensure we stay grounded in the ‘why’ behind the work.”
What does collaboration between product, engineering, and design look like at Lowe’s?
Effective collaboration starts with making sure product, engineering, design and our business partners view themselves as one team solving the same problem rather than separate functions handing work to one another.
My product managers own those day-to-day relationships. My role is to support them when challenges extend beyond the product team, whether that’s a cross-functional dependency, competing priorities, resource constraints or something requiring leadership alignment. I also spend time with engineering and cross-functional leadership partners to make sure we’re aligned at the leadership level, creating an environment where our teams have the clarity and support to work through decisions together.
I encourage my team to have clear requirements so when engineering and design are brought into the conversation, they clearly articulate the context and desired outcome, allowing the team to collaborate on the best solution. When there are different points of view, I coach them to work through those conversations themselves first. I step in when my involvement can help create alignment or facilitate a decision beyond their level of influence.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
I think alignment and creativity can coexist when teams have clarity around the outcome but flexibility around how they achieve it. As a leader, I focus on making sure my team understands the strategic intent, expected outcomes, constraints and dependencies surrounding an initiative. From there, I want them to have ownership of how they work with engineering, design and business partners to solve the problem.
As initiatives scale, my role becomes increasingly focused on the connections between the individual product spaces. I’m looking across the portfolio for dependencies, conflicting priorities, capacity concerns or decisions that could affect multiple teams. I can then bring those conversations together at my level or into leadership discussions rather than expecting an individual PM to navigate those broader dependencies on their own.
I also try to create opportunities for my PMs to challenge assumptions and bring forward new ideas. My job isn’t to give them all the answers. It’s to ask the right questions, provide context they may not have access to, connect them with the right people and remove barriers so they can lead effectively.
Nexthink’s platform is designed to help IT teams resolve issues across any application, device or network by providing real-time visibility, analytics and automation.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
When we build the roadmap at Nexthink, I find it useful to split the work into three categories.
The first is our key strategic bets: the three to five things that will make the biggest difference over the next six to 12 months. We work together to clarify the outcome we want and sketch a first rough concept of the product that will get us there. The goal becomes the combination of the two, agreed by everyone — giving teams something far more actionable than a single number to hit.
“We work together to clarify the outcome we want and sketch a first rough concept of the product that will get us there.”
The second is the work you simply have to do: security, compliance, privacy and tech debt. You agree on the standard once, and from there every team operates independently.
The third is everything else, where teams have the most autonomy. They know their products and customers best, so they're best placed to decide. Measurable outcomes help, but with a caveat: Targets work well only if you keep re-evaluating them against changing conditions.
What does collaboration between product, engineering and design look like at Nexthink?
I see product, engineering and design as three parts of a single team — the way a band works. Nobody asks whether the drummer or the guitarist wrote the song; what matters is what they produce together.
In practice, PMs spend most of their time with customers and prospects, figuring out what will genuinely make a difference. Designers turn desired outcomes into product concepts, and engineers bring them to life. But what’s changed over the past two years, largely driven by AI, is how much these roles now overlap. PMs vibe-code interactive prototypes to illustrate their thinking. Designers push PRs to improve the UX in production. Engineers can experiment ten times faster than before, which earns them a much bigger seat at the table when deciding what to build.
The best teams I’ve worked with don’t apply a textbook definition of each role. They’ve found an equilibrium across each member’s strengths and weaknesses, complementing each other to the point where you stop caring about who does what because you know the team will deliver.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
I spend one hour each week with each of my groups. We use that time to brainstorm new ideas and align on what’s coming next. I dislike status updates and one-way presentations, so we stay away from those. Outside these sessions, most of our alignment happens through quick, small async exchanges over chat.
We’ve also moved away from long PRDs to debate direction. Working prototypes are now so cheap to build that there’s no reason to spend weeks imagining what a product could look like when you can have a working version in a few hours.
The critical part is being clear about boundaries. Some things must be agreed upfront, but once that’s done, teams can and should be as creative as possible. This matters most at the start of something new, where we force ourselves into an exploration phase. No project starts with a single option on the table. Every proposal comes with two or three alternatives, and the more different they are, the better. We naturally fall in love with our first good idea; that’s human nature, and something you have to actively fight against. For that to work, you need an environment of trust where people feel safe proposing things that look different.
Grainger is the leading distributor of maintenance, repair and operating products, serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide. The company’s enhancing its digital edge with technologies like machine learning, IoT, cloud automation and data-driven insights to maintain its leadership for the next 100 years.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
At Grainger, product leaders start by building a deep understanding of the people who will ultimately use what we’re creating. Before thinking about roadmaps or features, we spend time understanding what our end users experience every day, where they encounter friction and what makes it harder for them to work effectively.
For me, that often means getting out of the office and into the field. When I joined our sales domain, I spent my first two months on ride-alongs, observing customer conversations and seller workflows firsthand. There’s no substitute for seeing the work in action.
From there, our job is to apply rigor to prioritization. We take what we’re learning through qualitative research, quantitative data and direct feedback, and build a clear story around what’s most important to solve. Rather than focusing on outputs, we focus on outcomes. For example, what needs to be different tomorrow for our sellers and customers? If we’re clear on that, teams have the context they need to make good decisions and move quickly.
“Rather than focusing on outputs, we focus on outcomes.”
Ultimately, strategy becomes actionable when you can connect company goals to real user needs and create alignment around why the work matters.
What does collaboration between product, engineering, and design look like at Grainger?
I often think of my role as a producer in a show. Product, engineering and design each bring different expertise to the table, and my job is to help elevate that expertise by ensuring we’re organized around a clear vision for what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’re going to get there.
When we’re tackling a new capability, we start by bringing everyone into the same room. We share customer stories, research, user journeys and examples from the field so the team can see the problem through the user’s eyes. Sometimes, that means watching videos, reviewing conversations or discussing the realities of the environments our sellers work in every day.
From there, collaboration becomes a series of short feedback loops. Engineering, UX and product are talking constantly. We share ideas, review work in progress and make decisions together as we learn more.
One principle I rely on is “strong opinions, weakly held.” I want to be clear about the vision and desired outcomes, but I also want the experts around me to challenge assumptions and contribute their perspectives. The best solutions emerge when everyone understands the problem and feels empowered to bring their expertise to solving it.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
I believe creativity thrives within boundaries. Our role as product leaders is to create enough clarity that teams know what they need to accomplish, why it matters and the constraints that should guide decision-making. Beyond that, creativity comes from trusting talented people to do what they do best.
At Grainger, we lean heavily into experimentation. Instead of trying to build a perfect solution on day one, we make smaller bets. We launch focused pilots, gather feedback, measure results and learn quickly. That allows us to validate ideas before making larger investments while keeping teams aligned around clear goals.
Recently, for example, we tested a new capability with a small group of sellers before scaling it more broadly. The goal wasn’t perfection. The goal was learning. That mindset gives teams the freedom to explore, adjust and improve based on evidence rather than assumptions.
What’s exciting is that our culture supports that approach. Teams have direct access to users, opportunities to run experiments and the autonomy to shape solutions. When you combine curiosity, trust and a willingness to learn, you create an environment where innovation can scale without losing alignment.
Powered by “human-in-the-loop” AI, Snyk’s platform helps engineering teams find, prioritize and resolve security vulnerabilities in code, containers, cloud infrastructure and other domains.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
Company strategy sits, for valid reasons, at a much higher altitude than what’s immediately actionable for an on-the-ground team. As product and team leaders, it’s our job to walk that fine line of bringing the strategy down a level to something tangibly relevant for our teams without being so prescriptive that we take away their freedom to innovate.
The best way I’ve found to do that is through objectives and key results. I start with the company strategy and determine which elements of it my teams can influence. Then, I work out what we’d need to accomplish, and by how much, to move those elements meaningfully. Those become the objectives and key results I write down and share with the team.
OKRs work well because they specify the outcome and leave the solution to the team. My teams own how they get there, and I coach them to run the same exercise one level down for their own areas, and so on.
One of our pillars this year is regaining developer trust in remediation. The part of this that my teams influence is whether a recommended fix gets merged, so that became the objective with a target merge rate attached, and the “how” was up to the team to pick.
What does collaboration between product, engineering, and design look like at Snyk?
I’ve always seen product, engineering and design as equal and complementary leaders of any workstream worth doing. At Snyk, product owns the “why,” engineering owns the “how,” and the three of us share decision-making and ownership of the “what.” As the voice of the customer and closest to the field, it's the product team’s job to make sure the team is prioritizing what matters most and building, at a high level, the right solutions. Design takes signal from product on what jobs need to be done, then owns the workflows, cross-company consistency and whether the experience makes sense. Engineering keeps product and design grounded in what’s realistic to build, helping their partners understand tradeoffs and prioritize accordingly. They also, of course, make sure what we build will scale and stay maintainable.
“At Snyk, product owns the ‘why,’ engineering owns the ‘how,’ and the three of us share decision-making and ownership of the ‘what.’”
Even with AI blurring those lines, I’ve found this split keeps things moving with the most clarity. Now, if product is swamped, I’ve seen success having design take on customer research with an AI plugged into Slack or Google Workspace. Product often takes the first stab at wireframes, and design still owns the call. Keeping that clear stops the blurring from becoming drift.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
AI’s scrambled this one. Before, everything happened systematically. While speed differed depending on the passion of the team, there was a relatively well-known sequence to how software was developed. Now, teams can iterate as fast as their LLM tokens allow, so by the time teams align, they’re already off in different directions.
Clearly defining ownership boundaries is what’s worked for us. The spirit of it isn’t a wrist slap or turf building (at least ideally). The necessity is really one of capacity — We only have so many people, and we need to duplicate as little work as possible. If a team anticipates jumping into another team’s area of expertise, the goal is to open a conversation. If that team has already built something similar or is in the middle of building it, then we’ve just established a new partnership. If they’re prioritizing other initiatives, the first team gets the blessing to build what’s required with their guidance. This way no one is blocked from building what they think is right, but everyone at least feels consulted. When you’re covering a lot of ground with a lean team, there’s no room for ego. Build, iterate and learn in public. That’s the ballgame.
Riskified’s AI-powered fraud and risk intelligence platform analyzes the individual behind each interaction to provide real-time decisions and robust identity-based insights.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
At Riskified, strategy translates into action through a clear chain of ownership: company goals, centered around merchant growth, approval rates and fraud-prevention accuracy, cascade into KPIs owned by each product group, then into roadmap themes and quarterly deliverables owned by individual PMs. We’re deliberate about connecting the “why” to the “what:” every roadmap item should tie back to a metric leadership cares about, whether that’s approval-rate lift, chargeback reduction or platform scalability.
Because our PMs solve problems that span data science, engineering and risk operations, translating strategy also means framing goals in language every discipline can act on, not just performance targets or objectives and key results on a slide. We prioritize ruthlessly using impact over effort, informed by real merchant feedback and fraud trend data, since our space evolves quickly. Leaders set the outcome and guardrails, and teams closest to the problem define the “how.” Regular business reviews keep goals honest; if a KPI isn’t moving, we revisit the roadmap rather than wait for a quarterly reset. That tight feedback loop is what keeps company strategy feeling like a team’s daily work.
“Leaders set the outcome and guardrails, and teams closest to the problem define the ‘how.’”
What does collaboration between product, engineering, and design look like at Riskified?
Collaboration at Riskified is cross-functional from day one, not a relay race. Product, engineering, design and data science sit together at the start of an initiative: product frames the problem and success metrics, design shapes the experience while working directly with engineers on feasibility, and data science weighs in early since model performance often defines what’s even possible in the product. We rely on shared rituals rather than handoffs — joint discovery sessions, design reviews open to engineering and sprint planning where tradeoffs are debated openly.
PMs here are expected to work across disciplines and solve genuinely multi-disciplinary problems, so the muscle of pulling engineering and design into a conversation early is built into the job, not an exception. Our customer success, integrations and analytics teams are often in the room, too, since merchants interact with our products directly. The result is that by the time something ships, no single team “owns” the idea in isolation — it’s been shaped together, which makes execution faster and the outcome more resilient.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
Scaling without losing creativity comes down to protecting a few things: clarity of purpose, tight feedback loops and trust. As initiatives grow, we anchor teams to a shared definition of success so alignment doesn’t require micromanaging every decision. People can move fast because they understand the intent, not just a task list. We build in structured space for divergent thinking early — discovery sprints and opportunity framing — before locking into execution, so creativity isn’t squeezed out once we’re moving quickly.
We also treat experimentation and learning agility as core values, not slogans: Teams are encouraged to test ambitious ideas and course-correct based on real signals rather than wait for a perfect plan. Regular demos and reviews keep people honest about what’s working and create room for new ideas to surface mid-flight. Decision-making stays close to the people doing the work rather than routing every call through leadership, which keeps ownership high. Finally, every launch is treated as a learning moment; we measure real-world impact quickly and stay willing to iterate.
Sage’s operations management system provides senior living communities with real-time insights into care delivery and operational efficiency.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
At Sage, we’ve built a unique way to connect strategy to the work people do every day. Rather than relying on traditional OKRs, Sage organizes around initiatives and SWATs. An initiative is a strategic area of focus; a SWAT brings together the cross-functional people needed to achieve a specific business outcome (often financial) through a tightly scoped, time-bound product push.
The outcome is a laser focus on the work that actually moves the needle. Initiative owners spearhead weekly meetings, keeping teams focused on the highest-priority work and driving outcomes week by week. Each initiative has an executive sponsor, creating visibility and oversight. And because initiatives are tied to time-bound results for the quarter, there’s a clear sense of urgency and accountability around what we’re trying to accomplish. The result is focus without a lot of bureaucracy and a company that can move quickly in the same direction.
What does collaboration between product, engineering and design look like at Sage?
What I love most about Sage is the collaborative, low-ego environment. Product, engineering and design work together from the start, with fluid roles. Engineers join user research, designers get into technical conversations, and everyone is encouraged to understand the whole problem, not just their piece.
“Engineers join user research, designers get into technical conversations, and everyone is encouraged to understand the whole problem, not just their piece.”
Teams organize around a product area, like fall detection or EHR integrations, or a market, like skilled nursing. That lets us go deep on both the users and the technology. We also collaborate across pods through product syncs, design reviews, engineering RFCs and active Slack channels.
For EHR integrations, collaboration extends beyond Sage. We co-build directly with our EHR partners. One example is a bi-directional tasking integration between Sage and ALIS, a leading senior living EHR. We spent weeks understanding EHR workflows, going onsite with caregivers to see the friction firsthand, and met biweekly with the ALIS team to design and build together. The result was a fully connected care workflow syncing in real time, a 46 percentage point boost in documentation compliance at top communities, and a workflow caregivers love.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
At Sage, alignment starts with staying connected to the company’s core goals and being clear about the problem we’re solving. We have the usual sprints, standups, PRD reviews and retros. I supplement that with AI tools that help me stay on top of important threads and spend more time building.
On creativity, we have a strong bias toward experimentation. We call it the “first pancake” approach: Figure out the smallest thing we can ship, put it in front of users and learn. I get a lot of ideas onsite at senior living communities, watching care teams work. Something that seems intuitive at a desk can look completely different when a caregiver navigates it during a busy shift.
Our users are a constant source of ideas, and there’s no shortage of problems to solve in senior care. The challenge is figuring out which ones have the biggest impact and testing quickly. AI helps us shorten that cycle. We use it to develop PRDs, explore ideas and test interaction patterns, getting from idea to feedback faster. That mix of deep user understanding, rapid experimentation and AI helps us move fast without losing sight of what matters: products that actually work for the people delivering care.
Nisos is the human risk management company specializing in unmasking threats before they escalate. The company’s intelligence-led platform and solutions help enterprises make critical decisions, manage human risk and drive real-world consequences for digital threats.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
Often, it starts by translating company strategy into the specific customer and business outcomes we need to create, then working backward into the problems the team needs to solve. I tend to ask questions like, “What decision are we actually making?” “What evidence supports it?” “What behavior or outcome do we want this to drive?” and “How will we know if it’s market ready/good enough?” Those questions help move strategy from something abstract into a set of clear priorities and measurable goals.
The best collaboration happens when product, engineering and design are involved before the solution is defined. Product brings the customer, market and business context; design helps us understand the behaviors and experience we need to create; and engineering brings an equally important perspective on feasibility, architecture and scalability.
From there, we give teams clarity on the outcome without over-prescribing the solution. The goal is for product, design and engineering to understand not just what we’re building, but why this problem matters now, what tradeoffs we’re willing to make and which signals should cause us to adjust course during discovery, planning or development phases.
What does collaboration between product, engineering and design look like at Nisos?
The best collaboration happens when product, engineering and design are involved before the solution is defined. Product brings the customer, market and business context; design helps us understand the behaviors and experience we need to create; and engineering brings an equally important perspective on feasibility, architecture, scalability and opportunities we may not have considered.
“The best collaboration happens when product, engineering and design are involved before the solution is defined.”
A good example is the Nisos Identity Integrity platform capability we’re currently building. We started with a broader customer problem: How do you help an organization establish whether the person and external digital footprint presented are consistent, rather than starting with a predetermined feature set? Product, design and engineering have been working together with our internal subject matter experts and external design partners to define what information matters, how it should be collected and interpreted, and how those signals should ultimately show up in the experience. That collaboration has helped us continuously challenge the premise and strengthen our execution bet on what will have high product-market fit once it’s released late September 2026.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
Interestingly, alignment and creativity aren’t opposites. In fact, clear constraints usually create more room for creativity. When launching something new, the Nisos product org spends a lot of time making sure the cross-functional team is aligned on the customer problem, the business objective and the non-negotiables, and then leaves room for the team to determine the best solution.
We’re applying that approach now as we build a new Identity Integrity platform offering. There are some things we need to be very clear about: what question the product is helping the customer answer, what signals are appropriate to use, what those signals mean and what we explicitly don’t want the product to imply. Once those boundaries are clear, the team has much more freedom to explore the workflow, interaction model and technical approach. That gives the team enough structure to stay aligned, while still creating room to test, learn and evolve the solution as we get closer to the customer problem.
Sysco LABS is the innovation arm of foodservice provider Sysco. Its teams develop e-commerce solutions that help the company’s customers browse products and place orders, track orders in real time and gain insight into their accounts.
How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?
At Sysco, strategy centers on the outcomes that matter most — stronger customer loyalty, lower cost to serve, higher fill rates and more resilient supply chains. We translate this into a focused set of outcome-based objectives for each empowered product team, giving clear direction while leaving the approach to them. As part of this, we are training the product team to use AI tools that streamline the creation of product requirements, prototypes, designs and related artifacts, accelerating the path from insight to validated solutions. Teams own the solutions; leadership supplies the context and priorities.
“At Sysco, strategy centers on the outcomes that matter most — stronger customer loyalty, lower cost to serve, higher fill rates and more resilient supply chains.”
What does collaboration between product, engineering, and design look like at Sysco LABS?
Product, design and engineering work together as a trio from the first problem statement through live experiments. They share accountability for results rather than handing work off in sequence. AI supports the collaboration by enabling faster prototyping and data synthesis, allowing the team to explore more options and set aside weaker ideas earlier. Domain knowledge of foodservice operators, along with judgment on usability and practicality, stays with the people — and AI acts as a strong assistant that strengthens the partnership without replacing it.
How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?
Alignment comes from shared strategy, customer evidence and success metrics. Creativity comes from empowerment: Once the desired outcome is clear, teams decide how best to achieve it. When we scale or launch new work, we keep teams small and cross-functional and measure progress continuously. This approach supports both steady progress and inventive thinking as the organization grows.
