Shifting market conditions, rapidly emerging technology and an increasingly complex regulatory and political environment are just some of the challenges testing today’s leaders, so it’s no surprise that many are at capacity. A 2025 Gallup survey found that nearly thirty percent of employees say they lack “clear, honest or consistent” communication from leaders, and this breakdown is causing a lack of trust and employee engagement.
So, how can leaders get back on track? We asked 11 standout managers about how they turn plans into progress while making sure direct reports are always kept in the loop.
Read on to learn how the following leaders keep priorities obvious and employees engaged — and the signals that show their management style is working.
InterSystems’ software products provide advanced data management, integration and analytics technologies for applications in healthcare, business and government.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
When I think about the hallmarks of good management here at InterSystems, I think about NFL coaching legend Bill Belichick. You don’t win multiple Super Bowls without tremendous skill at organization, motivation and team building. If you gave Bill Belichick a grocery store to run — and could figure out how to motivate him to run it — you’d shortly have the best managed, most profitable grocery store in the world.
But you don’t hire Bill Belichick to run a grocery store, you hire him to run a football team. He knows more about the game of football and how to win in the NFL than just about anyone else on the planet.
That’s what makes the leadership at InterSystems special, from our founder and CEO Terry Ragon to the just-promoted manager of a development team. We expect our managers to drive not just their teams but our technology and products at an expert level.
This is reinforced in every annual objective set, every conversation around a whiteboard, every architectural review. Our best leaders are excited to take on the hardest technology challenges and to build amazing teams to overcome them.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
When InterSystems was smaller, keeping priorities aligned happened naturally. Teams interacted constantly, observed one another’s work, asked questions and solved problems around shared goals. As our success — and our customers’ success — enabled us to grow, that kind of “water-cooler” collaboration became harder to maintain.
Fortunately, we’ve also built a skilled product management organization and a roadmap process centered on key product domains, including cloud fabric, data services and application platform. Each domain has a dedicated team jointly led by product managers and developers. These leaders meet regularly, both within their domains and across the organization, using a shared framework for defining outcomes and timelines.
This structure allows domain teams to plan and work independently while giving the broader team a consistent view of objectives, progress and opportunities for discussion. We continue to refine the process and track planning and execution metrics. But the most meaningful signal is feedback from our development teams. As the roadmap process has strengthened, so has their confidence in our ability to identify and achieve our most important goals.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
InterSystems core strategy hasn’t changed in its almost 50-year history — deliver through our products the data technology our customers need to succeed and grow. As our customers have grown, we have grown and their needs have grown even faster. It’s always a race to keep our technology and products on pace and our team finds this race tremendously exciting as well as challenging.
While it’s not the only measure of our success in that race, the scalability of the IRIS core database kernel — our data engine — is the ultimate distillation of what our most demanding customers need for their data-intensive applications. Two decades ago, we were excited when it could manipulate data at around a million operations per second on a single server. A few years ago, it crossed the threshold of a billion operations per second at a scale of thousands of CPU cores across dozens of machines. Today, it’s over two billion operations per second with no signs of slowing down. And we have to keep up at this exponential pace: In a world of AI and agents hungry for data, our customers will need all of that power and more.
IG North America is home to tastytrade, tastylive, tastyfx, and tastycrypto — a family of brands built to democratize trading and empower individual investors.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
If I had to pick one line, it’s “move fast, responsibly.” It’s shorthand for how we make decisions. We don't want to be the company that debates for three weeks and misses the window, but we also don’t want to break things just to move quickly. We reinforce this constantly, in meetings, in planning, even on our team t-shirts.
Leading by example matters a lot and so does building trust so people feel ownership over their work instead of just executing tickets. That’s something I focus on with my own team — building an ownership mindset, not just assigning tasks. I want product managers coming to me with a point of view, not a status update. That means giving people real decision rights on their piece of the roadmap and trusting them to run with a call even when I’d have made a different one.
The other principle that shapes how we operate is “build, learn, repeat.” It’s not a slogan, it’s how the product team works: build on a hypothesis, learn from the data, adjust and repeat in small increments rather than betting everything on one big launch.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our product operating model does this for us. Everyone in the company, not just product and tech, knows how it works and how the pods are structured. That matters more than people realize, because it means prioritization decisions don’t feel like they’re coming out of nowhere.
Each pod has a clear charter, a north star and metrics that ladder up to our company OKRs, so prioritization isn’t a guessing game or a popularity contest. Product managers push back on requests instead of just taking them at face value. Every ask goes through the same set of questions — what’s the impact, what does the data say, does it fit the strategy. What tells me it’s working is consistency across pods. Ask three product managers why something is prioritized and they’ll point to the same data, even though they weren’t in the same room. That’s the shared language doing its job.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
The thing that gets people fired up is the goal itself, making tastytrade the best, most preferred retail brokerage in the country. It’s ambitious, clear and the path is visible. That combination is what makes people want to build something here — not just execute a task list, but help shape how we get there and give traders a better platform.
The build-learn-repeat approach is what makes that goal feel achievable rather than just aspirational. It keeps us moving quickly without skipping the rigor, because we’re always testing before we commit fully. The clearest metric of progress is speed of learning, how fast we go from a data signal to a concrete change in what we’re building. That cycle time is what I watch most closely. It’s the real test of whether the strategy is working, not just whether the roadmap looks good on paper.
Commerce is an e-commerce company that creates a platform to help sellers build, innovate and grow their businesses online.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
If I had to sum it up — high standards, low fear. Fear kills good ideas before anyone even proposes them. We try to make it safe to take a real swing, not just safe on paper, as long as the reasoning is sound. But safe to try doesn’t mean soft on results. We hold people to hard outcomes and every commitment comes with a single name and a deadline attached. If that deadline’s slipping, we address it before it passes, not after. Weekly, we run through open commitments against their dates and we make space to talk through a recent experiment that didn’t land and why. The debrief part matters more than people expect. Saying out loud what we learned and making sure it actually reaches the people who’d benefit from knowing it, is often worth more than the original idea. It’s not a perfect process and deadlines still slip sometimes — but the habit holds, week after week and that’s what actually changes behavior over time.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our partner advisory board is the clearest example. As we evolve our ecosystem strategy, we need partners close enough to the work to catch what we’d miss internally and comfortable enough to call us out. That’s a standing group of trusted partners across different categories, meeting quarterly, part in person and part virtual, who see the same priorities we do and are expected to challenge them, not just receive them. These sessions are not always perfect, some sessions land better than others, but the consistency is the point and the signal it’s working is when partners start bringing us problems and opportunities first, instead of us having to go find them.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
Reshaping the ecosystem for what’s coming next in AI and agentic commerce: most of the industry is still reacting to the shift. We’re trying to get ahead of it by rethinking what a partner even is in this new model, not just adding more of the same partner to our network. A year ago we didn’t have a real program for agentic workflow developers and now that’s some of the most active energy in the ecosystem. The other piece is that partners are becoming the fastest way for merchants to actually use the AI capability we’re building, rather than waiting on the platform to roll it out alone. What makes this exciting is the speed of it. This isn’t a five-year roadmap playing out slowly, it’s shifting in real time and we’re still early enough that a lot of it is still ours to shape. Progress metrics: growth in active technology integrations, attach rate of new AI features through partner-led implementations and our own velocity in shipping product that deepens the agentic value prop, the clearest leading indicator of how many partners want to build alongside us next.
Chamberlain Group is a Blackstone portfolio company that makes home and automobile technology, including CG’s patented vehicle-to-home connectivity solution, myQ Connected Garage.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“Clarity is my job.”
That’s the standard managers here are held to. Chamberlain Group is a focused organization; we know what we’re setting out to do and that focus is something leaders are directly accountable for translating down to their teams, not just something the company states from the top. If someone doesn’t understand how their work ties to a goal, that’s not a footnote; it gets raised and worked through with their leader.
This is reinforced weekly through multiple channels: company-wide all-access communications, team huddles, one-on-ones and cross-functional cadences. Each one is a checkpoint for whether our people understand the priorities, not just whether they’ve been told.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our OKR process prioritizes the organization’s overall targets by cascading a limited list of full-year objectives through the organization. It’s designed to ensure everyone understands the organization’s highest priorities and can see their own work connecting to them. We ask: if you can’t connect your work to an OKR, that’s not something to sit with — we encourage bringing it to your leader.
We see this play out in how teams come together across the organization to align on our goals: cross-functional alignment, execution and management all built around these OKRs.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
What excites people most about the strategy is that we’re indexing on growth and challenging ourselves on new ways to hit our strategic targets. That growth opens opportunities people can see for themselves, both in near-term wins and in what’s next.
The metric that shows progress toward execution is our transformation metric — tracking the growth of our digital service business alongside a strong, stable core business. That balance, a healthy core plus an expanding digital service business, is how we measure whether the strategy is taking hold.
Mirakl is a provider of e-commerce software solutions.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
A manager’s job is to create clarity, not complexity. Good management means everyone knows our top priorities, understands how their role drives them and removes the obstacles that stand in the way of execution.
We reinforce that every week through data-backed business reviews. We look at the metrics tied to our highest priorities, with leaders from each function providing updates on the areas they own. That creates transparency, surfaces issues early and keeps everyone aligned on the same goals.
The biggest benefit is focus. Rather than chasing every new idea or urgent request, we share a clear understanding of what matters most and hold ourselves accountable to measurable outcomes. It keeps the organization moving in the same direction and gives teams confidence that they’re spending their time on the work that will have the greatest impact.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our monthly review and regional performance dashboard work together to make our priorities impossible to miss.
On the first Tuesday of every month, our entire region comes together to review the previous month’s performance. Each functional leader shares results, challenges and a key win or lesson learned. We recognize outstanding contributions, share customer success stories from the field and grade ourselves against our three strategic priorities for the year. It creates transparency, reinforces accountability and helps everyone understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Between reviews, our regional performance dashboard keeps those priorities visible daily, tracking the handful of metrics that matter most and gives the team a real-time view of progress. The dashboard rarely changes — and that’s intentional. When it does, everyone notices, because it signals that our strategy has evolved or that we’ve hit a new stage of execution. Recently, after a major product launch, we introduced new adoption metrics to reflect our next focus. The data itself is valuable but the dashboard’s real power is as a constant reminder of what we’re all rallying around.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
What excites people most is helping brands grow wherever their customers choose to shop.
Marketplace commerce can be incredibly complex, so our strategy centers on removing that complexity, making expansion across marketplaces simple, scalable and successful. There’s a real sense of purpose in watching a customer launch on one marketplace and then expand across many more, knowing we helped unlock that growth.
We measure that success in a few ways. First, marketplace expansion: how many marketplaces our customers adopt over time and the gross merchandise value growth they achieve. Just as important, we’re committed to being exceptional partners to the retailers and marketplace operators in the Mirakl ecosystem. One metric we’re especially proud of is the percentage of an operator’s sellers that use our platform. For some recently launched marketplaces, more than 80% of their sellers are our customers. That’s a powerful indicator that we’re creating value not just for individual brands, but for the entire marketplace ecosystem we’re helping to build.
Ibotta is a performance marketing platform that allows brands to deliver digital promotions to millions of consumers through a network of publishers called the Ibotta Performance Network.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” James Clear’s line from “Atomic Habits” has become a mantra on my team and it shapes how we structure our week.’
Every Monday, we meet as a full team and then again in smaller pods to review priorities, open questions and emerging themes. We start with a non-work question of the week, small, but it keeps us a team of people, not just nodes. From there, the rhythm does real work: it surfaces what needs support, what patterns are worth automating and where our approach needs to shift.
That system first mindset shows up in results, too. One analyst felt stuck scaling a dashboard overhaul; the ask was open ended and felt bigger than his reach. We built a system: identify patterns, define what stays versus goes, prove it out on his own work first. That clarity didn’t just unblock him, it raised the bar for how the whole team approaches insight quality.
That’s fitting for a team of analytics people. We’re naturally wired for systems and rhythms, but it’s the meaning behind the numbers that drives us. Those same systems are what turn that drive into real execution.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our JIRA timeline is the artifact everyone points to. It shows ownership by name, context (which product area and which “Boulder,” our term for an OKR objective, it ladders up to) and component, the system or request type it touches. It also surfaces status and most importantly for me as a people leader, what’s blocked or backlogged, so I know exactly where to step in and help unblock or reprioritize.
The signal that it’s working is momentum. We move from wide open, undefined questions to clear tasks and action items. When that velocity slows or actually stalls, that’s my cue to look closer.
Sometimes it’s simple operational troubleshooting, a data source or a piece of context someone’s missing. But when it’s not, that tells me a team member may need more support or a different resource, often another person on the team who’s solved something similar. I try to make that connection directly and specifically, so the person can work through it with backup rather than alone.
That combination, visibility into where work sits plus a habit of storming on it early, is what keeps priorities from quietly slipping.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
AI adoption is hitting our team in a real wave and what excites me isn’t the hype, it’s what happens in our hackathons when people apply a different lens to old problems.
One new analyst looked at years of experimentation on our direct to consumer app which tests features, onboarding experiences and app optimization. He noticed the metrics, pipelines and analysis steps were largely repeatable. In weeks, he built an AI experimentation hub that centralizes that corpus, makes past and present experiments searchable and surfaces the optimization and guardrail metrics for each. Work that used to take real digging now takes a fraction of the time. Next, we’re exploring how much of the analysis itself AI can support without sacrificing the integrity of the recommendations an analyst would normally own.
We’re never short on ideas. The metric I watch is adoption: does usage of tools like the AI experimentation hub rise, does time on repeatable tasks drop and does engagement from our product manager partners grow. We’ve seen that pattern with analyses and experiments that drove decisions. Now, we’re watching for the same signal with AI tools. Adoption and decisions are what tell us the idea was real.
360Learning is a learning platform that combines collaborative tools with a learning management system.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
The line I repeat most is ‘bet small, learn fast, let the upside run.’ Good management here isn’t about being right upfront, it’s designing decisions so the cost of being wrong stays cheap while the payoff of being right compounds. I coach four group product managers, who each coach three product managers. To protect that asymmetry, we kill an idea within a week if the signal is bad, but let a squad run hard once the data says yes.
We reinforce it weekly through rituals: each squad holds a weekly review of what shipped, what was learned and what’s being tested next and no manager pre-approves the call, the squad owns it and defends it to peers. That’s our low-authority feedback culture. Group product managers discuss trade-offs in weekly one-on-ones and don’t dictate them. In my own product review, the question I ask most is ‘what’s the cheapest version of this we could test this week?’ Repeated enough, that question becomes the culture. Teams stop asking permission to experiment and start asking how fast they can find out.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Two artifacts and they have to agree with each other. The high-level roadmap is anchored to the strategic objectives we set at the start of the year, it doesn’t move quarter to quarter on a whim, so nobody has to guess what ’priority’ means. Underneath it, a Trello board carries the actual work, open to the entire company, not just the product org. Anyone — sales, support, engineering outside a squad — can see exactly what’s being built and why, with no gatekeeping between what leadership discusses and what the teams actually do.
We reinforce it weekly. Squads update their cards as commitments change and the GPMs check that what’s moving on the board still ties back to the roadmap’s objectives.
The signal works. Anyone in the company, not just product people, can open that board and answer ’why are we doing this’ themselves. When people stop asking me or their GPM to explain priorities and start pointing to the board instead, transparency has actually replaced authority as the source of clarity.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
Three things energize people at once. First, we get to reinvent how people learn, not just digitize it: AI-simulations, new formats that make learning feel less like content and more like practice. Second, it’s not only for learners. The same AI is making people’s day-to-day easier, automating the busywork around learning so time goes back to the work itself. Third and what excites people most is thinking past learning altogether to a wider ecosystem where AI agents talk to each other, hand off context and quietly assemble a learner experience that feels seamless, without anyone stitching it together by hand.
One of the metrics that shows progress is self-service usage. How much learning people seek out on their own, unprompted by a mandatory assignment. It matters because it proves two things at once. People actually enjoy learning and see its value and the content reaching them fits what they need, when they need it, rather than being pushed regardless of relevance.”
DISQO is an audience insights platform that provides advertising intelligence, measuring brand and performance outcomes across every media channel to power data-driven marketing decisions.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“Post blockers immediately; never sit on them.”
While transparency has always been part of our DNA, we’ve shifted from passively acknowledging blockers to actively refusing to let them linger. Blockers aren’t failures — keeping them quiet is.
If an issue arises, the expectation is to surface it in real time, not wait for the next scheduled sync.
We reinforce this constantly across our dailies, one-on-ones and weekly syncs by making blocker resolution the first order of business. Managers don’t just ask for status updates; we actively step in to dismantle dependencies, reassign resources, or make quick architectural calls to keep engineers shipping without friction.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Priorities stay obvious not through task lists, but through artifacts that communicate the underlying intent and problem context. When everyone understands the core objective and the logic behind it, they are empowered to self-prioritize, eliminate blockers independently and maintain high delivery velocity.
The clearest metric of alignment is how effectively the team operates in the absence of leadership guidance. If work halts or drifts when leadership is away, the artifact fails. If the team consistently makes the right calls and sustains momentum during leadership PTO, priority alignment has succeeded.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
Teams are energized when they have a direct line of sight between overarching strategic goals and their day-to-day tactical execution. When leaders grant genuine ownership and autonomy, people shift from passive contributors to invested stakeholders.
Progress is tracked through incremental milestone velocity and ship cadence. By breaking strategy down into small, measurable delivery cycles, we surface bottlenecks early and maintain consistent forward momentum through a steady stream of tangible wins.
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Rula is a mental healthcare tech company.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“Invest in people leaders; don’t let them figure it out on their own.” Just because someone was a stellar individual contributor doesn’t automatically make them a solid manager — and leaving them to guess their way through leadership is a disservice to the whole team. Leaders of individual contributors are arguably the most critical players in our business, as they drive the behaviors and culture across the teams building our product and speaking directly to our customers.
To reinforce this weekly, we rely on leadership systems and playbooks so managers know exactly how to show up for their teams. Our leaders follow a structured operating cadence that includes tracking metrics, coaching individuals, managing processes and closing feedback loops with other leaders and cross-functional partners. By eliminating ambiguity week over week, we ensure our managers can reliably hit targets, drive skill development and cultivate a high-performance culture where individual efforts translate consistently into organizational success.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Everything starts with our company mission, vision and strategy, which cascades directly into each department through their own specific OKRs and metrics. But the primary forum that keeps these priorities obvious is our weekly business review.
In this meeting, we dive deep into the main metrics of the business, our performance against goals and key learnings from the previous week. Every week includes a retrospective of past initiatives to build upon our main focus areas. The ultimate signal that this system works is our agility. Because teams and leaders have a constant pulse on our momentum, they know exactly what dials to turn. It enables leadership to provide crystal-clear direction on where time and resources should be shifted — allowing us to accelerate faster on what’s working or immediately get back on track when we slip.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
The most exciting part of our strategy is our mission: “Make Mental Healthcare work for everyone.” Whether it’s patients, payers, providers, physicians, employers or partners, everyone’s work converges on one single goal — helping people who need care get it easily and seamlessly.
We hold ourselves to a rigorous standard. If the work we’re doing doesn’t ultimately support helping the next person get the care they need, we take a step back and re-evaluate how it fits into our strategy and daily focus. To prove we are delivering on this, the primary metrics we track to show progress toward execution are directly tied to new and existing patients supported and what’s holding us back from delivering the care. Tracking this ensures we aren’t just talking about our mission, but actively delivering the highest quality of care to as many patients as possible.
AirDNA is a provider of data and business intelligence for the billion-dollar travel and vacation rental industry.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“People should always know where they stand, what matters most and what good looks like.” For me, good management is a combination of transparency and accountability. I try to be very open with my team about what’s going well, what isn’t and where we need to change course. That gets reinforced every week through one-on-ones, team meetings and forecast calls. We look at the numbers together, but the conversation isn’t just “are you hitting target,” it’s what’s working, what’s getting in the way and what we can actually do differently this week.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our weekly forecast is probably the clearest one. It gives everyone a shared view of where we are against target, what’s likely to close, where the gaps are and what needs attention that week. The signal that it’s working is when the team can tell me the same story I’m seeing in the numbers - they know where they stand, which deals or activities matter most and what they need to do next. When people come into a forecast already identifying the risk and proposing what they’re going to do about it, rather than waiting for me to tell them, that’s a really good sign.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
I think what excites people most is having more ownership over their own success. Outbound is a big part of that — rather than relying purely on what comes into their pipeline, the team has the autonomy to go after the right opportunities and see a much clearer connection between what they put in and what they get out. We track that through the full funnel, from pipeline generated through to closed/won. That gives us a really clear view of what’s actually working — which segments, messaging and activities are converting — so we’re not just doing outbound for the sake of being busy. When we see something working, we can double down on it; when it isn’t, we change it.
Sittercity, a Bright Horizons company, is a technology platform working to reimagine the child care industry.
What’s a hallmark of good management here — and how is it reinforced weekly?
“We do the things we say we’ll do.”
We provide collegial updates on projects and objectives on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. This includes senior leadership providing the company with leadership deliverables and updating them regularly on progress.
What keeps priorities obvious — and what signal shows it’s working?
Our main forum is a weekly KPI meeting. We review all critical metrics in an open meeting where anybody can ask questions and provide suggestions. This gives everyone visibility into how we are progressing in our priorities and allows us to bring shared knowledge and experience to find opportunities to improve our outcomes.
What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress toward execution?
The core part of our strategy that is exciting is helping families meet their childcare needs. We track that directly every week and all of our downstream metrics exist to help us find ways to serve more families.
