I had the opportunity to speak at Walmart’s Product Summit 2025, followed by an engaging listening session with some of the sharpest product thinkers and leaders across the company. This is the talent I get to work with—and learn from—every day, a privilege I don’t take lightly.
Below are a few snippets from the talking points I shared with the audience.
Product leadership is always about building with intention. It’s deliberate evolution—anchored in purpose, strengthened by culture, and propelled by innovation.
Start with clarity. Clarity of mission. Clarity of who we serve. Clarity on how teams align to that mission. From day one, ground yourself in first principles: start with the customer, build what matters, and never drift from the what and the why.
Treat culture as your operating system. That’s the foundation for scale. Hire not just for resume, but for value alignment. Talent might get you started. Culture builds momentum which builds scale.
High-trust, high-velocity organizations don’t happen by accident. You build them. Through intent. Through repetition. Through systems that let teams move fast, learn fast, and stay focused on real problems. Make it safe to challenge assumptions. Make it normal to speak up early. Make it expected to iterate quickly.
Now, as we’re stepping into a new phase—where AI isn’t just influencing how we build. It’s not just about x% productivity wins. It’s transforming what our customers expect and need. This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s happening now.
Now what will matter most is speed—speed of iteration, speed of insight, and speed of decision-making. That’s where product roles are evolving fast.
The fundamentals of product leadership haven’t changed. A sharp understanding of customer needs. The ability to tell a clear story. The judgment to make hard calls in ambiguity. The responsibility to think beyond the next sprint and design for long-term impact. That’s the constant.
But the tools and the tempo are different. Imagine a product manager who used to spend three days reading customer feedback across tickets, reviews, and survey data. That work now takes thirty minutes. But more importantly, that time saved means more cycles to learn, experiment, and refine.
It’s not just 10X faster. It’s 10X more adaptive.
That’s the new expectation.
The surface area of what one product can influence has expanded. So has the pace at which we can test, fail, and improve. As this accelerates, leaders need to invest in leverage—a word that now means much more than efficiency.
Leverage is about compounding impact. It’s about making decisions, building tools, and fostering relationships that scale beyond any one product or team. Instead of solving a problem once, we ask: can this solve for many? Can we build once, but learn across ten different use cases? Design for tomorrow’s extensibility.
As product leaders, we’re stewards of both purpose and pace.
AI will redefine how we work. But it’s not a replacement for product judgment or customer understanding. It won’t replace customer empathy. It’s an accelerant. And when paired with strong culture, real empowerment, and a bias for action, it unlocks something powerful. It will amplify all of it.
This moment demands that we build intentionally. Be curious. Think systemically. Lead with trust. And scale with focus.
And that’s how we build something that lasts.