Aligning strategic goals and tactical execution for product excellence

Main Takeaways

• Cultivate a team culture where every member contributes ideas freely, preventing bottlenecks and enriching product development.
• Maintain a clear balance between long-term planning and daily tasks, ensuring both visionary goals and immediate progress.
• Adopt iterative decision-making by testing ideas quickly and making informed bets even when full data is unavailable.
• Communicate product vision in simple, measurable terms that align with business outcomes and build trust with sceptical stakeholders.
• Continuously review user feedback and performance data to identify opportunities, refine strategies, and change direction quickly when market trends shift.

Who are you in a nutshell? What do you do, and why do you do it?

I’m Olivier, a Product Director based in London, currently leading a new product initiative at J.P. Morgan. My career began in strategy consulting, tackling problems analytically but rarely seeing the solutions through. I craved ownership, seeing ideas become real products that deliver real outcomes. In 2014, I transitioned into product management, initially with Cisco and later at fintechs like Verse and Cash App. My drive has always been curiosity, understanding how things function, and continuously improving real-world user experiences.

What’s your setup? What tools, frameworks, and products do you use? Where do you work, and how is your schedule?

I currently split my work between home and the office. At home, I have a dedicated workspace with a large Dell monitor, a MacBook in clamshell mode, and external peripherals. In the office, flexible desks equipped with dual monitors simplify the transition.

With three kids at home, my days are dynamic. I structure mornings and late afternoons for deep focus work, reserving midday for meetings. Mondays anchor the week with one-on-ones, while Thursdays are no-meeting days for deeper thinking.

At work, it's a combination of Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. Personally, I value simplicity and therefore rely heavily on Apple’s native productivity suite. I use frameworks like opportunity solution trees to align discovery and prioritization with strategic goals, reviewing them quarterly to stay on track.

What’s the biggest challenge for you at the moment, and how do you plan to overcome it?

The primary challenge now is balancing strategic vision with daily execution. I am one of the leads of a small team building a new product from scratch at J.P. Morgan. This involves defining long-term goals while actively driving day-to-day progress, establishing workflows and processes, writing specifications, and ensuring clarity on immediate milestones. The solution lies in clearly communicated roadmaps, which teams can then take to drive their work how they best see fit.

How do you consistently identify high-impact opportunities that others might overlook?

To begin with, it’s not so much about coming up with ideas that others overlook, but about how they are executed. If 100 product managers were given the same opportunity space, the span outcomes would be very wide

Also, I don’t see my role as simply coming up with ideas. Instead, I focus on creating a system where good ideas can come from anywhere in the team. If the team relies on me for all the insights, we risk bottlenecks and missed opportunities. My job is to build an environment where everyone feels confident to bring ideas forward and where we can validate those ideas efficiently.

For live products, the one thing I always ensure I do is know the product’s user journeys and their conversion rates by heart. This helps spot issues or opportunities quickly. At Verse, I learned this habit well, regularly reviewing user flows to discover areas needing improvement. It's about systematically noticing what's underperforming rather than searching for elusive, completely new ideas.

How do you make confident decisions when faced with incomplete or unclear data?

Absolute confidence is not possible without clear data. Instead, I move quickly, testing hypotheses to gather better information. Itamar Gilad’s confidence scale helps manage uncertainty by explicitly acknowledging what we know versus what we assume. However, frameworks alone aren’t foolproof because people can always tweak scores to justify already-made decisions. Context and judgement matter enormously and, sometimes, you simply need to make informed bets, then adjust based on outcomes.

How do you present your product vision to skeptical stakeholders, and what do you do to maintain alignment over time?

I found it quite effective to align the product vision directly with business outcomes. If you work for a for-profit organisation, ultimately every decision must either increase revenue or reduce costs. So attempt to explain how your product vision, which should have a broad scope (i.e., it’s not a feature tweak) impacts both. In doing so, the discussion with skeptical stakeholders then revolves around the evidence that underpin your analysis of the product vision’s impact..

For more subjective challenges—like stakeholders not liking a design choice—I focus on having clear reasoning behind my decisions. During my time at frog, client stakeholders sometimes fixate on minor details, like colors (really), and it could derail the discussion. In those situations, even a basic rationale like “we chose green because it aligns with user expectations in this context” can help move things forward.

What systems or habits do you use to ensure that product discovery remains continuous?

Continuous discovery means regularly monitoring the basics, like core conversion metrics and customer support themes. At N26, I saw the value of frequent qualitative interactions, and informal ‘research coffees’ with users surfaced unexpected insights.

Additionally, maintaining an opportunity solution tree, updated quarterly, ensures ongoing alignment with strategic priorities, constantly refreshing our focus on the right opportunities.

What non-traditional metrics do you use to measure product success, and how do these metrics influence your strategy?

Beyond standard activation and retention metrics, I pay close attention to user support trends and qualitative feedback. Unexpected spikes in support tickets or recurrent user questions frequently indicate significant but solvable problems. These signals directly influence prioritization, guiding small but impactful improvements.

Can you describe a time when new information made you pivot your product strategy?

At Verse, we initially pursued Bitcoin trading integration, following market trends. Mid-project, user research revealed crypto trading wasn’t a priority for our customers, and broader market adoption was weak. Despite the difficulty, I decided to halt the project, reallocating resources to more impactful areas like regulatory projects and key product improvements. Reflecting afterward, we refined our process to validate ideas more thoroughly upfront, embedding adaptability into our strategic approach.