Lowe’s Leadership & Management

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.

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.