For product & design leaders
Executive Coaching for Product & Design Leaders
Lead your product, your team, and your organization.
Product and design leadership means figuring out what to build, why it matters, and how to bring it into the world, while creating the conditions for a team to do great work. I coach product and design leaders through both the product decisions and the leadership work around them.
I’ve led the product organization and the company.
My coaching draws on more than 20 years of building and shipping products, leading teams, co-founding and running Reaction Commerce, and serving as Chief Product Officer at Mailchimp.
A roadmap can expose an unresolved strategy question. A stalled launch can reveal unclear ownership. A disagreement about priorities can turn out to be a disagreement about who the product is for. We can work on the immediate challenge while examining the patterns underneath it.
What we might work on
Product direction
- Developing product strategy grounded in customer needs and business goals
- Translating strategy into roadmaps, priorities, and clear tradeoffs
- Aligning product, design, engineering, sales, and marketing around go-to-market plans
From idea to launch
- Moving through discovery, validation, execution, and launch
- Learning from launches: what to improve, change, or stop
- Influencing across functions and leading through ambiguity and change
Teams & organization
- Organizational strategy, building and restructuring teams
- Hiring and developing leaders; delegation and accountability
- Difficult people decisions and sustainable leadership
Executive leadership
- Moving from functional leader to company executive; developing an executive point of view
- CEO and executive-team relationships, executive presence, and communication
- Burnout, boundaries, and deciding what comes next in your career
“Sara has helped me become a stronger leader without feeling like I needed to become someone else in the process.”
Leading teams that build with AI
Building an AI-native company has me working through these questions firsthand: where agents can take on work, how teams can learn and ship faster, and what needs human judgment, care, and accountability.
I help leaders think through those choices in their own products and organizations. That can mean rethinking how work gets done, deciding what to delegate to agents, and helping people develop the skills and confidence to work differently. We also look at where doing the work yourself matters for learning, understanding customers, and developing judgment.
In From Producer to Builder, I explore how AI is changing product work. Managers Aren’t the Overhead. They’re the Point. looks at the leadership that helps teams turn faster output into meaningful outcomes.
The transition into executive leadership
Becoming a VP, CPO, CDO, or senior product leader often requires letting go of some of the things that made you successful.
- Attending every product review
- Creating clear decision practices
- Personally resolving every disagreement
- Helping leaders work through tradeoffs
- Being the person with every good idea
- Setting direction and developing judgment
Your impact increasingly comes through the people, systems, decisions, and environment you create. That transition can be surprisingly difficult.
In What Is the Role of a CPO?, I explore how to decide which responsibilities need your attention and which need more room for someone else to own.
“She also has very strong product instincts that have helped to shape my thinking and approach to growing my team and business.”
How we work together
We start with the situation in front of you. That might be a product strategy that needs focus, a roadmap full of competing priorities, a launch that has stalled, an executive-team disagreement, or a team structure that no longer fits. We look at what you can influence, what needs a direct conversation, and what assumptions might need testing.
I ask questions, notice patterns, and share experience when it helps. You bring the context and the decisions. Together we find a practical next step, whether that is a clearer expectation, a conversation with your CEO, or an experiment in how you delegate.
Decision Making for Product People offers a closer look at how I help leaders practice judgment, review decisions, and bring their teams along. Accountability Needs Friction looks at a stalled website project and the clearer expectations and feedback I needed to give my team.
For practical prompts to help prepare for conversations with your team, read Flexing our Feedback Muscles, on practicing both giving and receiving feedback.
“The biggest thing Sara gave me was consistency. Routines that hold up, a way to spot the repeat mistakes and comfort zones I kept falling back into, and the push to get out of them.”
Work with me
I work with product and design leaders developing strategy, shaping roadmaps, aligning go-to-market plans, and guiding products from idea to launch. That includes leaders working through product challenges in their current roles as well as those taking on broader responsibility or moving into their first executive role. If your role is changing because your company has been acquired, you may also find coaching through acquisition useful.
Read about my approach, session format, and fees, or schedule a free introductory conversation. You don’t need a perfectly formed goal before we talk.