Updated: September 30, 2025- 6 min read
“The most successful organizations don't just build great products—they build great systems that enable teams to consistently deliver customer value at scale. We share insights from leaders at Autodesk, RS Group, Walmart, and Cisco on the processes that fuel transformation.”
As a Head of Product Management at Airtable, I've seen the same pattern repeatedly: a company’s success comes down to how well they operationalize and execute against their product strategy. Compelling digital experiences are now table stakes, and consistently delivering products that customers love is do-or-die for businesses. Shelly LaRock, Head of Product Operations at Autodesk, captured the core challenge perfectly in a recent episode of Builders & Breakthroughs, a thoughtcast from Airtable.
"How do we take all of these different product teams working on different products, different customer bases, different tool stacks, and help them work better? How do I give a product manager back 25 or 50% of their time so they can actually be doing discovery and talking to customers?"
At Autodesk, supporting 500-600 product managers across multiple divisions, the challenge isn't coordination—it's creating systems to surface the feedback trends teams need to build great products.
In this post, I share similar insights and key takeaways from Airtable’s Builders & Breakthroughs thoughtcast. We've had the privilege of sitting down with leading product minds across several industries, and their ideas can help all of us think through our own product strategies in the ever-changing AI era.
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Use AI to Transform Product Feedback into an Actionable Roadmap
One of the most dramatic transformation stories on Builders & Breakthroughs to date is Autodesk's feedback system overhaul. Initially, they processed "30 or 40 requests each month … and 6% of those were getting assigned." After implementing AI-powered centralization, "100% of all requests are assigned to product teams the minute they hit our system."
But here's the critical insight most companies miss: centralization without intelligence just creates noise, not actionable insights. The real breakthrough happens when you combine centralization with AI to identify themes and even specific roadmap opportunities. Instead of drowning product managers in hundreds of individual requests across multiple systems, Autodesk surfaces five or six specific problems for teams to focus on.
The takeaway: Your customer feedback system should reduce cognitive load, not increase it. If your product managers are spending more time processing feedback than acting on insights, your system is broken.
Embed Experimentation Thinking into Every Product Decision
For Stuart Ehoff, Head of Growth Platforms & Product Operations, at RS Group, a global omni-channel provider of industrial and electronics products, the biggest opportunity for transformation was within his team’s experimentation framework: "Only around 5% of things we were shipping[were being tested, while] 95% were just feature factory output,” he said.
This "feature factory" mentality is the enemy of sustainable growth. The solution isn't running more experiments—it's embedding experimentation thinking into every product decision. RS Group built "an Airtable base that acts as the backbone of that program" where "product teams move experiments, hypotheses, ideas, designs, engineering tickets through that ecosystem."
The transformation was remarkable: what started as a scrappy process evolved into a comprehensive system that connects to other critical tools and systems, creating a seamless workflow from hypothesis to production. More importantly, it created visibility. Now, their CEO can access their experimentation system and see direct connections between research and business outcomes, product operations has achieved its highest purpose: making customer value delivery visible and repeatable.
The takeaway: If you're not testing a significant slice of your releases, you're guessing, not building. Build experimentation infrastructure that makes testing easier than shipping blind.
Leverage AI Tools to 10x Your Team’s Impact
Ben Peterson at Walmart is embracing AI to form radical new team structures. Instead of traditional four-in-the-box teams, he's testing "two supercharged individual contributors—someone with traditional engineering skillset, someone with creative business/product/design background"—using generative AI tools daily.
“My hope for every product manager, every designer, every professional, is that they are fully embracing this technology,” Ben told Builders & Breakthroughs. “They should be playing with it on a daily basis and figuring out how to 10x themselves in their role.”
This reflects a broader trend I'm seeing at Airtable: the boundaries between product, design, and engineering are blurring. The companies that thrive will be those that embrace this convergence rather than fight it.
The takeaway: AI isn't replacing human judgment; it's augmenting it. The winning teams will be smaller, more empowered units that leverage AI to punch above their weight.
Scaling Effectively Requires Tight Clarity and Focus
At Cisco, Jeetu Patel manages over 1,000 products across a 90,000-person organization. His scaling philosophy is about clarity and focus: "You shouldn't build a multi-product company where every product has a different route to market. Leverage the route to market and distribution you already have."
Patel's approach centers on three values:
Build products people love that get to commercial relevance
Think ecosystem-first
Progression should be asymmetric: be 10x better, not 10% better
The takeaway: Portfolio coherence beats feature proliferation every time. Your products should strengthen each other, not compete for resources.
Looking Forward and Your Action Plan
Looking ahead, three trends are reshaping product operations: AI-native operations that move beyond tools to fundamental thinking processes, flattened hierarchies with smaller empowered teams, and outcome-driven systems that optimize for customer value delivery rather than process compliance.
Start with these three diagnostic questions:
Feedback Systems: Are you centralizing customer input to create actionable insights or just more noise?
Experiment Ratio: What percentage of your releases are actually tested? How might you improve experimentation velocity?
Team Structure: Are your current roles optimized for today's tools and customer expectations?
Despite all the focus on systems and processes, culture remains the ultimate differentiator. As Shelly from Autodesk reminds us: "Change is hard." The key in this change management is involving customers in the conversation early on, “keeping them updated throughout our development processes … so by the team we roll it out, they know how it’s changing their work. They know what the value is, and they’re ready to go.”
The companies that master product operations at scale won't just survive the next decade—they'll define it. The question isn't whether you need to evolve your product operations, but how quickly you can make it happen.
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Updated: September 30, 2025
