How do you scale product delivery without losing agility? In this podcast hosted by Cassio Sampaio, Okta Auth0 VP and Chief of Staff Lauren McCarthy will be speaking on scaling product delivery with strategic program management. Lauren shares insights from her 25-year career on balancing process, tools, and team collaboration to drive successful product development across different organizational stages.
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Show Notes
- Introduce process gradually, tailoring it to the organization’s specific needs and growth stage
- Balance agility with structured workflows by being transparent about potential temporary slowdowns
- Prioritize cross-functional collaboration by educating teams about product goals and context
- Leverage executive sponsorship to drive transformational initiatives
- Develop domain expertise quickly to become an effective cross-functional leader
- Use decision-making frameworks like DACI to improve organizational efficiency
- Focus on customer outcomes rather than just team velocity and output metrics
- Create communication and work-tracking processes that enhance, not hinder, team productivity
- Implement mentorship programs to accelerate knowledge transfer and onboarding
- Be selective about introducing new tools, considering organizational readiness and scalability
- Maintain flexibility in process design, allowing room for team-specific adaptations
- Recognize that “doing nothing” can be a valid strategic decision
- Build operational rigor to ensure predictable and consistent project delivery
- Encourage teams to make decisions appropriate to their expertise and role
- Document decision-making processes transparently to improve accountability
- Invest time in maintaining tool hygiene as organizations grow
- Leverage AI tools like Google Gemini to improve information synthesis and productivity
- Create working agreements for communication across different teams and functions
- Develop a culture of respect and equitable time allocation across organizational levels
- Continuously optimize operational processes as the organization matures
About the speaker
Lauren is a highly accomplished technical program management leader with over 25 years of expertise. She’s obsessed with building, scaling, and improving cross-functional team collaboration and product delivery operations. This spans back to the beginning of her career in Education Technology to recent years, where Lauren has shifted her focus to the developer tool space, bringing her extensive knowledge and experience in technical program management and agile methodologies to companies like DigitalOcean and now Okta. She is currently Chief of Staff for Auth0, a flexible and developer-focused identity and access management platform. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and loves to spend her time outdoors, running, skiing, and exploring.
About the host
I am a product person with 20+ years of experience most recently with DigitalOcean, Apple, Auth0 and now running Customer Identity at Okta. I love technical products and my sweet spot is B2B SaaS / IaaS. I have done a bit of everything including running engineering teams, corporate development and marketing and lived and worked in Canada, US and Brazil.