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 new product management processes gradually, tailoring them to the organization’s growth stage and specific needs.
- Balance agility with structured workflows by being transparent about any temporary slowdowns during implementation.
- Prioritize cross-functional collaboration by educating teams on product goals, priorities, and broader business context.
- Leverage executive sponsorship to support and drive key product and organizational transformation initiatives.
- Develop domain expertise quickly to operate as an effective cross-functional product leader.
- Use structured decision-making frameworks such as DACI to improve clarity, accountability, and efficiency.
- Focus on delivering customer outcomes instead of only tracking team velocity or output metrics.
- Design communication and work-tracking processes that enhance productivity rather than create overhead.
- Implement mentorship and peer learning programs to accelerate onboarding and knowledge transfer.
- Be selective when introducing new tools, evaluating their scalability and organizational readiness.
- Maintain flexibility in process design to accommodate team-specific workflows and context.
- Recognize that “doing nothing” is sometimes the most strategic choice, especially during uncertain or transitional periods.
- Build operational rigor to ensure consistency and predictability in product delivery.
- Encourage decentralized decision-making, empowering teams to act within their areas of expertise.
- Document decisions and rationale transparently to improve organizational learning and accountability.
- Invest in tool hygiene as your product organization grows to avoid friction and inefficiency.
- Leverage AI tools such as Google Gemini to boost information synthesis, collaboration, and productivity.
- Create working agreements that set expectations for communication across different teams and functions.
- Cultivate a culture of respect and equitable time allocation across organizational levels.
- Continuously optimize product operations as the organization matures and scales.
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.