Leading Product Strategy Inside a Fortune 500 Enterprise
Situation: Innovation Inside a Highly Regulated, High-Stakes Enterprise
CBRE is a Fortune 500 commercial real estate firm operating at global scale, with deeply entrenched processes, regulatory constraints, and powerful incumbents in adjacent markets (e.g., CoStar).
Within CBRE Build, the mandate was to:
- Explore digital products that could create competitive advantage
- Modernize data, analytics, and decision-making tools
- Do so without jeopardizing core brokerage relationships, revenue streams, or legal constraints
Innovation was encouraged — but only if it could survive enterprise reality.
The Real Problem (Not the Obvious One)
The obvious problem appeared to be:
“How do we build modern digital products inside CBRE?”
The real problem was:
How do we create leverage through software while navigating legal risk, political capital, and deeply ingrained human behavior — without breaking trust internally or externally?
In practice:
- Many teams preferred Excel because it felt safer and controllable
- Data standardization conflicted with local autonomy
- Some product ideas overlapped with partners CBRE could not legally compete with
- Launching too early risked embarrassment and loss of future opportunity
Constraints That Defined the Environment
Product leadership at CBRE was shaped by non-negotiable constraints:
- Legal & competitive boundaries: Products could not compete with CoStar or violate non-competes
- Human behavior: Brokers optimized for speed and personal control, not centralized tools
- Enterprise risk tolerance: A failed public launch could permanently damage credibility
- Data fragmentation: Multiple sources of truth, inconsistent schemas, manual processes
- Organizational complexity: Global teams, matrixed ownership, unclear product authority
This was not a greenfield startup environment.
Key Leadership and Product Decisions
1. Treat product governance as a first-class product problem
Rather than focusing only on features, leadership emphasized:
- Business cases with explicit assumptions
- Clear approval and closure processes
- Explicit decisions to stop initiatives when conditions changed
The formal close-out of initiatives like Site IQ was intentional — avoiding zombie products that drain trust and resources.
2. Prioritize behavioral adoption over technical correctness
Repeated insight from the field:
“The tool isn’t the problem — the process is.”
Product work focused on:
- Understanding why Excel persisted as the system of record
- Introducing standardization without threatening autonomy
- Framing tools as support, not surveillance
In several cases, the right decision was to not force adoption.
3. Set realistic launch criteria and resist premature exposure
For customer-facing products:
- Launch dates were treated as adjustable, not sacred
- Marketing spend was delayed until product confidence was earned
- Internal stakeholders were aligned before external exposure
The cost of waiting was often lower than the cost of a failed first impression.
4. Create shared language and visibility across teams
To reduce fragmentation:
- Product reviews emphasized clarity over volume
- OKRs and weekly roundups focused on blockers and dependencies
- Stakeholder triage processes adjudicated competing feedback
The goal was not speed — it was organizational coherence.
Outcomes & Signals
- Fewer but more deliberate product bets
- Earlier recognition of misaligned initiatives
- Improved cross-team understanding of priorities and constraints
- Reduced political friction around product decisions
- Stronger credibility for product leadership over time
Some initiatives slowed or stopped — by design.
What This Case Says About How I Lead
This case reflects my approach to enterprise product leadership:
- I respect legal, political, and human constraints rather than fighting them
- I believe stopping work is as important as starting it
- I optimize for long-term trust over short-term momentum
- I treat governance and communication as product responsibilities
- I’m comfortable leading without perfect authority