CBRE is one of the largest commercial real estate companies in the world. Within CBRE Build, the mandate was to explore digital products that could create competitive advantage — modernize data, analytics, and decision-making tools. But there was a catch: don’t break anything.
That’s the enterprise paradox. Innovation is encouraged, but only if it can survive contact with legal constraints, political capital, deeply entrenched processes, and powerful incumbents like CoStar. You can’t just move fast and break things when “things” includes billion-dollar brokerage relationships.
Excel Was the Real Competitor
The question I kept hearing was “How do we build modern digital products inside CBRE?” But that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was more like: how do you create leverage through software when the humans using it prefer Excel, the data is fragmented, and some of the best product ideas would put you in legal conflict with your own partners?
I spent a lot of time in the field talking to brokers. What I learned was that Excel persisted not because people were stubborn, but because it gave them speed and personal control. A centralized tool felt like surveillance, not support. Any product we built had to respect that instinct, not fight it.
In several cases, the right product decision was to not force adoption. That’s a hard thing to advocate for when you’re hired to drive adoption, but I’ve found that pushing a tool on people who don’t trust it just burns political capital you’ll need later. It’s better to understand the behavior first and meet people where they are.
Stopping Work as a Product Decision
One of the things I think about a lot from the CBRE experience is the importance of knowing when to stop.
We formally closed out initiatives like Site IQ when the conditions that justified them changed. This was intentional. Zombie products — things that nobody kills but nobody champions — are some of the most expensive things in an enterprise. They drain trust, budget, and attention. I’ve found that closing them cleanly is often more valuable than starting something new.
I also pushed for product governance as a first-class concern. Business cases with explicit assumptions. Clear approval and closure processes. The goal was to make the cost of not deciding visible, because in large organizations, indecision tends to be the default and it can be very expensive.
Every initiative, I think, should have a hypothesis and a checkpoint. If the hypothesis is wrong, the fastest and cheapest thing you can do is stop — learn what you learned and move the resources somewhere else.
Patience Over Speed
For customer-facing products, I treated launch dates as adjustable, not sacred. We delayed marketing spend until product confidence was earned. Internal stakeholders were aligned before we risked external exposure.
This drove some people crazy. In startup culture, speed is the religion. But inside an enterprise, a failed first impression doesn’t just kill a product — it can damage credibility for the entire innovation team. In my experience, the cost of waiting was almost always lower than the cost of getting it wrong publicly.
We also invested in shared language across teams. Product reviews emphasized clarity over volume. OKRs and weekly roundups focused on blockers and dependencies. We built a stakeholder triage process to adjudicate competing feedback, because in a matrixed organization, everyone has opinions and nobody has clean authority.
I found those communication frameworks — the shared vocabulary, the triage process, the review cadence — to be as valuable as any individual product we shipped. They gave people a way to make decisions together without having to escalate everything.
What I Learned
Some initiatives slowed or stopped — by design. Fewer but more deliberate product bets. Earlier recognition of misaligned initiatives. Reduced political friction around product decisions. Stronger credibility for the product team over time.
The biggest thing I took away from CBRE is that enterprise product leadership is mostly about trust management. You’re not optimizing for shipping speed. You’re playing the long game — building enough credibility that when you do push for something bold, people are willing to go along.
I’m comfortable leading without perfect authority. Most of the time, that’s all you get.