To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

To solve misalignment, the company cascaded OKRs from the CEO down. Critically, regional leaders were made 'champions' of key pillars like user acquisition. This gave them ownership and a direct voice in shaping product solutions, turning potentially adversarial relationships into collaborative partnerships.

To build trust and deliver value, product managers cannot be 'tourists' who drop in on other departments transactionally. They must become 'locals'—deeply integrated, trusted partners who are regulars in cross-functional conversations and are seen as being 'in the battle' together with sales, marketing, and other teams.

Instead of debating whether Product Management or Product Marketing "owns" positioning, teams should treat it as a critical point of shared alignment. It's a collaborative space where the entire team agrees on the product's value and market strategy.

Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.

Forcing innovations to "scale" via top-down mandates often fails by robbing local teams of ownership. A better approach is to let good ideas "spread." If a solution is truly valuable, other teams will naturally adopt it. This pull-based model ensures change sticks and evolves.

Nestle's concept of an "intelligent CDP" isn't primarily about AI. It's about the human intelligence driving the system—the strategy, vision, and purpose. The technology is a tool, but its effectiveness depends on skilled people thinking critically about its application to achieve business goals.

To bridge cultural and departmental divides, the product team initiated a process of constantly sharing and, crucially, explaining granular user data. This moved conversations away from opinions and localized goals toward a shared, data-informed understanding of the core problems, making it easier to agree on solutions.

Spreading excellence should not be like applying a thin coat of peanut butter across the whole organization. Instead, create a deep "pocket" of excellence in one team or region, perfecting it there first. That expert group then leads the charge to replicate their success in the next pocket, creating a cascading and more robust rollout.