Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Top companies build adaptability into teams, culture, and workflows like evolving products.
- Success follows proactive design for change, rather than reaction after disruption.
- Product thinking in leadership and process design drives continuous growth and resilience.
The best organizations don’t just operate: they build.
These organizations treat themselves like living products by constantly evolving, learning, adapting. They focus on architecting for it.
The future of work won’t be won by the companies that react the fastest, but rather by the companies that design for adaptability — the ones who apply product thinking not just to their apps and services, but to their workflows, teams, leadership models, and culture itself.
Because great workplaces are iterated.
From Declarations to Design
Too many future-of-work strategies start with broad declarations: We’re hybrid now. We’re agile. We empower teams. But slogans don’t build resilience; systems do.
With a product, you wouldn’t ship a feature without testing it, measuring it, and being willing to pivot if it doesn’t work. Building an enduring organization is no different. The ones that thrive treat their ways of working the same way they treat their products — as experiments.
They ask:
- What’s working?
- What’s not?
- Where are the friction points?
- What do users (employees) actually need?
They make changes, learn quickly, and aren’t afraid to sunset old models that no longer serve the mission. It’s a bias toward evolution instead of preservation.
I’ve lived this firsthand across industries, from music to finance to media. In each case, success didn’t come from sticking to a declared blueprint, but from creating a product-like engine of continuous reinvention.
Teams as Products, Not Fixed Assets
In traditional structures, teams are static. You hire for a role, slot people into org charts, and hope they collaborate effectively. When markets shift or need change, you reorganize with sweeping layoffs or restructures — after the damage is done.
In product-led organizations, teams are dynamic. They’re built for outcomes, not permanence. You think about teams the way you think about building a platform:
- What’s the goal?
- What capabilities do we need?
- How can we architect cross-functional flow instead of siloed ownership?
At Disney+, where we scaled from a cold start to millions of subscribers, the most successful teams were fluid coalitions — design, engineering, marketing, and data working together toward shared goals, reshaping themselves as needed.
This doesn’t mean chaos, but instead intentional design: platforms, standards, lightweight governance, and shared missions — giving people clarity on what they’re solving for while allowing them to reconfigure how they get there.
Leadership Models: Strategy vs. Stewardship
One of the hardest changes for leaders is letting go of command-and-control models. In a product-driven organization, leadership needs to center around stewardship, not dominance.
Leaders who are stewards set clear North Stars and trust teams to find the best paths.
When I helped launch Marcus at Goldman Sachs, we saw firsthand that you can’t manage a digital business like a traditional one. Strategy had to be co-created with the people building it. The lending experience forced questions about risk management, marketing, and even the underlying business model.
Leadership cleared roadblocks, aligned incentives, and let builders build.
True product thinking means leaders focus less on control and more on orchestration: aligning missions, empowering autonomy, and adapting structures in real time.
This is uncomfortable for legacy organizations that are used to hierarchy. But the companies that make this change can unlock compounding momentum.
Workflows: Build to Change, Not Just to Operate
A lot of “future of work” talk focuses on remote versus in-office, or flexible schedules. Those are surface-level artifacts. The deeper opportunity is in how workflows are designed.
Are your processes brittle or resilient? Are your rituals built to adapt as you learn, or are they built around frozen assumptions?
If your standups, sprint planning, decision frameworks, and knowledge-sharing systems aren’t treated like evolving products themselves, you’re building future rigidity, not future resilience.
Every operational habit your company has — every meeting, every tool, every reporting structure — is either helping you adapt or calcifying your old ways. In a product-first organization, workflows are never “done.” They’re always in beta.
The Mindset: Product-Led Future of Work
Here’s the core truth: organizations that treat the future of work like a product will build the future. Organizations that treat it like a policy manual will get left behind.
This mindset demands:
- User obsession: treating employees as users whose needs you deeply understand and design for.
- Experimentation: piloting new models, workflows, and leadership approaches without fear of failure.
- Iteration: constantly refining how you work based on real feedback and real outcomes.
- Cross-functional collaboration: breaking down silos between business, technology, operations, and people teams.
Innovation comes from the messy, human process of building, testing, and evolving meaningful systems.
The Future Is Built, Not Predicted
No one knows exactly what the future of work will look like. But the companies who succeed will be the ones who build right.
They’ll be the ones who apply product strategy to everything they do; team design, leadership models, workflows, and culture itself. They’ll treat their organizations like living, breathing products — always learning, always evolving, always getting better.
And in doing so, they’ll build companies that don’t just survive change. They’ll thrive on it.
