In Depth Why great product leaders should stop obsessing over the roadmap | Diya Jolly (CPO & CTO of Xero)
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Apr 30, 2026 
Diya Jolly, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Xero who previously led product at Okta and Google. She discusses why leaders should raise team ambition, the need for protected startup-like innovation within big orgs, taking bigger roadmap risks in the AI era, delegating decisions with a three-bucket framework, and protecting weekly thinking time to make high-impact choices.
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AI Changes Product Focus From Features To Outcomes
- AI shifts CPO work from delivering capabilities to reshaping workflows and outcomes, enabling new business results like time saved or revenue growth.
- You must understand deeper customer goals to apply AI beyond surface feature requests.
Get Deep Into Architecture Decisions Now
- Expect to fly lower on architecture and UI choices because AI forces fundamental product and technical decisions.
- Ask model-agnostic questions: what must be deterministic, what can be probabilistic, and whether chat is UI or sidecar.
Organizational Politics Stems From Incentives
- Politics at work is often an incentives problem: misaligned rewards create friction and lobbying rather than collaboration.
- Diya defines politics as people not rowing the same way and carrying excess alignment burden.