What do you do when a customer asks for a feature that isn’t on your roadmap? In this episode of Hard Calls, Trisha Price and Mark Mitchell, Chief Product Officer at Morgan Stanley at Work, share personal, candid stories of the hardest calls Mark has made - starting with knowing when to walk away from a big prospect that just isn’t the right fit.

Mark breaks down how he weighs effort, impact, and adoption when deciding which product investments to make and why “massive size, small impact” requests are the real landmines.

Balancing strategy, execution and priorities is always challenging for product leaders, but Mark shares his 90-day-9-week-9-month time-horizon framework, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to manage.

They go deep on user adoption as the north-star KPI, the “whole product” motions that actually drive it, and the customer focus that keeps product, sales, marketing, and education aligned.

What makes for a great product organization? “For us, it starts with us making sure that we understand the needs of the customer. Understand the needs of the problem and the problem that we're trying to solve, and spend a lot of time understanding the front side of discovery and planning and all the things that go into building a great product.”

Finally, Mark shares how a highly regulated financial services enterprise, such as Morgan Stanley at Work, is embracing AI—from code assistance to internal copilots—and why he believes AI will soon be a prerequisite input for product decisions.

Whether you're navigating short-term pressures or long-term strategy, new to product or a seasoned leader, this episode will add to your knowledge base to help you make smarter product bets and deliver value at scale.

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Presented by Pendo.
Explore more insights at pendo.io or connect with Trisha Price on LinkedIn.