Sage Leadership & Management

How do product leaders translate company strategy into actionable goals for their teams?

At Sage, we’ve built a unique way to connect strategy to the work people do every day. Rather than relying on traditional OKRs, Sage organizes around initiatives and SWATs. An initiative is a strategic area of focus; a SWAT brings together the cross-functional people needed to achieve a specific business outcome (often financial) through a tightly scoped, time-bound product push.

The outcome is a laser focus on the work that actually moves the needle. Initiative owners spearhead weekly meetings, keeping teams focused on the highest-priority work and driving outcomes week by week. Each initiative has an executive sponsor, creating visibility and oversight. And because initiatives are tied to time-bound results for the quarter, there’s a clear sense of urgency and accountability around what we’re trying to accomplish. The result is focus without a lot of bureaucracy and a company that can move quickly in the same direction.

What does collaboration between product, engineering and design look like at Sage?

What I love most about Sage is the collaborative, low-ego environment. Product, engineering and design work together from the start, with fluid roles. Engineers join user research, designers get into technical conversations, and everyone is encouraged to understand the whole problem, not just their piece.

Teams organize around a product area, like fall detection or EHR integrations, or a market, like skilled nursing. That lets us go deep on both the users and the technology. We also collaborate across pods through product syncs, design reviews, engineering RFCs and active Slack channels.

For EHR integrations, collaboration extends beyond Sage. We co-build directly with our EHR partners. One example is a bi-directional tasking integration between Sage and ALIS, a leading senior living EHR. We spent weeks understanding EHR workflows, going onsite with caregivers to see the friction firsthand, and met biweekly with the ALIS team to design and build together. The result was a fully connected care workflow syncing in real time, a 46 percentage point boost in documentation compliance at top communities, and a workflow caregivers love.

How do you maintain alignment and creativity while scaling or launching new initiatives?

At Sage, alignment starts with staying connected to the company’s core goals and being clear about the problem we’re solving. We have the usual sprints, standups, PRD reviews and retros. I supplement that with AI tools that help me stay on top of important threads and spend more time building.

On creativity, we have a strong bias toward experimentation. We call it the “first pancake” approach: Figure out the smallest thing we can ship, put it in front of users and learn. I get a lot of ideas onsite at senior living communities, watching care teams work. Something that seems intuitive at a desk can look completely different when a caregiver navigates it during a busy shift.

Our users are a constant source of ideas, and there’s no shortage of problems to solve in senior care. The challenge is figuring out which ones have the biggest impact and testing quickly. AI helps us shorten that cycle. We use it to develop PRDs, explore ideas and test interaction patterns, getting from idea to feedback faster. That mix of deep user understanding, rapid experimentation and AI helps us move fast without losing sight of what matters: products that actually work for the people delivering care.