Leader Spotlight: Leaning on empathy, trust, and empowerment, Joanna Narbuntowicz

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Joanna Narbuntowicz is a digital product leader. She was most recently Vice President, Product at Saks OFF 5th. Joanna began her professional career at Saks Fifth Avenue as a project manager for internal tools and progressed to senior director of product. Along the way, she pursued experience in merchandising, taking on an associate buyer role. Joanna later moved to Saks Off 5th to help build the newly formed in-house tech team, which included product.

In our conversation, Joanna talks about her three core values: empathy, trust, and empowerment. She discusses how these core values are pillars of a successful product management organization, as well as how they tie into being customer- and data-driven.

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Relying on core values

You’ve built several high-performing teams throughout your career — most recently at Saks OFF 5TH. Could you discuss how you believe your leadership style has evolved throughout your career?

I was recently reflecting on my career as a leader, and I’ve realized that at some point, you start developing core values. There are certain role models who inspire you; you look up to them and try to imitate them. Sometimes, you may also decide to avoid certain behaviors because you’ve been in situations before that you don’t want to repeat.

I’ve come to realize that my core values are empathy, trust, and empowering my team. I can answer most of the problems that I’ve encountered through these core values. They ground me and set my plan forward, and I’ve always relied on them. Also, as I’ve evolved as a leader, I’ve noticed that my ability to practice situational leadership has improved. That’s probably what has changed the most over time. I’ve come to realize this is who I am as a leader, but it doesn’t mean that that’s who I need to be to everyone on my team. Leadership is not one-size-fits-all, and realizing that was a big growing opportunity for me.

Now, I’m in a place where I stick to my core values, but, at the same time, I can be a slightly different leader to different people on my team. It’s about tuning in to the individual and their needs. That’s the type of leader that I am and that’s what I want to be to everyone.

There are many types of leadership — democratic, directive, participative, servant, visionary, transformational, charismatic, affiliative, etc. Is there a type that you feel you lean on most or that’s most natural to you?

It’s a combination. Going back to my core values, I try to be innovative, but I also rely on my team for this. I strive to create a supportive environment where they can be more innovative. You mentioned charismatic leadership, and I feel like because I get so personal with my team, I probably identify with this one the most. I try to inspire, and I often lean into the idea that I can model behavior by doing certain things a certain way.

Creating an environment of trust

You talked about promoting a culture of innovation. Could you say more about that? Do you find you use a certain situational style to try to promote that culture a bit?

For innovation to thrive, you need to create a supportive, open environment and a safe space for your team. Communication has to be active, and your team members need to feel like they can share any idea, even if it’s unconventional. I’ve also seen first-hand that people become very innovative when they try to solve problems. I encourage my team to stay very close to our customers and understand their personas and behavior. Once you start truly understanding their challenges, you’ll be able to start coming up with ideas to solve them.

I’ve also seen the reverse, where a product, solution, or technology becomes so trendy that the company tries to use it at all costs, even if it’s not right for the organization. That’s the opposite of innovation. For example, AI is super innovative right now, but if you don’t have the right application and you’re not trying to solve the right problems, that’s not innovation.

Further, there are certain types of leaders, like those who are too authoritative, who can stifle innovation. That type of leader generally walks into the room with very strong beliefs and that can set the outcome of the conversation. That doesn’t create a space open for open dialogue, which is hard.

You mentioned the importance of building trust as an important component of giving a team space to be innovative. How do you go about building that trust?

Transparency is important, but you have to find the right balance when you’re in a leadership role. It’s not always possible to share all information. Regardless, I try to be as transparent as possible. I want to create and share the bigger picture of where the company’s going and make that connection for my team.

Building trust is also about delivering on your promises. For example, I had someone on my team who expressed that they were ready for the next step. I didn’t feel that they were ready at that moment, but promised to create a personalized plan to help get them to the next level. Then, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. When I say I will do something, I will try to do it, no matter what.

It was a team effort, but this person eventually accomplished their plan and got their promotion. Afterward, they mentioned how they were surprised that I followed through on that promise. That’s how I gained their trust, for sure. They saw that I was invested in their growth.

Customer- and data-centricity through education

What is your approach to cultivating a customer-centric, data-driven culture within your teams?

I feel like a lot of companies talk about customer- and data-centricity. I come at it from a lens of education, which is essentially empowerment. This means making sure that we don’t forget that we’re working in the world of technology. A lot of the things we work on can easily become an abstract concept that has nothing to do with our customers. I want to make sure that our customer needs and experiences are always at the center of everything we do.

I want my team to understand our customer personas. What are their desires? What are their challenges? One way to do this is to connect my team with customers and create a space where they have access to this data. At Saks OFF 5th, I was fortunate to have a research team rolling up to me, so we were able to do customer interviews, surveys, etc. That was amazing.

Internally, I want to make sure that my team is connected to other functions within the company to understand how they perceive our customer needs and what their strategies are. I often had leaders from other areas — in particular, marketing, customer insights, and customer service — come in to talk about their strategies and findings.

From a product perspective, we could be focusing on the customer experience while not even thinking about the actual merchandise that’s being sold on the website. But when you have the leader of our merchandising team come in and say, “Our customers are really price savvy. They care about this new style, and they’re looking for this on our website,” that broadens the knowledge about the end customer and gives people additional context.

How do you deal with situations in which people might be interpreting the same data differently?

There have been times in my career where my team asked, “The numbers are telling the story. Why isn’t this particular department within the business responding to that? Why are they deciding to do this when it contradicts the data?” I’ve come to realize that nowadays, anyone who’s making decisions wants to be data-driven. People have the intention, so it sometimes comes down to interpretation. I’ve seen barriers where people don’t trust the data. If you have conflicting data sources or lack the complete picture, that can create apprehension.

It’s really important to make data accessible and transparent, as well as to align with language. It’s kind of like a data dictionary. Are we using the same vocabulary? It’s also crucial to emphasize translating those numbers as well. How are we interpreting them? That’s very important to creating trust within your organization.

What are some common barriers that you’ve observed in adopting data-driven practices among product teams?

Everyone is trying to be data-driven nowadays. The biggest barrier is just trusting the data or having a strong belief that your experience is better than the numbers in a report. For example, if you have contradicting reports or data within your company, that trust goes out the window. The decision-maker then tends to rely on their experience and gut feelings.

Creating that clarity, making sure that everyone understands what each data component means, how to interpret it, etc., is vital. It’s also important to avoid looking at these metrics in a vacuum. It’s not just one individual metric, it’s everything around it. You need to understand what they really mean.

What’s your approach to validating data — for example, if the data isn’t sitting well with someone or isn’t aligning with what they expected?

There are a couple of ways. The primary approach is to collaborate with analytics, engineering, or technical teams whose acumen and skillset can support the creation of a unified data dictionary or standardized metrics. I’ve also been in a situation where I was able to demonstrate very specific events and how they impacted metrics.

Empathy and clarity in data-driven decision-making

Sometimes, decisions can be swayed by personal agendas or by politics. Do you have some strategies to combat that?

This is complicated because it involves human emotions and relationships within the company. I’ve definitely faced those situations. Part of this goes back to my core value of being empathetic. I try to understand the end goal of a specific decision or strategy and how that person is trying to get there. I don’t leave it up to a big meeting where there’s a lot of disagreement. I try to go behind the scenes to understand what’s happening and why.

I’ve often been in a situation where the end goal might actually be the same, but the way of getting there is different. How can we partner on aligning to get there together? If you become vulnerable and have that honest conversation with someone, you’ll generally get the complete story and you’ll understand the intricacies of what’s happening.

I’ve also tried socializing ideas and getting buy-in before that big moment. I don’t want to be too late on the educational component. It’s important to start trickling the information down and across early to bring the complete picture together. That’s often how I navigate corporate politics.

Could you share an example of a time when you had to navigate stakeholder biases or conflicting agendas to ensure that a decision was made based on the data?

Yes. This example involves technology that uses generative AI — it’s an amazing tool that I was able to unlock and bring to our organization. The tool promised to automate specific functions within merchandising on our website, as well as make the final product experience for our customers more personalized. We could use the tool to scale more of those experiences. It was a win-win for our internal function, as well as for our customers.

I was super excited about the possibilities, but I started to sense pushback and skepticism from the teams that were impacted. I went back to my empathy value and wanted to go behind the scenes. It was eye-opening. I realized that the team was really worried about the fear of the unknown. What did the tool mean for the process? How was their everyday life changing? They even worried about whether they were going to lose their jobs to AI. I kept listening and having more conversations, and it quickly became apparent that I haven’t done enough education and partnering on this initiative.

That was a big lesson for me. I quickly pivoted and, instead of just pushing the tools and being overly excited, I worked to bring those stakeholders on board. Once they started to realize the value of the product, they began advocating for it too. It was easy at the end, but while I was in it, I felt like I was missing something. I had to have a lot of conversations to go deep into people’s everyday work and educate them on what this tool could do. I emphasized that this was about elevating their job, not eliminating anything. At the end of the day, we had a full adoption.

The team then developed their own process, which was a critical step. Instead of giving them the tool and telling them how to use it, I simply educated them on its capabilities. From there, they developed their processes and determined how they would work with it. It was an amazing ride from there — they were able to efficiently deploy optimized product assortments on our website and we saw much higher conversion on the pages generated from this technology.