CEO Insights Magazine

AGlobal Product Executive focused on a passion for delivering growth and innovation to businesses worldwide, Tony Pagliocco is known to be an internationally experienced change agent with a track record of building successful, digital products for Fortune 500 companies that have global reach and multi-million dollar revenue earnings.

As the Chief Product Officer at RAI, Tony serves as the strategic visionary and advocate for a portfolio of global digital products. He leads the product management team to facilitate the creation of innovative, digital solutions that solve problems, generate results, and deliver amazing experiences. Tony utilizes best-in-class product management practices, tools, and culture to drive the development and delivery of B2B, B2C, and G2B digital products to audiences of millions. His expertise in enterprise SaaS and PaaS design enables him to spearhead transformative delivery approaches to both product and agile management. Tony provides end-to-end solutions for digital product development across various platforms, such as web, mobile, and Web3, delivering astounding experiences to clients and users.

Throughout his career, Tony has been recognized for his ability to deliver results with transforming product management, strategic planning, agile and cloud transformation, emphasizing effective leadership and cross-functional collaboration. Let’s hear it from him.

Define RAI as an organization.

RAI is an agile, impact-focused, and people-centric organization with three business lines - Audit, Tax, and Digital Consulting. Our digital-led products and solutions are a blend of strategy, design, delivery, and engineering under one roof. Our experienced professionals and specialized teams focus on not only the delivery of products and services but also the growth and maturing of that product as it goes forward. This gives us a very wide discipline and our versatile team allows us to offer unique and best-in-class services.

Tell us about your leadership approach.

I am a staunch believer in agile values when it comes to leading. I utilize the values of openness, honesty, transparency, respect, and commitment and hold those very close to myself. Having that culture and value within the team, produces a feeling of safety and trust among people, which allows us to produce a lot better outcomes together. From a leadership style perspective, I am a servant leader who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and prefers working together rather than working in silos. However, in that same space though, I am very empathetic to the product managers on my team because I have been doing what they are doing for several years, and I know the challenges that they face and how we can avoid them. At the same time, I pay extreme attention to creating an environment where my teams feel empowered - being empowered allows them to be brave and bold to try new and different things.

How have you been guiding the team to draw valuable insights to create solutions that manage complex projects?

Our product team is extremely data-driven. We always back up our hypothesis or decisions that we make for features or development based on quantitative and qualitative data acquired from as many sources as possible. We gather data by doing research analysis, competitor analysis, and conducting customer interviews or potential customer interviews to understand their pain points and find out ways to make their experience easier. We harness this data to craft products that make an impact in the lives of our customers. Even after we go live with our products, we constantly use predictive and prescriptive tools to measure active user data and find out what's popular and what isn't, what features are performing, and which ones aren't. We utilize these post-loop interviews to understand customers’ experiences which helps us to be more efficient and accurate in our deliveries.

How do you ensure client lifecycle management at each stage of deploying the company's products or solutions?

We have a very transparent system where we use different dashboards that are readily available everywhere for our stakeholders to be able to actively see what we are working on, what is our goal for the current iteration, what are the things that are blocking us, and how we are mitigating those blockers. We focus on a truly agile sense of how to be able to keep our stakeholders informed. We are rapidly prioritizing and building our iterations; we know we have the capacity, and the velocity to accomplish what we want to, and with that believe we are always delivering something tangible in every iteration. These activities are combined with our agile management and communication tools and then incorporating automation into them. At the end of the day, we use data to continuously improve and deliver faster and with better quality.

What is the future roadmap you are heading towards?

Throughout my journey, I have had the benefit of working with many great companies and learning from many amazing people and incredible mentors. Going forward, I want to continue learning to become a better leader and help enhance my team's careers while taking them on that road where they can also be leaders and they can also start going through a similar kind of leadership experience that I have been fortunate enough to have. Also, I see nothing but great success for RAI – meeting new challenges and successfully delivering out-of-the-ordinary solutions. Our focus is to enable entities to be future-ready and to address economic and social challenges through innovative digital-led solutions. A great example is Infinite pl, our newest joint venture in Saudi Arabia which is between ourselves and Saudi Post Logistics, where we are aiming to disrupt logistics globally.

Tony Pagliocco, Chief Product Officer, RAI Digital

With over 23 years of leadership experience in product management, Tony is a successful professional who is passionate about bringing growth and innovation to consumer businesses around the world with a deep understanding of the intersection between operations, strategy, and product management.