How Product Managers & Designers Should Connect Strategy to Their Work
- Federico Virkel
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Your OKRs Aren’t Given. You Design Them.
A Story About How Prosigliere’s Product Team Actually Works
Every new quarter, strategy arrives from the top: bold goals, ambitious markets, expansion plans. But at Prosigliere, something different happens after every leadership meeting.
Our Product Managers and Product Designers don’t walk out waiting for instructions. They start translating. Not the strategy itself, but what it means for the product, the users, the business model, and the behaviors we need to shift.
Because at Prosigliere, OKRs are not a handoff. They’re a co-creation between the people closest to the customers and the people defining the direction, our team embeds into our customers organizations to make real impact.
It All Begins With One Question: “What can we influence?”
Our PMs and Designers don’t obsess over top-line revenue or board-level numbers.
They go straight to the inputs, the behaviors that move the North Star:
How fast do our users reach value?
How often do they return?
Where does friction kill momentum?
Where did the business leak margin, cost, or quality?
This is where our operating model comes alive: Discovery, product sense, analytics, business understanding, delivery, and leadership, all working together, not in silos.
Once we identify the behaviors that matter, OKRs stop being abstract. They become real, own-able levers.
From Strategy to Clarity: The Prosigliere Way
As an example, say leadership sets a direction: “We need stronger adoption of our new product line.” A passive team waits for tasks.
Prosigliere PMs and Designers ask: What behavior must change for adoption to grow? Where is friction killing activation? What’s the biggest risk to this strategy? How do costs, margins, and operations shape our choices?
This is where business acumen kicks in: connecting user behavior, business understanding, and product execution into something the team can actually move.
The Behavior Shift Unlocks the OKRs
Our teams don’t write OKRs from features.
They write OKRs from desired behavior change:
More users completing onboarding
Fewer failed payments
Faster time-to-value in new markets
Lower support volume in core flows
Once the behaviors are clear, KRs practically reveal themselves. Then comes the moment where we inject our operating muscle: turning KRs into Bets.
Bets: Where PMs and Designers Come Alive
A Product Manager frames the hypothesis. A Designer tests the riskiest assumption. Engineering shapes the feasibility. Everyone merges customer insight with business reasoning.
Someone says: “What’s the smallest bet we can run to see if this behavior can change?”
And suddenly the team is experimenting, not guessing. This ritual, rapid experiments, decision journals, insight synthesis, is exactly how our product org avoids waste and accelerates learning.
Roadmaps Become Narratives
Our roadmaps are not lists of features.
They read like story arcs:
Now: The bets we’re running
Next: What we’ll do depending on learnings
Later: Themes we’ll explore once uncertainty drops
Customers and stakeholders don’t just see what we’re doing they see why we’re doing it.
And Finally, The Backlog Becomes The Last Mile, Not The First Step
Because once OKRs → Bets → Roadmap are clear, stories inherit purpose. Every ticket ladders up to something bigger: Story → Epic → Bet → KR → Objective → Strategy → North Star.
Alignment stops being a meeting, it becomes a byproduct of how we work.
No one at Prosigliere says: “My OKRs were given to me.”
They know they designed them, with context, business sense, and deep customer understanding.