Do You Need a PM Center of Excellence? The Answer is Yes.

Noa Ginsberg, SVP, Product Management Excellence at FactSet, faced a challenge that would make most product leaders nervous: transform how a 40-year-old financial data company builds products. Not a single team or feature, but the entire product organization.

In this episode of Hard Calls, Noa and host Trisha Price dig into what it truly takes to introduce modern product thinking to build a Product Management Center of Excellence. They discuss the best practices for rolling out new tooling and analytics-driven processes across thousands of employees without losing touch with the customer and what made FactSet successful in the first place.

"If we hadn’t positioned for product excellence, we wouldn’t be ready for the AI wave.” - Noa Ginsberg

Here's what you'll discover:

How to build a Product Center of Excellence that scales. Noa breaks down the framework she used to reduce duplication, create clarity, and align product teams around shared outcomes—without adding bureaucracy.

Why gut instinct still matters in a data-driven world. Experience teaches you to recognize patterns faster than dashboards can. Noa explains how to trust your intuition while building the discipline to validate it with data.

The metrics that actually drive outcomes. Noa describes that aligning product metrics to business outcomes is not as easy as it sounds. Using the FACT Model, Noa shares how her team moved beyond vanity metrics to metrics that connect product decisions to business results.

How AI is changing the product development lifecycle. From ideation to prototyping, AI is compressing timelines and allowing anyone to bring an idea to life. Noa reveals where her team is seeing the biggest impact and where human judgment still wins.

Episode Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction and Noa Ginsberg's Role at FactSet
• (03:00) The Hard Call of Transforming a 40-Year-Old Company
• (06:39) Gut Feel as Data: Trust Your Instinct But Verify
• (12:07) When to Build a Product Center of Excellence
• (16:34) Stakeholders, Supportability, and Voice of Customer
• (20:57) How to Get Started Building Your Own COE
• (25:07) Aligning Product Metrics to Business Outcomes
• (29:00) Keeping Teams Customer-Connected in the Messy Middle
• (32:09) How AI and Agents Are Accelerating Product Development
• (39:13) Closing Thoughts on Decision-Making and Product Excellence

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