Denise Dresler is VP of Product Design at Avature, an enterprise SaaS platform for talent acquisition and talent management. She has been with the company for more than a decade, starting as an implementation consultant after beginning her career as a mathematics professor. Over time, Denise transitioned into in-house talent acquisition and eventually became the group’s director before moving into product leadership roles. Today, she leads Product Management, UX, Technical writing, and translations, helping shape Avature’s product strategy and experience across its global platform.
In our conversation, Denise discusses what it means to lead product with people first — specifically how prioritizing team wellbeing and proactive leadership helps her manage competing priorities. She talks about how AI is transforming product work and where it can meaningfully improve both speed and outcomes. Denise shares how her unconventional career path shaped her leadership style, including the importance of hiring strong teams.
Competing priorities and leading across product teams
You’re often leading multiple functions like product management, product design, and engineering. With those three areas moving at once, how do you manage competing priorities?
Across all functions, there are a few things where I try to be extremely consistent. One of the big ones is that people come first for me as a leader. Imagine I’m in the middle of thinking about product strategy, and one of my reports writes to me and says, “Joe wants to resign.” That immediately becomes my top priority for the day.
Across all the functions I lead, the people who directly report to me get a lot of priority on my agenda. I’m supporting them and helping them solve their problems, and also helping the people in their organizations who might be anxious about someone resigning. That’s the easiest decision.
Another thing I focus on is managing proactively instead of reacting to incoming work like emails or chat messages. I try to have a very clear idea of what I want to get done each day and each week. For example, this week I have a very important presentation with the entire development organization about our product strategy for the year. I pre-book time on my calendar to make sure those things get done, whether that’s meetings where I need to collaborate with people or focused time for my own work.
There are competing priorities everywhere — both across functions and also within the same function. Even within product management, we run an organization with around 30 teams, so there are multiple product managers working in parallel.
For me, it’s about identifying where my attention is most important to give, pre-allocating time, and then reacting with whatever time I have left — answering emails, responding to chats, and dealing with everything else that comes in during the day.
When it comes to integrating AI into workflows, how are you deciding what should stay human-centric versus where AI actually improves outcomes?
In the product organization specifically, AI is greatly improving outcomes in research, especially when it comes to speed, quality, and breadth of output. I am mind-blown about how quickly and accurately we can move forward with research about new product lines using real-world examples. Even if it’s not 100 percent accurate, it gives us so much data to work with.
Product marketing used to do that research for us, and it would take a lot of time. It’d go through a queue of people, and it was an excruciatingly long process. Now, I can just use AI and say, “Give me an example of a data model for an employee in HR Core, and just give me all the data points that you think it should have.” Suddenly, I can have a detailed list with 200 fields.
AI as an accelerant for learning
Have you seen an overreliance on AI or instances of it getting in the way of people learning or building expertise?
Actually, I don’t. I think you can leverage AI for learning quite nicely, and it can sometimes be better than traditional learning tools. Think about how people traditionally learn something like research skills. Often, that comes from one-on-one coaching or mentoring, because corporate research is complex. You rely a lot on creativity and personal guidance.
Now you can replace part of that mentoring with an agent that coaches you through how to think about researching a topic. At the same time, that same system can help execute the research. In our organization, we’ve created learning agents inside our enterprise-approved tools. People have access to coaches, content curators, and other learning agents that help them develop skills and have strategic conversations about how to approach different problems.
So the learning experience is actually an area where AI can be very powerful. It can solve problems for you, but it can also teach you how to solve them — or how not to — if you ask the right questions.
You often launch many initiatives at the same time. How do you maintain an aggressive release schedule while still giving your team the space to learn from their experiences between launches?
Sometimes the speed affects me more than it affects the individual teams. Many of the people working on those projects are assigned only to that specific initiative. For them, the speed and the learning process are balanced differently.
We allocate time specifically for feedback and standardization after each product launch. The product manager will spend time after the release interviewing customers and closing the learning loop. For larger products, we often run early release or beta programs before a general release. That allows us to gather feedback and refine things before the product reaches a broader audience.
For leaders like me and a few others in the organization, things can get very busy — especially for product marketing and the go-to-market teams. But we operate at a level where we expect that kind of close follow-up, so we plan for it.
An untraditional path into product leadership
Your path into product was rather unconventional. Now that you’ve worked in many different parts of the organization, how do you feel that diverse experience shapes how you lead product teams?
My career started when I joined a software company working on customer project implementations. Later, I moved into recruiting, and we happened to sell recruiting software. Because of that, I already understood the technology from an implementation perspective. But when I actually became a recruiter myself, I finally understood the job that our customers were doing every day.
That experience turned out to be incredibly valuable when I moved into product and started defining product strategy. I had been in the users’ shoes. I knew what their day-to-day looked like and what they were trying to accomplish.
It helps in conversations with product managers because I can say, “Imagine you’re doing this job. Your day looks like this. You’re distracted by these things and still trying to achieve this outcome.” That perspective helps explain why a certain solution might not work or why the experience needs to be better.
But there was another influence on my career as well. When I was younger, I was very interested in entrepreneurship and startups. I remember going through the Y Combinator startup course and thinking about the skills you need to build a company. One of the things that really stood out to me was hiring. If you hire the wrong person in a startup with three people, there’s a good chance the company won’t survive. That made me realize how critical it is to learn how to identify the right people.
I also became obsessed with execution and efficiency, so I naturally spent a lot of time developing those skills. Overall, though, one of the biggest impacts in my leadership career is knowing how to hire, how to identify the right talent, how to structure the departments, and how to create career paths. Every single one of those elements is talent-related, and you need to have those skills as a leader.
How did that help you transition into product leadership?
I knew nothing about being a product manager when I joined as a product director, but I knew a lot about having the right people next to me. I knew the value in creating a good structure for hiring and promoting talent, and that’s what helped me through the first years — especially while simultaneously dealing with imposter syndrome and learning on the job. I was doing the right thing and building the right team, and now, we have an incredibly powerful team to show for it. I’m really proud of them all.
With my consulting experience, I learned a lot about how to communicate with the customer. Once you become an executive, you’re going to face those touch points where situations escalate, and you’re going to have to maintain your composure. That’s what I value the most about my early days.
Applying root-cause thinking and leadership at scale
Many people start in product and then learn the business side as part of their leader development. You had to learn the product side of things later on in your journey — what was that process like for you?
One skill I developed over time is learning how to dig beneath the symptoms people describe. Whether you’re talking to employees, friends, or customers, they’re people — and people talk about their symptoms and what they see. They talk about how they think they can solve a problem. A lot of the time, my job is to break through those symptoms and identify the underlying cause of the problem.
That’s one of the most important skills for a leader — understanding what’s really happening behind what people are saying. Another important skill is fighting assumptions. People make assumptions all the time without realizing it. They assume something is true and build decisions on top of that assumption. Eventually, they hit a wall. The same thing happens with symptoms. You assume what someone told you represents the full problem, and then you try to solve it.
The real challenge is learning to ask the questions that uncover the underlying issue. Sometimes you can’t get all the answers directly from customers, so you have to ask those questions internally and develop hypotheses with your team.
That sounds simple — people often just ask “why” five times — but in practice it’s very difficult. You’re most likely not even going to realize that what you’re dealing with isn’t the full picture. This is actually how my training in mathematics had a big influence on how I think about problems.
In mathematics, you can only use what has already been defined or proven. You have to work strictly with the statements that exist on the page. That mindset teaches you to separate facts from assumptions. If something hasn’t been defined or proven, you can’t treat it as true. I try to apply that approach to product work. I ask myself: Is this a confirmed fact, or is it an assumption? Is this a symptom, or do we understand the underlying cause?
Of course, business decisions are never as precise as mathematical proofs. At some point, you still have to take risks and move forward. But it helps to be explicit about what you know and what you’re assuming. You might say, “We believe this is correct with about 80 percent confidence, so we’re going to move forward.”
You’ve been at your company as it’s grown from roughly 60 people to 1,700 now. What has been the biggest transformation in that time?
I’ll actually start with what hasn’t changed, which is our culture as an organization. Our founders did a great job of crafting the company’s culture from the beginning. They wanted it to be well-defined and had a clear idea of the values they wanted to promote.
For example, we value positive people and try to avoid hiring people who complain about everything. We want people who help move projects and the company forward.
That cultural foundation makes it easier to navigate everything else as the company grows. As for what changed, the obvious things are structure and processes. When we were small, many things simply didn’t exist — career frameworks, salary structures, and other formal processes.
Over time, we added those structures. But because it happened gradually over about 15 years, it didn’t feel like a dramatic transformation. It was more of a steady evolution. We’re always reviewing how we work and asking whether decisions from the past still make sense or whether they need to change. That constant reflection prevents you from reaching a point where something suddenly feels completely broken.
What has been most important for sustaining your leadership through that growth?
Earlier in my career, there were periods where responsibilities and workload piled up. During those seasons, I would get extremely stressed, and that sometimes turned into physical symptoms. Eventually, I found tools that helped me manage that stress better. Now I’m much better at separating mentally from work when I need to.
Some of the things that helped are simple practices like breathing exercises or even ice baths. They might sound trendy, but learning how to stay calm in stressful situations made a real difference for me. There’s definitely a before and after in my career. Now I can look at a difficult day and think, “We’ll work through this.” That’s made a huge change in my professional life.
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