Leader Spotlight: Building 0-to-1 products inside legacy organizations, with Jose Diaz Salazar
Jose Diaz Salazar is a product and strategy executive and “zero-to-one builder” based in San Francisco. He most recently served as Director of Digital Strategy & Transformation at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and previously led product and go-to-market for AndGo by Goodyear, a fleet service automation platform. He’s also an Adjunct Professor at Case Western Reserve University’s Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship, where he teaches a selective cohort of students how to turn ideas into products and ventures.
In our conversation, Jose shares how his agency background shaped his approach to digital product strategy inside large corporations — especially when the “customer” paying for the work isn’t the end user. He also breaks down what it takes to build 0-to-1 ventures inside legacy organizations without losing trust, and what he’s seeing from a new cohort of PMs and builders who have never prototyped without AI.
From agency work to corporate product strategy
How did your early career design agency experience benefit you when you transitioned to managing and leading product within a corporation?
I wasn’t personally expecting to be in the advertising world or to be a creative. But one reflection I have from that question is that everybody’s path is different. Product is almost like a constellation of things connecting — some are not super connected — but it’s this constellation of experiences that amalgamate into you wanting to build products. And even though it doesn’t exist, and I think some schools are trying to do it, there’s no product school. Product school today is the street. You’ve got to go and do it.
Agency life taught me what it did was it gave me speed and agility and this kind of consulting approach. You’re partnering with your customer who owns a brand, and you’re delivering an experience — hopefully an experience — in my case digital experiences for users or consumers on the other side.
So in some ways you have to deal with the complexity of getting paid by somebody that is not your end user. When you’re in a corporation or an enterprise, it’s very similar. One of your business leaders is partnering with you for a solution that will impact their end consumer or their end user.
You’ve got to do it fast and you’ve got to be agile and you’ve got to be very metric-oriented because they’re giving you money and they’re expecting a specific result. It’s a statement of work kind of relationship.
If I were to summarize it, agency life taught me how to ship work that’s both excellent for the user and efficient for the customer. And that muscle memory, it’s hard to forget once you have it. When you go into an enterprise and a complex corporation, you understand who are the middle layers, what is important to them. These are your customers, but you understand also that there’s a user that is going to receive the benefit. And if you don’t think about it that way, your ecosystem of value creation is messed up.
You mentioned that you were kind of surprised that you ended up in an agency. How did that come about?
I’m kind of surprised I’ve ended everywhere that I’ve ended. Right out of undergrad, I ended up at a research institute and then I went to an agency and then I went to Goodyear. If you would’ve asked me, 12-year-old Jose riding his bike in Costa Rica, where do you want to work, I don’t know what I would say.
I used to think of agency work as very transactional and very specific to one point of the roadmap or one point of the user journey. I’ve always wanted to go across the user journey.
What I was seeing was very communication-driven, very marketing driven. It was a point in time. The customer would come in with a need, you would execute on that need and deliver an experience and then they would move on. But the customer was controlling that user journey, that experience, that business. I wanted to be part of it.
Was there anything that you felt you had to unlearn when you shifted to owning long-term product value inside a corporation?
It wasn’t necessarily unlearning. Agency tends to be such a creative place. It’s incredibly fun, and it’s incredibly a pressure ecosystem where you have to deliver quickly — tight deadlines, tight budgets — and they’re paying you for creativity.
Something I carried with me is: how do you get to be calm, cool, creative in a pressure oven? It’s critical.
I’d say the other thing is it wasn’t about unlearning something from agency life so much as bringing those things — and also re-bringing what I learned in undergrad while I was building my media company. It was this blog that became one of the top two or three blogs in Latin America while we were in undergrad. Building all of that from zero to one, talking to readers, working with them, understanding how to make something bigger out of their feedback — those things were important.
I would probably unlearn a little bit of the transactional aspect of an agency. Start, finish. But when you’re building product, you’re shipping your next version, your next product. In some ways it has an end and a beginning and then you redo it. So there is more that I carry from agency into corporate than I leave behind.
Building 0-to-1 inside a large organization
What feels surprisingly similar between a startup and a “startup within a company?
The constraints are surprisingly similar and at the same time fundamentally different. Similar buckets, but very different ways of activating them.
First, you need money. In a startup, you need fundraising. When you’re building a new venture from within, you need funding too. You’re not going to show great results in the first few quarters.
Second, you need a compelling vision and narrative. In a startup, you need an elevator pitch. What is that vision of a different future? You use it for recruiting talent, for fundraising, and to drive your team’s work. The same happens at a corporation. In my previous life: how does the future of mobility shape the tire and automotive industry — cars being shared, electric, autonomous — and how does that change become an opportunity? You still have to craft your narrative and bring people along.
Third, you have to show critical value aligned with results. In a startup you’re aligning with your board. In a corporate world, you’re still responding to a group of people. You can’t say, “Give me all this money and let’s check in every couple years.” That’s never going to work.
What changes most when you’re building 0-to-1 inside an enterprise?
I use an analogy: when you do a startup within a company, your startup is like an asteroid going around the sun, and the sun is your mothership. If your asteroid gets too close to the sun, it disintegrates and becomes the sun. But if it moves away from the gravitational pull, it drifts off, gets cold, and dies.
So you manage that gravitational pull. Sometimes you need to get closer to the sun — tough quarter, strategy change. Sometimes you have freedom to move out. The closer you get, more brand power, more ability to go to scale, but it slows you down on exploration. The further you go out, the more exploratory you can be, but there is risk in terms of trust from the corporation and the people in it.
Differences: in a startup you’re navigating different investors through the journey; in a corporate venture I dealt with the same investors for five or six years.
Another difference is strategic unfair advantage. At Goodyear, it’s 125-plus years. You show up and say Goodyear, and they know it. If you start a new startup tomorrow, nobody knows you.
And then there’s the scarcity mindset. Startups talk about runway — “I have X months.” That pressure is different in a corporation.
‘Moving fast’ without breaking trust
Could you illustrate this with an example, like AndGo?
One of the most fun periods of my life was studying early-stage startups. My mentors are CEOs of startups in the Bay Area. I brought those lessons back to Goodyear and to my board and said, “This is how they do this. I understand that might be too crazy for us, but this is how we could do it. What do you think?”
One example: hiring and compensation. A startup is willing to do things with sales that an enterprise would never do. One mentor said: remove the ceiling for incentives. If they sell $10 million, they make $1 million. In a corporation, you can’t do what startups do, but you have to meet them halfway.
More strategically, for us it was: this is the ambition and the vision from our narrative. We wanted to go into a well-established marketplace with a SaaS component. And we kept asking: are we going to spin it out or spin it in? The answer was: we do not know. We’ve just got to keep trying and see where it fits. We asked it every other month: spin out, spin in.
What did ‘venture governance’ look like in practice?
We created a board. We had our CTO, another executive at Goodyear, and an independent external person who was an expert in software sales. They became my board. I met with them every four to six weeks for an hour and a half, and I treated them exactly how you would treat your board at a startup.
I would send the board package ahead of time. We would run it like a startup board: ask questions, ask for alignment, move on, come back and show results. All the way to the point of, at times, asking: am I the right CEO to be doing this job?
There was a moment where we needed founder-led sales — the CEO needed to be the head of sales. I asked: am I the right person? We agreed: yes and no. Yes, I’ll stay in the role, but no, I need training. So we got training.
How did you handle strategic decisions — markets, models, and reporting — inside a legacy company?
We used the board for strategic questions: business model, revenue model, markets. Let’s say a customer asks us to go to the UK — should we? If we open the UK, what conflicts with other Goodyear businesses? What relationships do we need?
And then: educating the board. We started measuring gross merchandise value as an online marketplace. That’s common in Amazon or Airbnb. For us it was new. I worked with a consultant inside Goodyear and brought back their financial perspective: how it makes sense, how you account for that, how you report it back into Goodyear.
For product leaders building 0-to-1 inside large organizations today, what’s the one illusion about “moving fast” that causes the most damage?
Speed isn’t velocity. It’s trust through structure that you need to build.
If you drift too far from the mothership and start doing things on your own too much, you’re taking a reputational risk. The people doing day-to-day jobs are creating value so you can come and do what you’re doing. Innovation is thanks to the labor of all these people. Do not disrespect the people you might find to be blockers or traditionalists. They’re there to keep the lights on.
The illusion is moving too fast in ways that create resentment: “Why do they get special treatment? Why can they hire? Why can they use that tool?” Those exceptions are potentially damaging the long-term reputation of your startup inside the company.
Better communication and better rotation — bring people from the company into the startup so they can experience it — helps. If I break things too quickly in areas the company is sensible about, I’m damaging trust.
How do you decide what “risk” is acceptable when you’re trying to move quickly?
I think about risk like a normal distribution. On the left: risk that’s mostly fear — ignore that risk. In the middle: risk you can digest — hard, but you build safeguards. On the right: risks you’re just not willing to take. You define with your board what those are.
Then there’s a structured hierarchy for how you operate: operations first — mission, strategy, operating procedures, how you build product. Then HR — new job families, pay scales. Then legal — entities, contracts, terms of service. Then procurement — how you evaluate and buy tools. Then accounting and finance — how you run a P&L on a different business model.
You have to do it in a way that the leaders of those areas feel comfortable about the steps you’re taking, in the context of that risk framework.
What AI-native builders change about product work
You teach at Case Western. How are your students framing AI instead — as a collaborator, a prototyping medium, a business model, or something else?
Teaching at Case is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Twelve students get handpicked every year from hundreds of applications. It’s a one-year entrepreneurial fellowship.
I teach the fall semester and help them build products from zero to one. Mostly computer science, but some biomedical doctors and business folks too.
What I guide them through starts with what I call the logic line. Connect the line between a person, a user, and what you’re trying to do, with the right ingredients. A person is doing something in a context and experiencing something — most of the time it’s a pain point. Then: how can I make that better? That’s your vision. Then: if I created value, how do I extract some of that value? That’s your viability and business. At any point, you check your logic line. It changes as you bring data.
Now, here’s what I’ve seen: once they know what they want to build, they go and build it. The speed of prototyping has increased by 10-20x. When they show me what they’ve built. I tell them: even just three years ago, this wasn’t possible with the time you invested.
So what does that tell you? It’s easier to create things, but the more things there are, users can select for more of those things, and you have to hone in on your logic line to create something that really creates value. Tools like Lovable and coding with Claude make them so much faster. But now they’re facing a more existential product question: how do I make this work?
What are they doing with the time they used to spend on prototyping?
Before, you would spend 80% of your time coding a prototype, then try to make it work. Now you spend 20% coding and you have all this time to think: how do I get product market fit? How do I go to market?
So you have computer scientists worrying about product market fit and revenue models earlier. Some of my students have their own startups outside of the lab. I met one of the students in San Francisco for coffee — they started a company six months ago, and one of their customers is a hospital in Ohio.
Those students are able to make strategic decisions like product market fit much earlier. How do you see that impacting their outcomes?
They’re maturing faster. They’re being asked the basic questions of creating value: desirable, viable, feasible. Technology has unlocked them to focus on those sooner.
And you already see product bifurcating — technical product managers, product growth, product ops, product marketing, product specialist. I think that continues. You’ll have more tools and solutions being created, and the need to find fit quicker, keep track of the logic line, experiment faster. I’m seeing computer scientists acting like product managers earlier than they thought.
Leading AI adoption inside legacy companies
What’s the single most important mindset shift you recommend product leaders at legacy companies make to avoid being outpaced by teams who learned product building with AI from day one?
For incumbents, “figuring it out” means an operational governance way to implement AI at scale, transform their business from the ground up, and prepare for the acceleration that quantum computing promises to bring by 2030. This requires a fundamental shift in capabilities, values, and habits.
If your company is 40 years old, then for 40 years you’ve been building processes for humans — accounting, operations, supply chain. You have a 100-step process. Now you have agents coming in and they don’t need those 100 steps. You have to throw it away and re-imagine it for agentic AI, then decide when humans are in the loop and what they do.
Agentic workflows are more decision trees — yes/no — than complex processes we built for ourselves.
Where does AI competition show up first for incumbents?
I think there are three types of competition: incumbents moving faster; new competitors coming from the bottom up using AI; and your internal competition.
Internal competition is the death trap: incumbent teams saying, “Now, why are you going to redo my product or sunset this?” Or, feeling that the company has more time to transform. This inaction erodes value for shareholders, customers, and employees. I don’t think companies have months or years to figure it out. They need clear vision: “This is how we’re going to do it.”
Why is ‘comfort’ a liability in AI adoption?
When I built AndGo, I built three types of AndGo. The first, throw it away. The second, throw it away. The third is alive right now. That’s going to keep happening.
AI adoption speed is a business risk and a business model existential question. It is not a tech initiative. AI isn’t a feature to add, it’s really a whole reason to transform companies and build new experiences that just a year ago were unimaginable.
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