Leader Spotlight: Taking an ambidextrous approach to innovation, with Salam Beasan
Salam Beasan is the Director of Product, AI Solutions at Lusha, a sales intelligence SaaS platform. She focuses on applying AI and deep-tech to build smart, scalable products that deliver value from day one and center the user experience. Salam began her career in test engineering at Intel and Microsoft, later moving into product roles at eBay, Toluna, and Similarweb. Before joining Lusha, she was Senior Director of Product, B2C, Innovation at Similarweb.
In our conversation, Salam talks about her “ambidextrous” approach to innovation, where she specifically dedicates fixed time for both experimentation and continuing work on successful features. She shares best practices for managing a portfolio of products, as well as the importance of orchestrating alignment across the company.
Crafting a strong portfolio narrative
You have extensive experience managing a portfolio of products. At a high level, how do you define a clear strategic narrative across a portfolio without diluting the individual value propositions of each product?
A strong portfolio narrative begins with clarity of mission and a clear understanding of customer outcomes. Strategic narrative is centered around a single unified goal, which acts as the North Star that gives every product a role to play in a bigger story. For me, defining a strategic narrative always starts with first understanding the “why,” not just for the company, but for the customer.
I focus on building a unified vision that ties the entire portfolio together around the value it delivers across the user journey. At the same time, I'm intentional about preserving the distinct mission and metrics of each product within the broader mission.
One of my strengths is translating big, abstract goals into actionable narratives that teams can rely on and rally around. For example, today I'm leading the transformation of our offering into a full funnel AI-powered go-to-market assistant. That's the overarching story. And underneath that, I manage multiple product lines, each with a very different role to play — from conversational intelligence that uncovers insights in sales calls, to autonomous agents that power visual workflows, to AI-driven engagement tools. What’s worked well for me is using the “Jobs-to-be-Done” framework to connect the dots.
I map out the full customer flow from prospecting, to enrichment, to outreach, to engagement in the context of Lusha, and position each product as solving a specific, high-impact job in that sequence. That framework continues to prove itself over and over again each time I use it. It creates a cohesive narrative without forcing the governance around it, but delivers a seamless and intelligent user experience.
Another part of my approach is operational. I ensure that the portfolio shares UX principles, AI foundations, and data infrastructure, so the experience feels consistent, even as products evolve independently. You don’t need to compromise individual product excellence to deliver portfolio coherence, but you do need to architect it that way from the get-go.
How do you find the right balance between scaling your existing proven offerings and investing in new innovations?
For me, the key is balancing stability with experimentation. To do this, I championed the creation of a dedicated innovation task force — small, fast-moving, and separate from our core teams. They explore bold ideas and rapidly prototype without disrupting what’s already working. This setup lets us scale proven products while still investing in what's next. It’s a practical approach that keeps us both grounded and forward-looking.
Another best practice is partnering with core teams. Rather than isolating innovation completely, I encourage building bridges between this team and the core product performance engine. I ensure that innovations can be integrated into the main product line once they have been validated. I also conduct regular checks and develop shared goals to manage the tensions between exploratory projects and ongoing roadmap commitments.
Lastly, I advocate for flexibility and resource allocation. When I dedicate fixed time for innovation and protected time for the team's experiments, this helps the teams focus on scaling and also work on features that have already proven their value. I call this the ambidextrous approach.
Perhaps most importantly, as product executives, we should nurture a culture that celebrates experimentation and tolerates calculated failures as learning opportunities. As leaders, we should actively invest in reinforcing this mindset.
Effectively managing a portfolio of products
What’s your approach to portfolio-level prioritization when individual product teams have competing goals or timelines? How do you mediate those tensions?
As a product leader, I see my role as ensuring that every team can move with autonomy, but never in isolation. I don't believe in silos. Prioritization at the portfolio level, for me, is more about juggling roadmaps and creating a shared sense of purpose while managing trade-offs.
My approach starts with clarity of impact first. I work with each team to tie their goals back to the overarching company mission. That helps to elevate the conversation beyond feature debates or deadlines and into outcomes, dependencies, and opportunity costs.
At Lusha, I manage multiple AI-driven product lines, and each one is moving at a different speed and, sometimes, in competing directions. To navigate that, I apply a lens grounded in business value and timing sensitivity. I make prioritization decisions by looking at the bigger picture and the entire portfolio first. I base these decisions on two things: business value and timing sensitivity. So, when products compete for attention, I evaluate which one will drive the most meaningful business results and which one needs to happen now versus later.
When PMs on your team aren’t used to having a portfolio of products, how do you manage and introduce them to this balance?
It’s interesting because this is not only related to the product managers' skills or experience, but the circumstances of everything around them. Over the years, I’ve learned that when tensions arise, and they sometimes do, our job as executives is to mediate that. I mainly make sure that I empower teams to do what they do best. I bring them to the level where they are their best selves, and I help in orchestrating alignment. I get them together to surface constraints, share context, and co-evaluate trade-offs. This creates mutual understanding and often leads to joint solutions that wouldn't emerge in isolation. From there, tension starts to diffuse.
More often than not, transparency is paired with accountability. When you empower the team and they feel accountable, it diffuses most of this friction. In practice, this means that I'm constantly zooming in and out when needed. I don't want to micromanage the team, but I also don't want to be entirely out of the loop. Sometimes, I resolve conflicts between teams when they're unable to solve them on their own, and I reinforce this by providing them with the bigger picture.
Because I normally operate with both innovation and core products simultaneously, I also make sure that short-term wins don't crowd out the longer-term bets. It’s a balancing act, but it all comes down to our transparency and accountability.
Can you share an example where a single product's performance, positive or negative, caused you to shift strategy across the broader portfolio?
A few years ago, I led the establishment of a new business unit and product line at Similarweb, following the integration of a U.S.-based company we had acquired. We launched an offering focused on digital intelligence that expanded beyond Similarweb’s core web traffic data to include deep mobile behavioral insights, tailored for B2B use cases. This was powered by one of the largest and highest quality mobile behavioral panels in the U.S., allowing us to deliver richer visibility into mobile-first buyer journeys.
What began as a complementary layer to our analytics stack quickly outperformed expectations, particularly in activation, retention, and customer engagement. That strong early signal indicated we weren’t just building a useful add-on; we were uncovering a new user persona and market opportunity. That pushed me to shift the broader product strategy.
We expanded coverage, redesigned the UX to match B2B workflows, and shifted our roadmap to support integrations and features aligned with B2B use cases. What started as an experiment became the foundation for a new product strategy — and it proved how quickly strong product signals can reveal a direction you can’t overlook.
Translating complexity into clarity
How do you decide when to sunset, spin off, or fold one product into another within the portfolio? What criteria guide those decisions — qualitative, quantitative, or both?
For me, these decisions are some of the most strategic, and also some of the hardest — because they’re not just about performance, they’re about focus, momentum, and future fit. I approach them with a clear framework that blends quantitative signals, qualitative insight, and long-term strategic alignment. I prefer not to invest in something that might not fulfill its potential.
Quantitatively, I look at classic indicators like engagement trends, retention rates, customer adoption patterns, and contribution to revenue KPIs, but it can’t stop there. I've seen a lot of cases when a product is “performing okay” on paper but isn’t pulling its weight strategically — or it’s creating fragmentation in the user journey, which slows down the portfolio as a whole.
And when you take the effort invested there and apply it elsewhere, the ROI is higher.
Another key signal I watch for is when multiple products start solving overlapping problems, either because the market or our company has evolved. When that happens, I initiate a deep product mapping and customer usage analysis to see if folding capabilities together would create more value with less complexity.
Qualitatively, I listen closely to customer feedback and internal friction when I see it. I engage stakeholders from the different internal partners within the company to be part of this assessment process. If a product is misunderstood, under-leveraged, or constantly needs custom positioning to justify its role, that’s a red flag.
Ultimately, I believe sunsetting or merging a product isn’t a failure — it’s a discipline of focus. It’s about protecting your team’s energy, reducing cognitive load for customers, and reallocating innovation capital to where it can make the biggest difference. If a product can’t win on its own, I ask: Can it win as part of something bigger — or is it time to let it go?
You were talking about communication and different stakeholders. How do you communicate portfolio-level strategy to executive stakeholders in a way that aligns company goals with product initiatives without getting lost in feature-level detail?
One of the most, if not the most important, parts of my role is translating complexity into clarity, especially when aligning product strategy with company-level goals. I believe that portfolio communication at the executive level should tell a story of value, not a list of features.
Start with the story of value. My approach starts with anchoring everything in the business outcomes we’re driving — whether that’s ARR growth, user expansion, market differentiation, or operational efficiency. I always make sure that every product initiative in the portfolio ladder ups to one of those goals. If it doesn’t, it either gets reframed or reconsidered.
When I communicate with executive-level stakeholders, I use a layered storytelling approach. I always start from the top first. At the top, I present a clear, simple narrative: what we're building, why it matters now, and how it supports our competitive edge. Then, if needed, I provide supporting layers — investment trade-offs, timelines, risks, and metrics. It has to be layered and it has to be visual. I want people to look at something and understand what's happening visually without needing to dig deeper into all the details. This has helped me a lot throughout the years.
Further, I use visuals showing roadmap themes, ecosystem diagrams, and customer journeys, for example. These visuals help show how the pieces are connected. Normally, this helps stakeholders understand how today's work sets the foundation for future compounding impact without getting buried in tickets or documentation. Executives are not interested in that. They want to see a timeline and a bottom line.
Finally, involving leadership in early stages and as early on and as often as possible is something that always proves itself. Communicate proactively and be super transparent. Treat this strategy communication as an ongoing dialogue, not a one-time thing. This allows executives to feel ownership and have visibility into the evolution of the products, and alignment becomes natural.
As your product portfolio grows, how do you ensure consistent quality, UX coherence, and scalability of infrastructure — especially when different products evolve at different speeds?
This is one of the biggest challenges in any portfolio leadership, specifically in the types of portfolio products that I manage today. As products grow, there's a real risk of fragmentation: inconsistent user experiences, duplicated logic, and cumbersome infrastructure. It’s true for every company in hyper-growth mode or those with different types of portfolio products.
My approach is to treat quality, coherence, and scalability as shared responsibilities across the portfolio, not as side tasks for individual teams. From day one, I work to establish horizontal foundations: shared design systems, common data models, and cross-product engineering standards that let each product move fast without drifting apart.
At the same time, I give teams the freedom to evolve at different speeds. Not every product needs to be on the same release cadence or the same maturity phase, but they do need to speak the same language and share the same DNA in terms of processes, and ultimately feel like parts of one ecosystem. Creating a mutual language and DNA in this horizontal foundation is crucial.
For me, consistency doesn't mean slowing everyone down and making them work at the same pace; it's actually the contrary. It means designing for alignment early, and it connects to the communication best practices I shared earlier. That’s how you scale with integrity.
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