Last week I attended my first Disney Data & Analytics Conference (DDAC 2025).
The experience was inspiring—not only for the quality of speakers, but also for the clarity with which themes like creativity, agility, and agentic AI were tied together. The sessions ranged from visionary to pragmatic, and as I moved between keynotes, panels, and hallway conversations, I kept hearing a single thread: we’re moving into a world where data platforms aren’t just about insight. They’re about action, decision, and trust. While every company there was discussing AI, and focused on the next generation of what data can do, what stuck out to me at the core was the foundational data platforms needed in order to deliver these products.
Here are the highlights that stuck with me most—and how I see them applying to my own leadership and product approach.
🎬 Pixar: Storytelling Powered by Data
Pixar’s Steve May spoke about the art of combining creativity and data to build meaningful and realistic stories. He showed how data doesn’t sit behind the curtain—it lives in every detail of the creative process. From modeling light that behaves in ways our brains instinctively trust, to animating physical movement that feels authentic, the invisible scaffolding is always data-driven.
What I found fascinating was Pixar’s insistence that data is not there to limit creativity—it’s there to expand it.Steve described moments when creative ideas would seem impossible until the data models caught up, enabling animators to build worlds that feel both magical and believable.
💡 My reflection: In product management, we often think of data as “supporting evidence.” Steve reminded me that data can be a co-creator. The same way Pixar uses it to make a story immersive, we can use data to make products more relatable and valuable. It’s a challenge to stop seeing data only as something to measure with, and instead start seeing it as something to design with.
🏟️ Rosalyn Durant: Agility and Trust
Rosalyn Durant brought the room into her world—not only at ESPN, but also during her leadership of the NBA bubble at Disney World during the pandemic. If you’ve ever managed a team through high-stakes, high-pressure environments, you’d recognize the themes she touched on: clarity, trust, and relentless agility.
Durant told stories about leading in environments where nothing was comfortable. Her leadership approach was to push past those boundaries—both for herself and for her teams. She reminded us that real agility isn’t about simply reacting quickly, but about building the trust and confidence that allows people to perform in uncertain conditions.
Her message carried over to ESPN today, where personalization at scale requires the same combination of operational excellence and flexibility. Delivering real-time sports experiences for millions of fans isn’t just a technology problem—it’s a leadership problem.
💡 My reflection: As a product leader, I see agility show up in two ways. First, in how we design processes that flexwhen priorities shift. Second, in how we lead our teams through ambiguity. Durant’s point about “pushing past comfortable places” resonated deeply with me. It’s the same muscle I try to exercise with my team—encouraging them to step into conversations, decisions, or experiments that feel slightly uncomfortable, because that’s where the most growth happens.
👩💼 Cassie Kozyrkov: Decision Intelligence in Action
Cassie Kozyrkov, formerly Google’s Chief Decision Scientist and now running Kozyr LLC, brought her signature clarity to the hype-heavy AI conversation. While many talks circled around technology stacks, Cassie zoomed out to remind us that AI only matters when it supports valuable decisions.
She urged leaders to frame every AI initiative as a decision problem:
What is the decision we’re trying to improve?
What is the value of getting that decision right more often or faster?
What’s the cost of getting it wrong?
Instead of obsessing over model complexity or tooling choices, her focus was on aligning AI to meaningful business outcomes. That means prioritizing use cases where AI can genuinely improve clarity or action, and discarding the rest.
💡 My reflection: This landed hard for me as a product manager. It’s easy to get caught up in shipping features or building platforms because they’re “expected.” But Cassie’s framing is a reminder to always pull back to the decision lens: does this investment change the quality of the choices our business or customers can make? If not, it’s motion without impact. That’s a lens I want my team to use more intentionally.
🤖 Salesforce COO: The Agentic Model
Salesforce’s COO gave one of the most practical breakdowns of AI agents in the enterprise I’ve heard.
He described agents not as futuristic experiments but as workflow accelerators already in play:
Customer agents: FAQs, scheduling, conversational campaigns
Employee agents: HR/IT ticketing, knowledge portals, daily task lists
Process agents: Case summaries, lead enrichment, operational workflows
He also shared a framework for designing agents responsibly:
Role – Who the agent represents
Data – What it can access
Actions – What it can actually do
Guardrails – How it stays safe and compliant
Channel – Where it lives (chat, app, workflow)
The kicker: “LLMs are not enough.” To work, agents must be built on an ecosystem that includes RAG for reasoning, governance for safety, metadata for unification, and APIs for scale.
Perhaps the most valuable point he made was that implementation is just the first step. The real test of an agent comes through iterative UAT, ongoing ROI validation, and careful balancing of creativity and control.
💡 My reflection: For me, this underscored the shift from building data platforms as reporting systems to building data platforms as decision engines. In my leadership, I’m increasingly focused on helping my team think less about what dashboards to build and more about what actions or workflows our products can unlock. That’s where the next wave of enterprise value lies.
🌍 My Lens: Leading with Agility and Outcomes
Across Pixar, Durant, Kozyrkov, and Salesforce, a few themes tied together for me:
Data as a co-creator → from Pixar’s artistry to Kozyrkov’s decision intelligence
Agility as leadership muscle → from Durant’s crisis leadership to how we build product teams
Agents as action layers → from Salesforce’s framework to the way we’re reimagining platforms
As a data product leader, my lens is to build connective tissue between these themes:
Empowering teams to see data as more than metrics—to treat it as an engine of creativity and clarity.
Encouraging stakeholders to push past comfort zones in how they consume and act on data.
Designing platforms and processes that don’t just inform but take action with trust and guardrails built in.
That’s the real takeaway for me from DDAC 2025: the future of data leadership isn’t about delivering more dashboards. It’s about delivering confidence, agility, and intelligent action.
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💡 Next post preview: I’ll dig into how “agentic thinking” can shape the day-to-day of product operations—from intake, to prioritization, to how we measure ROI.