Empathy Over Ego: Trevor Paulsen on Building Breakthrough Products Inside Big Companies

Breakthrough Innovation

In this episode of Breakthrough Innovation, hosts JL Heather and Preston Chandler sit down with Trevor Paulsen, Director of Product Management at Adobe, and one of the key architects behind Customer Journey Analytics (CJA)—a product that redefined Adobe’s analytics strategy and scaled from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue.

Trevor takes us behind the scenes of launching CJA, not just as a product innovation, but as an enterprise transformation—re-platforming a legacy tech stack, challenging internal mindsets, and relentlessly focusing on the customer.

Key Lessons Covered in This Episode:

The Customer Is the Strategy: Trevor shares how CJA started by deeply listening to customers—not what they said they wanted, but what jobs they were trying to get done—and how that clarity kept the product focused as it scaled.

Experimentation Is the Path to Clarity: From building throwaway prototypes to watching users struggle (on purpose), Trevor explains why the product team’s job isn’t just to ship features—but to validate value before they do.

The 30% That Works: You’ll never know which 30% of ideas are gold until you test. Learn how Adobe’s team built a culture around cheap experiments, fast failure, and constant discovery.

Beware the “Can We” Trap: Trevor highlights a common pitfall in product teams: building something because it’s technically possible. His counter: ask should we, not just can we—and build trust by staying true to user needs.

Big-S vs. Little-S Strategy: Stick to the Big-S strategy: the core customer problem you’re solving. But when it comes to execution—Little-S strategy—stay nimble, because you will be wrong.

Enterprise ≠ Consumer: B2B experimentation looks different. You don’t always have millions of users or massive A/B test datasets. Instead, Trevor shares how his team leans on qualitative testing, customer proximity, and usability risk reduction.

Empathy = Influence: Trevor’s #1 piece of advice for product leaders? Build empathy. For your customers. For your engineers. For your execs. Empathy turns resistance into alignment—and ideas into buy-in.

Key Takeaways:

✅ Start with the problem, not the solution.

✅ Fast, throwaway prototypes > long cycles with sunk costs.

✅ Discovery is your job—don’t outsource it.

✅ Product success inside big companies depends more on influence than authority.

Links And Resources:

• Connect with Trevor Paulsen on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/trevorpaulsen
• Twitter: https://x.com/trevorpaulsen

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