PROFILES IN
INNOVATION
2025
AI Product Manager
LEADER
TM
AWARD
Dylan Sapienza
LEADERSHIP JOURNAL
Innovation requires less perfectionism and more moving forward
Education: BA, The George Washington University Company Name: New York Life Industry: Financial Services Company CEO: Craig DeSanto Company Headquarters Location: New York, NY Number of Employees: 11,600 What book(s) are you reading? The Power Broker by Robert Caro What was your first job? Working as a Lifeguard Favorite charity: Seva Foundation: Eye care organization Interests/Hobbies: Philosophy, rock climbing and reading
The day our head of agency set the delivery date for Dialogue—an AI-powered voice platform enabling insurance agents to practice sales conversations 24/7—something fundamental shifted. What had been a joyful experiment with my colleagues Rick Archer and Raul Haynes suddenly carried real weight. We had agents waiting. Leadership watching. A timeline that demanded we stop questioning everything and start delivering something. This transition forced me to confront a tension that defines modern innovation: How do you balance the wide-open creativity required to build something unprecedented with the narrow focus needed to actually ship it? The challenge was pressing because I was navigating genuinely uncharted territory. Generative AI for real-time voice conversations at enterprise scale—no one has solved this. Yet I encountered many voices speaking with absolute certainty about architectures and best practices as if they were settled questions. It would have been easy to secondguess myself. What helped me trust my intuition was a simple realization: I had started working with Generative AI three years ago, when it first became available. Three years was the maximum experience anyone could possibly have. In this domain, I was as senior as senior could be. That realization gave me permission to listen to what my intuition was screaming: Move forward, have a bias for action, fail and learn, deploy and iterate. I could sense our agents liked the tool. We had captured something real, a spark that would vanish if we over-thought it. But acting on that intuition required a disciplined shift in mindset. The experimental phase had me constantly redesigning the application, questioning core assumptions. That wide view is essential for innovation, but it’s also a trap. You can remain stuck in an endless cycle of perfectionism, never feeling truly ready to deploy. The narrow view accepts certain premises and moves on. It focuses on distinct blockers between you and production, not infinite adjacent possibilities. This shift felt constraining at first. I missed the lightness of pure experimentation. But I discovered something deeper: Innovation without delivery is incomplete. Today, with over thousands of users engaging in 28,000 practice calls and 170,000 minutes of training in just two months, I’ve learned that creativity and accountability don’t have to be opposing forces. In fact, they’re complementary phases of the same process. A leader’s job isn’t to choose between them, but to know when each mindset serves the mission, and to have the courage to shift between them. PROFILES IN
68
2025 Fourth Quarter
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