S - Dell undergoing a massive multi-year architectural transformation project aimed to significantly increase innovation speed and improve scale to drive global standardization. Critical initiative tied to Dell's strategic goals. I was given high visibility stretch opportunity to co-lead this initiative reporting directly to my skip-level manager.

T - My task was to drive necessary product and platform changes across numerous often siloed senior leadership teams and product orgs. Early on, I received feedback from my skip that I was "not being aggressive enough in pushing senior leaders to drive respective product changes faster". The implication was that even if I was building consensus, we needed to get into faster decision making and commitment cycle.

A -

- My first step was to clarify intent and what 'aggressive' looked like in context of this initiative from my skip. She clarified in a follow-up that she expected me to show assertiveness and relentless drive even if we are talking to senior leaders. She wanted me to focus on clear, data-driven demands for action and accountability.

- Next, I increased communication frequency with specific leaders instead of broad updates to drive critical decision points to closure sooner. I brought in perspective of risks due to delay and framed requests as crucial enablers to drive success.

- I also started sharing mini-progress update snippets along with 'need help' bullets to my skip to draw her attention as she was managing multiple other initiatives. This helped bring in her influence to senior leads wherever I was seeing hesitation from a leader despite clearly showing data trends.

- For example, when discussing order fulfilment customer experience, we brought my SVP to get supply chain SVP aligned on how to approach their factory cutover during this major architectural switch by analyzing various possibilities to minimize customer impact

R - As a result of the feedback and my subsequent actions, we saw noticeable acceleration within next 3 months in product change commitments and 15% faster deliveries to bring changes ahead of time. This feedback helped me refine my ability to effectively influence senior leadership in a highly matrixed organization by staying true to data-driven demands and creating accountability system to drive impact.