How Tiama Hanson-Drury Aligns Product, Tech, and Teams Around What Actually Matters
Most companies are good at setting strategy at the top.
Many are good at executing in the trenches.
Where things usually break down is the space in between.
In part two of her conversation on the Signal to Noise podcast, Tiama Hanson-Drury, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Opus 2, dives into that messy middle: how leaders translate vision into execution, align cross-functional teams, and create the discipline that ultimately drives growth, focus, and enterprise value.
Speaking with Glenn Murphy, Managing Partner and Head of Riviera Europe at Riviera Partners, Tiama shares the practical frameworks, leadership habits, and hard-won lessons she’s applied across fintech, legal tech, and AI-driven businesses.
What emerges is a clear philosophy: clarity beats complexity, focus beats motion, and discipline beats hype – every time.
From Strategy to Execution: Making the Middle Work
Tiama recommends a deceptively simple framework she’s used throughout her career: MECE – Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.
Originally developed as a consulting communication tool, MECE helps leaders break complex problems into clear, non-overlapping components that together explain the whole. For Tiama, it’s not just a thinking tool – it’s a leadership enabler.
By breaking initiatives into their smallest, clearest parts, teams can:
- Communicate more effectively across disciplines
- Understand why work matters, not just what to do
- Collaborate without ego or ambiguity
This approach has been especially valuable in Tiama’s role as a CPTO without a traditional engineering background. Rather than writing code herself, she focuses on abstraction, translation, and context – ensuring teams can build ideas together instead of talking past one another.
One Metric to Rule Them All
One of the most powerful moments in the episode comes when Tiama describes a pivotal shift her team made at Minna Technologies.
Initially, the business optimized for adoption.
But as the company matured and especially as acquisition conversations approached – that metric stopped telling the full story.
The real driver of value turned out to be success rate: whether subscriptions were actually managed effectively.
Once that single metric was identified, everything changed.
Instead of dozens of competing priorities, the entire organization aligned around improving one outcome. Product, engineering, marketing, operations, finance, and commercial teams worked cross-functionally, running experiments, sharing learnings, and operationalizing what worked, while killing what didn’t.
The result wasn’t just better performance.
It was clarity, velocity, and trust.
As Tiama puts it, when everyone knows what matters most, leaders don’t need to be in every meeting. Teams row in the same direction on their own.
AI That Works Because It’s Built for the Job
At Opus 2, Tiama is seeing something that surprises many outsiders: legal teams aren’t resistant to AI – they’re embracing it.
But the key is specificity.
Opus 2’s AI isn’t trained on generic datasets or broad research tasks. It’s designed specifically for high-volume legal litigation workflows. That focus enables lawyers to:
- Prepare more effectively for trial
- Identify inconsistencies in witness testimony
- Structure and test legal arguments before entering the courtroom
This isn’t AI for novelty’s sake.
It’s AI embedded where real work happens.
The lesson Tiama emphasizes is universal: AI delivers value when it’s deeply integrated into domain-specific problems – not when it’s bolted on as a feature.
Discipline Is the Real Acquisition Signal
Reflecting on Minna’s acquisition by Mastercard, Tiama is candid: it wasn’t luck, timing, or flash that made the deal happen.
It was discipline.
Buyers don’t just acquire products – they acquire teams, operating models, and decision-making muscle. What mattered most was the company’s ability to:
- Stay focused
- Say no
- Build with intention
- Move quickly without chaos
That discipline was visible not only in outcomes, but in how the organization worked day to day. And it’s exactly what acquirers look for when deciding whether a business can scale inside a larger ecosystem.
Psychological Safety With Accountability
High trust doesn’t mean low standards.
Tiama describes a leadership style that combines clarity of ownership with psychological safety, what she calls the ability to both “bring the sandwiches” and ask, “Where are the sandwiches?”
Teams need:
- Clear roles and expectations
- Permission to call out gaps- up, down, and sideways
- A shared commitment to the goal, not individual egos
When accountability is normalized and non-personal, teams move faster, correct earlier, and collaborate more honestly. It’s not about comfort – it’s about progress.
Final Thoughts
Across industries, geographies, and company stages, Tiama Hanson-Drury returns to the same core principles:
- Simplify relentlessly
- Align around what truly matters
- Build discipline into how teams work
- Use technology where it creates real leverage
In an era full of noise – around AI, growth, and leadership, her approach is a reminder that execution still wins. Not through bravado or hype, but through clarity, trust, and focus.
Tiama Hanson-Drury Background
Tiama Hanson-Drury is an award-winning executive with a track record of scaling businesses and increasing enterprise value through product, technology, GTM, and AI innovation. She currently leads global product and technology at Opus 2, shaping strategy and development via client and product advisory boards. Previously, she was CPO at Minna Technologies, leading a strategic growth plan that resulted in an acquisition by Mastercard, and held executive roles at Zappi and Dynata. Tiama is known for low-ego leadership, cross-functional execution, and building high-performing, diverse teams.
