Why product stewardship belongs in the business strategy conversation 

Meet the Expert with Louise Bernstein 

Product stewardship teams are often measured by what they prevent: compliance failures, market-access problems, and regulatory risk. Louise Bernstein sees a much bigger role for the function. 

Product stewards sit where regulatory requirements, customer expectations and commercial strategy meet. That puts them in a position to protect a company’s right to operate, and also to help it enter markets faster, make stronger product decisions, and anticipate what customers will need next. 

The challenge is finding the capacity to do it. 

In this episode of Meet the Expert, Louise Bernstein, Managing Director of Product Stewardship at 3E, talks about why the pressure on product stewardship teams keeps rising, how leaders can make their business impact visible and where AI can give experts more room for the work only they can do. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why is product stewardship getting harder?

Louise Bernstein: The pressures product stewardship teams feel are very acute compared to three years ago, and every single decision they make is compounding. 

The one we talk about all the time is the fragmentation and escalation of regulatory complexity around the globe. It has grown sharply over the last ten years, and the European Chemicals Agency found errors in 44% of [the chemical mixtures it inspected for] labels and SDS. That really showcases how hard it is to keep your documentation up to date. In Asia Pacific, regulations come out with transition times of days, weeks or months. In 2024, Beijing banned or restricted dozens of hazardous chemicals with about two months between publication and enforcement, and companies had to change their supply chains and commercial models to factor that in. 

At the same time, CEOs want growth. They want new markets, different claims for different geographies. That’s wonderful. But that growth, mixed with fragmented regulations, really compounds the risk versus revenue. And these teams are not growing at the pace of change. The work takes deep experience in the systems, the data and the market, and these people are not a dime a dozen. There are a lot of retirements happening, and it’s hard to find new people. 

I have never met a team that said, “I have too many people on my team. I don’t know what to do with all these people.” It’s always, “We have to make these trade-offs.” Nobody likes to talk about those trade-offs, but they’re absolutely making them. 

Why should businesses think differently about the role of product stewardship?

There is a huge opportunity to reposition product stewardship as a business impact driver. It ensures the right to operate, which protects revenue. But used well across the whole product development lifecycle, it drives growth too: time to market is reduced, reformulation times are reduced, and market claims are super defendable. 

Product stewards have a trifecta of knowledge: industry expertise, regulatory expertise and voice-of-customer expertise. People don’t usually think about that last one, but most customers go to the product stewardship team. “Give me the compliance profile of this product. Here’s what I care about.” This team has its finger on the pulse of what customers care about, and that should be fed into market claims and R&D. 

That link is often missed in the way people describe their own role. Yes, it’s about compliance. Yes, it’s about regulations. But it’s a throughline right to what the VP of finance cares about. 

What does that business impact look like in practice?

One example is a life sciences customer of ours. The team was often left out of core product development workflows until the last minute, so they put a revenue number on that. For every 30 days a market launch slipped, it cost the company US$9 million. 

Those delays were usually due to standard right-to-operate and market-entry gotchas. They absolutely could have been avoided if the team had been involved earlier. That reframing changes the conversation: this role is incredibly important to our market strategy. It’s not just a check-the-box compliance activity. 

How can product stewardship leaders make that value visible?

People need to start linking their work to business metrics. And it doesn’t need to be “this one SDS opens up our market in Germany.” That’s a big leap. 

Start with collaboration between teams: turnaround time on compliance questions, turnaround time on compliance documentation. If you have nothing, start there. Because when you can say, “We reduced that turnaround time from ten days to seven in a year, and that helped R&D work faster, helped the commercial team get back to customers faster and helped marketing change its go-to-market messaging faster,” even that little bit of data makes a really big difference. 

Then you can go a little bit bigger. Keeping your poison center notifications taken care of ensures right to operate, and right to operate protects revenue. These are all data points you can collect and link back to really important company metrics. 

A place to start: Track turnaround time for compliance questions and documentation. Then look at what faster turnaround makes possible for R&D, sales and marketing. 

How do teams earn an earlier role in commercial decisions?

You don’t always have to wait to be invited to the table. Product stewardship teams aren’t sales teams, who are sometimes more bullish about inserting themselves into things. But it’s very important to say, “In that strategy being built out, I have a very important role to play, and here’s why. You want to enter Japan? Here’s what we need to do now to make sure we can enter Japan in Q4 of 2027.” 

A lot of times, I’ve heard of customers being told they’ve already entered a market, and then the checks and balances are done with the product stewardship team. One horror story: a customer of ours found out about a new reseller partnership in Canada through a press release they found online. They weren’t even informed. The team had to do a 48-hour marathon of due diligence so the sales could go ahead. It turned out to be okay, but it put that team in a really tough position. 

Product stewardship now means tracking substance, product, and jurisdiction combinations at a scale no team can hold in their heads. What role does AI realistically play?

AI gives you a way to interrogate information that was impossible before. But what it does not replace, what it accelerates, is deterministic regulatory intelligence. You need that curated knowledge underneath, and then AI on top. In other words, AI, just like software, is only as good as the data that powers it.  

While AI creates capabilities that were impossible before, there is so much 'low hanging fruit' opportunity in general admin! A lot of regulatory impact work still happens in spreadsheets. It’s copy-pasting. It’s manipulating Excel. Teams spend weeks just lining up data. Take that away, and you’re probably saving months of a team’s time for the work that informs R&D strategy and commercial strategy. That work is more interesting and more impactful to a business. 

What doesn’t AI replace?

AI is a scary thing for product stewardship teams. Is it going to replace my expertise? The answer is a thousand percent no. 

The need for expertise, that cross section of regulations, industry, company preferences and the voice of the customer: AI will never be able to replace that. Product stewards know what competitive niche their company wants to have. The problem is that expertise can’t be leveraged when people are so stuck in the admin side. 

So, AI is an enabler when it’s used well. That means operationalizing it properly, making sure people have the skills to use it appropriately and then giving them the space to elevate and influence. The expert becomes the influencer, and teams gain compliance confidence because they can work through their full list instead of making incredibly hard trade-offs. 

What should product stewardship leaders be preparing for now?

Every quarter, leaders tell us they’re being asked to be nimbler, act faster and cover more ground without their teams matching that scope. And most companies, especially larger ones with more legacy systems, are trying to be agile in a very nimble world using systems built for linear, static working. The two just don’t mesh. 

So, leaders need to look at people, skills, systems, and processes together. Those are the legs of change. If you only look at one, you get short-term value. 

I completely understand why it’s intimidating. Many product stewardship teams have operated the same way for decades, because the systems and structures haven’t changed in decades. I get intimidated too, because every company and every role is going through the same transition. But if you drive that change yourself instead of waiting on the sidelines, you can amplify skills and knowledge that were locked away before. Now is the time to take the reins, for your team and for yourself as an individual. Otherwise, it just feels like change is happening to you, and that’s really hard. 

What makes you optimistic about where the profession is going?

I have a strong conviction that the role of the product steward is only ever going to be elevated. They are the unlock for time to market, for shorter reformulation times, for smooth market entry. But it’s about positioning themselves within a company, advocating for themselves and tying their value to business metrics instead of just compliance work. We have a lot of customers who have done it, but there are mindsets to change. 

And it matters well beyond any one company. All of us are on the other end of a product steward’s decisions. They’re defining the hazard profile of every product on the market and keeping entire supply chains compliant and operational. That’s why I find so much energy in helping these teams get to the strategic side. 

Three actions for product stewardship leaders

1. Connect product stewardship KPIs to business outcomes. Start with turnaround time, then show what it changed for R&D, sales and marketing. 
2. Get into market-entry and product decisions earlier. Bring a plan to the strategy conversation instead of waiting for the invitation. 
3. Find the admin work technology can remove. Give experts more time for judgment and influence. 

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Watch Louise’s full episode on YouTube.   

Louise Bernstein is Managing Director of Product Stewardship at 3E, where she oversees solutions that help companies manage regulatory compliance, product safety, SDS authoring, labeling, and market access challenges. With nearly two decades of experience in product stewardship and EHS technology, Louise is a recognized industry leader who helps organizations turn compliance expertise into a strategic business advantage, accelerating market entry, supporting innovation, and enabling safer products.