Product Talk
- Episodes
- 725
- Released
- weekly
- Latest episode
- Nov 9, 2026
About the podcast
Produced by Products That Count, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products, this podcast is an award-winning show by and for product minds, with millions of downloads and a 5-star rating on most major platforms. Each of the 300+ episodes features a product leader interviewing another product leader and exploring what it takes to build great products. Recent ones feature the Chief Product Officers of Brex, Glassdoor, Experian and more. About Us: Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of 30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success. Learn more at ProductsThatCount.com.
Episodes 725
Glean CPO on why shipping more features with AI doesn't mean you're creating more value
Emrecan Dogan is a trained industrial engineer who has spent his career applying systems thinking to product management, and as Chief Product Officer at Glean, he has found the perfect laboratory for it. Glean …
Show notes
Emrecan Dogan is a trained industrial engineer who has spent his career applying systems thinking to product management, and as Chief Product Officer at Glean, he has found the perfect laboratory for it. Glean is an AI assistant and platform for the world's largest enterprises, and the same principles Emrecan uses to think about building AI products, where fixing one bottleneck immediately moves the constraint somewhere else, are the principles he uses to think about how product organizations should be designed and how PM careers should evolve. In this episode of Product Talk host Sonjoy Ganguly sits down with Emrecan to talk about why the correlation between how many features you ship and the value you create may actually be getting weaker in the AI era, why he believes the super IC PM is the defining career opportunity of this moment, and how Glean runs a product org where autonomy is taken, not given, and where the product itself tracks organizational intelligence in real time.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:25) Why AI makes judgment, systems thinking, and customer insight more important, not less
(2:25) The bottleneck framing: why fixing one part of the PM assembly line just moves the constraint somewhere else
(7:58) What stays the same about PM and what is changing, and Emrecan's favorite interview question to test candidates on it
(11:08) The CPO's real job in a founder-led company: unlocking and translating vision, not defining it
(15:47) The skills Emrecan hires for: customer obsession, AI fluency, systems thinking, judgment, and taste
(19:40) Why the correlation between feature shipping volume and actual value creation is weak, and what that means for how PMs should measure themselves
(21:39) How Glean balances enterprise predictability with frontier-speed shipping, and the autonomy model that holds it together
(25:21) Pod design, colocation decisions, and why Emrecan has 28 direct reports and almost no recurring one-on-ones
(29:50) How Glean uses its own product to track organizational progress, prepare for one-on-ones, and replace status reporting
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]
Why Webflow is betting on AI-native product teams
AI is changing the economics of building software, and that means the way product teams plan, prioritize, and build has to change too. In this episode of Product Talk, Denise Hemke sits down with Webflow CPO …
Show notes
AI is changing the economics of building software, and that means the way product teams plan, prioritize, and build has to change too.
In this episode of Product Talk, Denise Hemke sits down with Webflow CPO Ben Haefele to explore what happens when AI makes building software faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Ben shares why traditional upfront planning can actually create more risk, how Webflow is using "building backwards" to put working software in front of customers sooner, and why human judgment and customer empathy matter more than ever.
From agentic development and rapid experimentation to the rise of the product "editor," Ben offers a practical look at how leaders can redesign their teams around a faster learning loop, without losing sight of the strategic vision that keeps everyone moving in the same direction.
If you're leading a product organization in the age of AI, this conversation will help you rethink how you build, learn, and decide what deserves to ship.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:25) Why planning made sense when engineering time was expensive, and why that logic no longer holds
(3:53) What roadmaps, prioritization, and product planning look like in a world where what's possible keeps shifting
(6:05) The new bottleneck: it's not time to code, it's time to learn from what you've shipped
(7:55) Building backwards: what changes when you start with working code instead of documents and Figma files
(10:47) Why documentation written before implementation is always wrong, and how agents fix that
(12:15) Why being a great editor is now the most critical skill in the AI era
(14:42) What surprised Webflow when they started running agentic development experiments, and why best practices matter more than ever
(16:30) The CPO's new job: living on the frontier, systematizing what you find, and raising your ambition accordingly
(18:20) How Webflow progressively enabled its entire product org: from design, to product management, to shipping real code to production
(21:38) Why human judgment is not going away, and what the product manager's role looks like in an agentic workflow
(23:53) How agentic development finally unlocks the P3s and P4s that have been sitting in the icebox for years
(25:28) Why Webflow's internal agentic development practice mirrors the product experience they need to deliver to customers
(27:28) The custom in-house harness and organizational second brain that gives agents full business context before they write a line of code
(28:51) The three things Ben would tell any CPO who wants to redesign their product development lifecycle right now
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]
Tonal CPO on building the world's largest kinetic dataset
Jonathan Shottan began his career at the intersection of data and scale, working at Pinterest as the company was expanding internationally, and at Facebook before that, where he learned how data could drive …
Show notes
Jonathan Shottan began his career at the intersection of data and scale, working at Pinterest as the company was expanding internationally, and at Facebook before that, where he learned how data could drive business growth. He is now the Chief Product and Content Officer at Tonal, an intelligent gym that sits on your wall and builds strength through a magnetic resistance motor that collects physiological data 50 times per second across 300 different arm articulations. That data, accumulated across a large and growing user base, is now the world's largest kinetic dataset, the only one with enough fidelity to enable predictive health outcomes at scale. Jonathan was selected as a finalist for the 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of CPO Rising series, host and Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Jay Patel sits down with him to talk about what it actually takes to build a product with sub-1% monthly churn and over $100M in ARR, how he thinks about boulders versus pebbles when deciding what to build, and why he believes saying no is most of his job.
In this episode, we cover:
(0:35) Jonathan's background and career path from ad tech to Facebook to Pinterest to Tonal
(1:03) What Tonal actually does and why the kinetic dataset is the most exciting part of the business
(5:37) How the CPO role has evolved from strategic backstop to speed limiter
(7:01) Tonal's product-led culture and what that means for how decisions get made
(8:04) Why every product leader has to think of themselves as a builder first, even as AI takes on more of the building
(10:46) The 3-year vision, 1-year operating plan, quarterly goals framework for balancing today and tomorrow
(12:58) What first-time CPOs almost always get wrong and what to do instead
(16:47) The CPO alpha effect: what measurable business and cultural outcomes come from having a strong CPO at the table
(18:49) How Tonal uses AI in the product and how Jonathan's team cleared years of orphaned Jira tickets in two days using Claude
(21:07) Boulders versus pebbles: how Tonal decides what to build, what to say no to, and why healthcare is the next big bet
(24:42) How Jonathan hires exceptional PMs and the one interview question he asks every candidate
(28:02) Balancing hardware, software, and content to keep churn below 1%
(31:21) What stints in growth and monetization at Pinterest and Facebook taught him about customer value
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]
The gap between building a demo and building something that scales to 600,000 locations | Mood Media CPO
Trey Courtney started his career as a software developer at Accenture and spent 16 years evolving into the role of Global Chief Product and Partnership Officer at Mood Media, the largest provider of audio and …
Show notes
Trey Courtney started his career as a software developer at Accenture and spent 16 years evolving into the role of Global Chief Product and Partnership Officer at Mood Media, the largest provider of audio and visual in-store experiences in the world. If you have heard music playing in a Macy's, seen a menu board at Whole Foods, or walked through a Ferrari showroom, you have experienced what Mood Media builds for roughly 600,000 locations worldwide. Trey was selected as a finalist for Products That Count's 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of Product Talk, host and Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi sits down with him to talk about what it takes to bring a product mindset into a sales-led, private equity-backed company, how he is navigating AI investment when the stakes are high and the tools keep changing, and what he thinks the CPTO org chart looks like in three years.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:23) Trey's path from software developer at Accenture to running product, creative, and partnerships at Mood Media
(3:24) What Mood Media actually does: the brand behind the brand at 600,000 locations worldwide
(5:32) How product decisions get made when the roadmap is largely driven by custom client requests
(7:14) Sales-led, private equity-backed: how that shapes product culture and what Trey has tried to change about it
(9:17) Why Trey now owns creative and partnerships in addition to product, and what breaks when those functions are siloed
(13:23) Where AI is going in the experience economy: real-time personalization and why they started with 11 Labs three years ago
(16:04) The hardest part of AI leadership: which tool to bet on, when to launch, and how to manage compliance in a large company
(20:57) The jagged line: what it actually looks like when AI investments go wrong on the way to going right
(22:55) How AI is landing differently across creative, engineering, and product management teams
(26:01) What happens when salespeople start vibe coding and showing prototypes to clients
(29:47) What the CPTO org chart looks like in three years: QA, DevOps, and the PM-to-engineer ratio
(33:43) The competitive analysis agent that builds battle cards automatically so salespeople stop asking
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
Turning interior walls into a circular economy business
The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance …
Show notes
The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing JUUNOO Founder Chris Van de Voorde to discuss building modular and reusable interior walls to eliminate waste in commercial real estate fit-outs, scaling a circular economy startup from Belgium to rapid growth in the U.S., and the product design philosophy of relentlessly minimizing components to build simple, great products.
(1:30) Chris's background: engineer, walls obsessive, and why he named JUUNOO after his kids Jules and Lanor (3:08) The problem JUUNOO is solving: single-use office fitouts in a world of shorter leases (6:11) How a COVID strategic Excel spreadsheet led Chris from Belgium to New York (10:05) Company culture: three rules, crucial conversations, and why sustainability comes before sales (12:36) Why diversity is just good business: the 99.999% of smart people not working for your company (13:31) The revenue model: why gross margins improve 20% the second and third time you sell the same wall (17:49) Go-to-market flywheel: why JUUNOO targets tenants first and uses those wins to unlock architects (20:06) Circular valuable design: how to build products where end-of-life value exceeds reuse cost (22:35) The Circular Value Institute: how Chris is teaching a 70-billion-dollar retailer to profit from resale (25:06) The biggest opportunity in sustainability right now, and why Chris is also worried it might be too late (28:28) What is coming next for JUUNOO: the clickable drywall patent and the plan to roll it out in 20 countries (34:46) What makes a great product manager: a relentless drive for fewer components
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/turning-interior-walls-into-a-circular-economy-business/
How WHOOP turned wearable data into an AI coach | WHOOP AI Product Lead
Viviano Cantu is the AI Product Lead at WHOOP, but his path there did not start in product. He joined WHOOP in 2021 as a software developer, led the storefront team, and then in March 2023 moved over to start a …
Show notes
Viviano Cantu is the AI Product Lead at WHOOP, but his path there did not start in product. He joined WHOOP in 2021 as a software developer, led the storefront team, and then in March 2023 moved over to start a new team around coaching. That same month, he and a few colleagues started ordering pizza on Friday afternoons and hacking on whether an LLM could actually coach someone throughout their day. Six months later, WHOOP Coach launched as the first generative AI coach in a wearable. He has led AI at WHOOP ever since, and along the way his team built AI Studio, an internal platform that lets anyone at WHOOP go from idea to a working AI agent in under ten minutes. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Viviano to dig into what separates a weekend health chatbot from a coaching product that reasons over one person's physiology consistently for years, how WHOOP thinks about evals, synthetic personas, and the my memory feature, and what his engineering background actually changed when he crossed over into product.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:56) The Boston Rat Czar side project, and what it says about how Viviano approaches problems
(3:20) How WHOOP Coach started: Friday hack sessions, GPT-3, pizza, and a prototype called the WHOOP Bot
(8:33) The GPT-4 pivot mid-build, and why pushing the timeline was the right call
(10:41) The gap between a weekend AI demo and a coaching product that knows one person over years
(11:56) How WHOOP uses synthetic personas to run evals without touching real member data
(13:35) Who decides what a good coaching answer looks like, and how AI Studio made that process faster
(17:25) What building AI Studio did to how the team thinks about prioritization
(20:00) Where WHOOP intentionally put the friction, and why PII never touches the model
(21:39) The new role being developed at WHOOP that sits between engineer and PM
(25:02) What entering the clinical space with EHR sync taught Viviano about precision versus recall
(27:43) Why WHOOP lets members see and edit everything the AI knows about them
(30:34) What Viviano brought from engineering to product, and what did not survive the move
(33:01) The tweet about AI-assisted coding discipline, and what he was watching on his team
(34:56) An AI workflow tip for PMs: one folder, parallel threads, and auto-approve
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/wearable-data-into-an-ai-coach/
Why the AI era demands more from product managers, not less | Perk President of Product
Nikita Miller spent 15 years building products before becoming President of Product and Technology at Perk, an AI platform for business travel and spend management. She made the move from the U.S. to Barcelona …
Show notes
Nikita Miller spent 15 years building products before becoming President of Product and Technology at Perk, an AI platform for business travel and spend management. She made the move from the U.S. to Barcelona about a year ago, arriving right in the middle of Perk's transition from a single travel product to a multi-product platform. The timing meant navigating that transformation while also rethinking how product teams work in an era where AI has changed almost everything about how work gets done. In this episode, host Cassio Sampaio sits down with Nikita to talk about the UX renaissance she sees happening in B2B, the concept of shadow work and why removing it is one of the biggest product opportunities right now, why she thinks the most important PM skill in the AI era is discernment rather than taste, and what she tells early-career product managers who are trying to figure out where to invest in themselves when the landscape keeps shifting.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:32) What surprised Nikita most about moving from the U.S. to Barcelona and leading an international team at Perk
(3:27) How AI changed the structure and pace of her product teams: smaller teams, cross-functional flexibility, designers doing front-end coding
(7:55) Travel as a massive wedge: why winning in B2B travel is harder than it looks and how it opens the door to spend, events, and more
(13:26) The UX renaissance in B2B: why B2C expectations have permanently raised the bar for enterprise product
(17:31) Whether AI helps disruptors or actually empowers incumbents more
(19:21) How Perk is actively thinking about disrupting itself
(20:10) Discernment over taste: why the ability to judge which problems to solve and when is more important than ever
(22:44) Shadow work: the framework for identifying what can be automated so customers can focus on what matters
(24:31) Where the interface goes from here: MCP, voice, visual, and why it probably will not collapse to just one thing
(28:27) Advice for early-career PMs: what persists across every wave of technology change
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
Midi Health CEO on building the front door to midlife women's health
Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual menopause and perimenopause care company serving patients in all 50 states, covered by insurance. She spent 15 years as a venture and private …
Show notes
Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual menopause and perimenopause care company serving patients in all 50 states, covered by insurance. She spent 15 years as a venture and private equity investor, then founded and sold a digital health company called Kerbo, before her own perimenopause experience made the care gap impossible to ignore. When she finally found a clinician who understood what she was going through, that expert was an hour away and cost a fortune out of pocket. In 2021, she co-founded Midi with Sharon Mears to bring expert menopause and perimenopause care to every woman virtually, in 50 states, covered by insurance. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Joanna to talk about what her investor background gave her as an operator, how Midi thinks about trust as a product decision rather than a brand value, and what it actually looks like to scale care quality to hundreds of thousands of patients without letting it slip.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:22) What 15 years of investing taught Joanna about building product, and what pure operators miss
(3:46) What tells her a product org is healthy, and the CEO/product leader tension she manages every day
(9:29) What trust actually looks like inside a product decision at Midi, and where they fell down early
(13:24) MIDI University: how they scaled expert clinical knowledge to hundreds of nurse practitioners
(16:39) Why AI models are often wrong about women's health, and what that means for Midi's care protocols
(18:13) How Midi uses AI to scan charts and identify which providers have patients who keep coming back
(21:40) What Midi will and will not do, and how they decide where the scope ends
(26:25) Why insurance coverage was non-negotiable from day one when cash pay would have been so much easier
(28:35) How the equity mission holds up inside commercial decisions
(31:02) The AI advisory board: AI John Doerr on OKRs, AI Dan Ariely on text message rewrites
(32:36) How Midi uses AI without recreating the feeling that got women dismissed in the first place
(37:23) Lightning round: prevention over optimization, and what the next generation of women's health founders should build
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
Doordash PM on why your domain expertise matters more than your technical skills
Saee Pansare started her career not in software but in a lab, studying food engineering and imagining a future developing flavors and ingredients. What she discovered instead was that she had the instincts of a …
Show notes
Saee Pansare started her career not in software but in a lab, studying food engineering and imagining a future developing flavors and ingredients. What she discovered instead was that she had the instincts of a product manager all along; she just happened to be building physical products. After stints at Kraft Heinz, Amazon, and Whole Foods, she landed at DoorDash where she now leads the DoorDash for Business charter, building group order and large order systems for corporate clients. In this episode of Products That Count, podcast host and Chief AI Product Officer at Boston New Technology Shweta Agrawal sits down with Saee to unpack what food product development taught her about software PM, why she believes domain expertise beats technical background when switching industries, and how she navigated the trust-building challenge that every career changer eventually faces.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:08) Saee's path from food engineering undergrad to MBA to product management (4:33) What a food engineer actually does, and why it looks a lot like software development (6:05) Managing the P&L for cheese powders and marshmallows at Kraft Heinz (10:28) How Saee ran customer discovery and prototype testing for physical food products (15:21) How pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID eating habits are completely different, and what that means for food businesses (18:05) Why time to commercialization pushed her out of food and into software (23:21) How she applied for PM roles without a technical background, and what strategy worked (27:00) The hardest part of the transition: building trust with software engineers (30:36) Job search advice for career switchers: what a resume alone cannot do (32:07) What the DoorDash for Business charter actually is, and what the day to day looks like (34:54) DoorDash versus Amazon: how company size shapes the speed of everything (37:12) Advice for anyone transitioning from physical products into software PM right now
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
The question AI still can't answer about product management | Cengage Product SVP
Ghazal Badiozamani is the SVP of Product Management at Cengage, one of the world's largest education companies with roots in publishing that go back over 100 years. Before Cengage, she spent eight years at …
Show notes
Ghazal Badiozamani is the SVP of Product Management at Cengage, one of the world's largest education companies with roots in publishing that go back over 100 years. Before Cengage, she spent eight years at Elsevier helping legacy businesses understand and adopt emerging technology, starting with machine learning before it was mainstream, eventually building a digital team from scratch and launching a digital authoring system from nothing. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Ghazal to talk about what it takes to lead product inside a company that has existed for over a century, why the squad model may be approaching a fork in the road, and her take on the most pressing question in AI-era product development: what does product even mean now?
In this episode, we cover:
(1:11) Ghazal's path from strategy to product at Elsevier, and what prompted the move to Cengage
(4:32) What it actually feels like to lead product inside a company that's been around for generations
(6:08) Why product problems always end as people problems, and why that's the most interesting part of the job
(7:28) How design principles and core values serve as anchors through both digital transformation and AI adoption
(12:59) AI's progression: from efficiency tool to fundamental question about what product even is
(14:55) Why building for nonlinear human thinking is the new product challenge
(16:58) Team structure today and two very different futures for the squad model
(19:46) Why removing design from the triad is a mistake, and what each personality type actually contributes
(23:23) Development speed: from 3 to 5 months down to 2, and why customer absorption is now the real constraint
(27:14) The CPO alpha effect: the two capabilities that are almost never found in the same person
(30:45) The funnel-based product analytics dashboard Ghazal checks almost every day
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-question-ai-still-cant-answer-about-product-management-cengage-product-svp/
Why speed is the AI feature no one asks for but everyone needs | Fireworks AI VP of Technology and Strategy
Rob Ferguson is the VP of Technology and Strategy at Fireworks AI, a company that makes frontier AI infrastructure accessible to any organization that wants to own its own models rather than depend on someone …
Show notes
Rob Ferguson is the VP of Technology and Strategy at Fireworks AI, a company that makes frontier AI infrastructure accessible to any organization that wants to own its own models rather than depend on someone else's. He started studying machine learning before it was called AI, worked on Pro Tools and AI systems for a music streaming service, helped design Amazon Go's grab-and-go technology, and built startup programs at AWS and Microsoft. Now he is at what he calls the front row of AI, sitting between applied research and go-to-market and translating what the technology can actually do into things companies can actually buy and build on. In this episode of Product Talk, iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade sits down with Rob to talk about why speed is the AI feature no one asks for but everyone needs once they see it, how AI training went from lab-only to cheap as a cup of coffee, and his hot take that we are at the end of SaaS and entering an era he calls workwear.
In this episode, we cover:
(0:48) Rob's background from music and machine learning to Pro Tools, Artio, Amazon Go, and Fireworks (3:43) What it means to sit at the intersection of applied research and go-to-market (11:41) What Fireworks AI actually does: inference infrastructure and model training in one place (14:11) Who Fireworks serves and how the customer has changed as training costs have dropped (16:52) Speed as a hidden AI feature: why nobody asks for it and everyone needs it once they see it (20:18) The shift from AI as talkers to AI as doers, and what that means for product (21:24) AI independence vs AI dependence: why owning your model changes what you can build (23:27) The most common problem Rob sees: agents that work but cost thousands of dollars to run (26:25) Drawing the line in the sand: why doing less deeply beats promising everything (27:41) Hot take: we're at the end of SaaS and entering the era of workwear (31:55) Why domain experts and liberal arts thinkers become more valuable as surface-level software commoditizes (33:04) What the AI industry gets wrong about itself and the case for openness and independent scrutiny (38:24) The voice tech stack Rob is obsessed with and uses every day
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/why-speed-is-the-ai-feature-no-one-asks-for-but-everyone-needs/
How Brightline Brought Mental Health Care to 400,000 Kids Who Had Never Had It
Mahssa Mostajabi is the Head of Product at Brightline Health, a pediatric behavioral health company delivering therapy, psychiatry, and coaching to kids, teens, and families across both virtual and in-person …
Show notes
Mahssa Mostajabi is the Head of Product at Brightline Health, a pediatric behavioral health company delivering therapy, psychiatry, and coaching to kids, teens, and families across both virtual and in-person settings. She joined Brightline in April 2025, on the exact day the company's first Brooklyn clinic opened, stepping into an organization mid-pivot from virtual-first to hybrid care. Before Brightline, her path wound through women's health, maternal care, insurance, and fintech, with a consistent through line: building for people in overlooked moments in highly regulated environments. In this episode of Product Talk, Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Mahssa to talk about what it means to build a product when your user is an entire family, how Brightline brought free behavioral health coaching to over 400,000 kids in California (77% of whom had never received mental health care before), and why the calculus around AI is fundamentally different when your users are children.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:37) Mahssa's path from Girls Inc. and nonprofits through women's health to pediatric behavioral health
(3:50) Why she keeps choosing highly regulated industries, and what that means for how she builds
(5:51) Building for the whole family: navigating kids, parents, clinicians, and payers
(10:30) How Brightline designs explicitly for teen privacy without losing parental trust
(12:31) Joining Brightline on day one of the hybrid pivot and how she oriented herself fast
(15:11) On-site clinic visits as a new joiner: what user interviews with clinic staff revealed
(16:20) What in-person care surfaced that virtual data could not
(21:43) Building Bright Life Kids with California's DHCS: what a true state partnership looks like
(23:27) What a first mental health session owes a child who has never received care before
(24:38) Why standard outcome measures often fail pediatric populations, and what Brightline built instead
(29:16) Where AI belongs in pediatric behavioral health, and where Brightline says it should not go
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/how-brightline-brought-mental-health-care-to-400000-kids-who-had-never-had-it-and-why-ai-is-not-the-one-delivering-it/
The Conviction Bet No Customer Asked For and How Asana's CPO Builds the Case for One
Arnab Bose is the Chief Product Officer at Asana and one of the most outcome-oriented product leaders in the industry. Before Asana, he spent nearly six years as CPO of the Okta platform, where he led product …
Show notes
Arnab Bose is the Chief Product Officer at Asana and one of the most outcome-oriented product leaders in the industry. Before Asana, he spent nearly six years as CPO of the Okta platform, where he led product strategy across identity and security. He joined Asana in September 2025, stepping into a company mid-transformation: the collaborative work management category must reinvent itself from a tool for organizing human work into an orchestration layer for humans and AI agents working side by side. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Arnab to talk about the one principle that has defined his career, what it actually looks like to build and defend a conviction bet when no customer has asked for it yet, and why the era of being lauded for shipping your roadmap is officially over.
What you'll learn:
- The secret operating principle Arnab says separates good CPOs from exceptional ones, and why almost everyone claims to follow it but almost no one actually enforces it
- How he built the business and technical case for continuous authentication at Okta before any customer asked for it, and what would have gone wrong if he had not
- Why the largest product opportunities are almost never customer-requested, and how to build conviction without customer pull
- What the CWM industry has to become in the age of AI agents, and why Arnab says the per-seat SaaS model is getting completely upended
- How the CPO role is shifting from roadmap ownership to revenue and retention accountability
- The two future archetypes for product orgs: head of R&D with engineering, product, and design reporting in, or CPO with general managers owning real revenue numbers
- Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana internally, and what still requires a human being
In this episode, we cover:
(1:10) Arnab's career from Microsoft to Okta to Asana
(3:10) The one operating principle that separates good CPOs from exceptional ones
(5:37) How to operationalize outcome-driven thinking across a product org
(11:39) The continuous authentication conviction bet at Okta: building the case before customers asked
(13:33) How to build technical truth and a financial business case for a net-new market
(16:37) What gets missed when commercialization, partners, and sales enablement are afterthoughts
(18:38) What AI speeds up and what still requires human judgment
(20:39) Why the entire CWM industry must transform from human collaboration to human-AI orchestration
(24:06) How CPO accountability has shifted toward revenue and retention outcomes
(27:15) The two future archetypes for the product org
(29:42) Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana, and where it isn't yet
(33:59) The headwinds Arnab sees in AI adoption, and why buyer ROI isn't matching the hype
(37:03) How Asana thinks about build vs. buy vs. partner in an AI-native world
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-conviction-bet-no-customer-asked-for-and-how-asanas-cpo-builds-the-case-for-one/
What a CPBO Learned Building a Personal Fleet of AI Agents
Michael Affronti is the Chief Product and Business Officer at DriveCentric, the number one CRM and engagement platform for automotive dealerships, and one of the most hands-on product leaders building and using …
Show notes
Michael Affronti is the Chief Product and Business Officer at DriveCentric, the number one CRM and engagement platform for automotive dealerships, and one of the most hands-on product leaders building and using AI agents today. He spent three and a half months earlier this year back in the code, learning how agents actually work from the bottom up, memory, state management, harnesses, before returning to the executive seat. In this episode of Product Talk, Sonjoy Ganguly sits down with Michael to unpack how he runs a personal fleet of over a dozen agents (named Jarvis at home, Q at work), how his AI Labs team ships two production agents a month, and what product leadership actually looks like when the team is a mix of people and agents.
What you'll learn:
1. Why Michael says the most important thing AI does for product managers isn't automation, it's shortening the distance to a decision
2. How he built a personal agent fleet for everything from Sunday meal planning to conference talk prep, and what happened when agents went rogue
3. The SDLC next-gen project at Drive Centric: mapping every step from idea to shipped product, then cutting everything that doesn't require human judgment
4. Why product briefs are actually getting longer at Drive Centric while everything else in the process is getting shorter
5. How the AI Labs team operates as single-person full-stack companies, owning the brief, the code, the customer conversation, and the launch
6. Why being too restrictive with AI access is the biggest mistake companies are making right now
7. What the best product leaders will look like in five years, and why portfolio thinking is the skill that won't get automated away
In this episode, we cover:
(0:51) Michael's career arc from Microsoft Outlook to Salesforce Payments to Bumble trust and safety to Drive Centric
(8:44) How the role of product management shifted from tactical launches to business impact ownership
(10:52) How AI changed his leadership style, and what he's deliberately kept the same
(11:02) Shortening the distance to a decision: prototypes, voice notes, and same-day customer feedback
(13:29) Why one-on-ones are becoming less frequent but more meaningful
(14:17) The "back to being builders" thesis and AI's shift toward judgment over artifacts
(16:41) The SDLC next-gen project: mapping every step from idea to shipped product and cutting the rest
(19:41) Why engineers are now joining customer meetings, and what that signals
(20:53) The personal agent fleet: Jarvis at home, Q at work, and what went wrong
(24:41) How Drive Centric built agent-building into company OKRs
(26:01) Where companies are making mistakes with AI, and the AI Labs experiment
(28:26) What the best product leaders will look like in five years
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
CPO Rising Series: IBM CPO on Building Products for a World That's Five Years Away
How do you make product bets today for a world that will not arrive for another six years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, IBM Z and Linux One …
Show notes
How do you make product bets today for a world that will not arrive for another six years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, IBM Z and Linux One Chief Product Officer Tina Tarquinio will be speaking on how she and her team manage hardware, firmware, and software roadmaps across multiple time horizons at once, from quantum-safe encryption to AI inference built directly onto the chip. Tina also shares how IBM's shift to design thinking transformed its product culture from a checkpoint-driven process into a client-obsessed discipline, why usage data matters more than revenue as a product metric, and what it actually took to grow a flagship product line more than 4x over a decade.
ŌURA VP of Product on Building the Future of Women's Health
What does it take to build health products that truly understand women's bodies? In this podcast, Planned Parenthood Direct CPO Hannah Park sits down with ŌURA VP of Product Inessa Lurye to discuss how she's …
Show notes
What does it take to build health products that truly understand women's bodies? In this podcast, Planned Parenthood Direct CPO Hannah Park sits down with ŌURA VP of Product Inessa Lurye to discuss how she's building science-driven products that turn wearable data into meaningful health insights and better conversations with clinicians. She shares what it takes to adapt algorithms to the complexity of women's health, balance product development with long-term research, and build for diverse populations. The conversation also explores AI, health equity, and how product leaders can make informed bets on where healthcare is headed.
Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder on Producing Sustainable Natural Gas in Energy Transition
What if the waste product of one industry could become the clean fuel source for another? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building …
Show notes
What if the waste product of one industry could become the clean fuel source for another? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Shearman to discuss producing cost-effective and sustainable natural gas from CO2 waste, the use of artificial intelligence in product development, and the importance of market demand and commercialization strategies when building a product.
Stack Overflow VP of Product on Why Nobody Is Building for the New Moat
Everyone says trust is the new moat in AI, but is anyone actually building for it end to end? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Stack Overflow VP of Product Alex …
Show notes
Everyone says trust is the new moat in AI, but is anyone actually building for it end to end? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Stack Overflow VP of Product Alex Lato will be speaking on why the knowledge problem hasn't been solved yet, how Stack Overflow is evolving from a developer Q&A platform into an agent-native enterprise product, and what it really means when SMBs are outpacing enterprises on AI adoption. She also gets into why hesitation is the real risk in product leadership, what clarity over consensus means in practice, and how the designer's role is quietly becoming something entirely new.
CPO Rising Series: Paychex CPO on Reimagining The User Experience With AI
What happens when a 50-year-old software company tries to move at the speed of AI, and what does it really take to merge two very different product cultures after an acquisition? In this episode of the CPO …
Show notes
What happens when a 50-year-old software company tries to move at the speed of AI, and what does it really take to merge two very different product cultures after an acquisition? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Paychex CPO Ryan Bergstrom will be speaking on reimagining the user experience with AI, how his team learned the hard way that accelerating only engineering just moves bottlenecks around, and why utilization is the only product metric that ultimately matters. He also gets into the HIPAM budget framework he uses to track and shift R&D spend, and why incumbents with deep customer data have a genuine moat in the AI era.
CPO Rising Series: Tubi CPTO on Why This Is a Golden Era for Product Management
What happens when coding stops being a constraint for product teams, and what should product leaders do right now to get ready? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident …
Show notes
What happens when coding stops being a constraint for product teams, and what should product leaders do right now to get ready? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Tubi Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli will be speaking on why this is a golden era for product management and how the entertainment industry is about to go through its biggest disruption yet. Mike shares how Tubi runs "Tinker Days" to keep the whole org experimenting, why he's investing countercyclically in junior talent, and what it means to build for model capabilities that don't exist yet.
LiveKit Head of Product on Betting on Voice AI and Leading Without Authority
What does product leadership look like when AI makes everyone a builder? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, LiveKit Head of Product Ben Cherry will be speaking on how …
Show notes
What does product leadership look like when AI makes everyone a builder? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, LiveKit Head of Product Ben Cherry will be speaking on how LiveKit made a high-conviction pivot from video infrastructure to voice AI, why making AI sound human is harder and more important than most people realize, and what he learned moving from software engineer to product leader. His take on the "PM as CEO of the product" framing: it's about accountability for outcomes, not authority over people, and getting that wrong is one of the most common traps in early product careers.
CPO Rising Series: Carta CPO on Why Knowing What to Build Matters More Than Ever
What does it take to stay relevant as a CPO when the very definition of the product manager role is being rewritten in real time? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident …
Show notes
What does it take to stay relevant as a CPO when the very definition of the product manager role is being rewritten in real time? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Carta CPO Vrushali Paunikar will be speaking on how she thinks about product management in an AI-transformed world, why she frames her best PMs as systems architects rather than feature owners, and what eight years at a founder-led company has taught her about trust, speed, and creating excess value. She also gets into how she structures product reviews, why the hardest problems at Carta are the ones you can't measure, and what battle scars really mean in a product leader.
Queens Carbon CEO on Decarbonizing the Built Environment With Low-Carbon Cement
What does it actually take to decarbonize one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, and how do you build, fund, and scale the company that bets on it? The scale and urgency of the transformation …
Show notes
What does it actually take to decarbonize one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, and how do you build, fund, and scale the company that bets on it? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Queens Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Daniel Kopp to discuss enabling built environment decarbonization through cement and concrete that requires lower energy and water usage, optimizing various financing structures to scale the company, leveraging AI and diverse team to build a full product system.
The 5 Durable Pillars Every AI Product Leader Needs
What if the biggest mistake product leaders are making right now isn't moving too slowly, it's moving fast in the wrong direction? In this episode of Product Talk, CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke …
Show notes
What if the biggest mistake product leaders are making right now isn't moving too slowly, it's moving fast in the wrong direction? In this episode of Product Talk, CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke sits down with AWS Head of Product Acceleration Jim Kim to discuss the five durable principles that help product teams thrive in the age of AI. From prioritization and customer obsession to trust, context, and the rise of the full-stack builder, Jim shares a practical framework for building products that create lasting value, not just the latest AI feature.
Campfire AI Product Lead on Why Domain Expertise Is Your Biggest Product Advantage
What if your most unconventional career detour turned out to be your biggest product advantage? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product Nacho Andrade, Campfire AI Product Lead Brendan Doyle will be …
Show notes
What if your most unconventional career detour turned out to be your biggest product advantage? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product Nacho Andrade, Campfire AI Product Lead Brendan Doyle will be speaking on how his years as an auditor at KPMG and founder of a niche lease accounting software company gave him an edge most product managers don't have. He gets into the real tension between domain expertise and creative bias, how Campfire AI is building an AI-native ERP that moves fast without breaking things in a compliance-heavy space, and why anyone sitting in a "boring" industry right now has a massive opportunity to make the jump into product.
CPO Rising Series: LegalOn Technologies CPO on Customer-First Product Leadership
What does it take to go from practicing law to becoming the Chief Product Officer of a company disrupting the legal industry with AI? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count …
Show notes
What does it take to go from practicing law to becoming the Chief Product Officer of a company disrupting the legal industry with AI? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, LegalOn Technologies CPO Vanessa Davis will be speaking on how she made the leap from attorney to product leader, and why putting the customer first drives every major decision she makes. She also gets into how LegalOn navigated a major stack overhaul to move fully to LLMs, what the entrance of tools like Claude into legal tech means for the industry, and why DAU over MAU is her north star metric.
Suno CPO on Why the Old Product Rules Don't Apply When You're Building on Frontier AI
What does it mean to build a truly AI-native product rather? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Suno CPO Jack Brody will be speaking on how a career …
Show notes
What does it mean to build a truly AI-native product rather? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Suno CPO Jack Brody will be speaking on how a career spanning design, a decade at Snap, and now AI music has shaped a completely different approach to product thinking. Jack shares why retention is the only metric that really matters, how he creates space for ideas that seem crazy, and why two of product management's most sacred rules don't apply when you're building on frontier AI models.
CPO Rising Series: BetterHelp CPO on Why CPOs Need to Think Like Business Operators
What does it mean for a CPO to truly own outcomes? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, BetterHelp CPO Terre Layton will be speaking on how product …
Show notes
What does it mean for a CPO to truly own outcomes? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, BetterHelp CPO Terre Layton will be speaking on how product leadership is evolving in the age of AI, drawing on a career that started with AI research long before LLMs existed. Terre shares why CPOs are now business operators with product as their primary lever, how she thinks about building teams for the agentic era, and why time to value and retention are the two metrics that tell her everything.
CPO Rising Series: ATOSS CPTO on Why Product Managers Need to Think Like Investors
What does it mean to run product like a mini company, and how do you say no to a multi-million dollar deal when it conflicts with your strategy? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That …
Show notes
What does it mean to run product like a mini company, and how do you say no to a multi-million dollar deal when it conflicts with your strategy? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, ATOSS Software SE CPTO Vikas Seth will be speaking on outcome-driven product management and what the next evolution of the product leadership role looks like. Drawing on seven years growing ID Now from startup to scale-up at 10x revenue, Vikas shares his framework for closing the gaps between customers, go-to-market, and R&D, and why building enthusiasm for the product is the most underrated leadership skill.
Koah CPO on Why Ads in AI Don't Have to Be Evil
What would it look like if every AI app had a sustainable way to make money without dark patterns or paywalls? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Koah Co-Founder and …
Show notes
What would it look like if every AI app had a sustainable way to make money without dark patterns or paywalls? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Koah Co-Founder and CPO Mike Choi will be speaking on how he's building the AdSense for the AI app network. Mike shares what he learned from 18 months of rapid consumer app building, why AI users behave completely differently than search users, and why sponsored experiences in AI might actually be a good thing for everyone.
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