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Product Talk

Products That Count

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.

Play
  • 39 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 35 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • Wednesday · 39 min

    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 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/

  • Monday · 39 min

    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 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/

  • October 7 · 31 min

    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 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]

  • October 5 · 41 min

    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 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]

  • October 2 · 38 min

    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 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]

  • September 30 · 36 min

    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 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/

  • September 28 · 40 min

    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 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/

  • September 25 · 39 min

    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 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/

  • September 23 · 41 min

    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 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/

  • September 21 · 30 min

    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 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]

  • September 16 · 30 min

    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 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.

  • September 14 · 37 min

    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 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.

  • September 9 · 42 min

    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 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.

  • September 7 · 33 min

    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 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.

  • September 2 · 30 min

    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 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.

  • August 31 · 39 min

    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 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.

  • August 26 · 39 min

    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 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.

  • August 21 · 32 min

    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 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.

  • August 19 · 36 min

    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 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.

  • August 17 · 37 min

    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 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.

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