Product Talk

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. 

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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"...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

What does it take to build products that work for 150 million people in one of the most regulated industries in the world? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Optum Fmr Chief Consumer Officer Rita Khan will be speaking on how product leadership is transforming healthcare at scale. Rita shares why understanding the full stakeholder ecosystem matters more than quick UX wins, how she frames investment portfolios to earn executive trust quarter by quarter, and why she only hires "shapers" who refuse to accept the industry's constraints as excuses...

What happens to product leadership when anyone can create a product in minutes? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Axiom Law CPO Katrina Benjamin, Perk CPO Nikita Miller will be speaking on why this might be the biggest moment in product leadership history. Nikita shares how roles across product, design, and engineering are converging in exciting ways, why the best AI is invisible to users, and what urgency and conviction really look like in a company that's growing fast.

Why are 95% of AI deployments failing, and what does it take to be in the 5% that succeed? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Invisible Technologies Fmr CPO Apurva Garware will be speaking on how to build AI-native products that actually drive business outcomes. Apurva shares her framework for connecting product metrics to business north stars, why the biggest risk in AI is building something nobody uses, and how the entire product discovery cycle has been compressed from weeks to days.

How do you transform a 45-year-old, $52 billion enterprise into an AI-native platform business and take it public in the process? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Ingram Micro former CPO Ambrish Verma will be speaking on the frameworks he used to navigate tech debt, allocate innovation capacity, and build the moat that repositioned a legacy distributor as a technology platform company. He also shares what happened when he asked Claude to play the role of a board member and challenge every assumption in his strategy.

What does it take to turn a stagnant product org into one that grows a company's stock price by 59% in three years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, former eBay and Sam's Club CPO Eddie Garcia will be speaking on how great product leadership creates outsized business returns. Eddie shares his 343 portfolio framework, the concept of "positionless product development," and the Scan and Go story that went from three grassroots employees to multiple billions in sales.

What does it mean to build care as a product? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Turo CPO Tom Wang, Spotnana CPO Sarosh Waghmar will be speaking on why trust is the foundational design principle in travel tech, how AI can make a stranded traveler feel like someone said "I got you," and why the modern CPO has to be fluent in three languages simultaneously, customer pain, business model, and technology trajectory. He also shares why cleaning the infrastructure gutters is the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible.

What if the PM-to-engineer ratio flipped and there were two product managers for every engineer? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, SignalWire EVP of Product Adam Kalsey will be speaking on why the bottleneck in software has shifted from building to knowing what to build, and why the business model is just as much a part of the product as the technology. He also shares how he built an autonomous product ops intern using Claude and OpenClaw and spent almost $50 an hour on tokens in the process.

What does a former touring DJ who accidentally built one of the internet's first MP3 stores have to say about product leadership? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Intuit SVP of Product Wyatt Jenkins will be speaking on why managing opportunity cost is the heart and soul of product management, why the PM who doesn't make their engineering team twice as good shouldn't be there at all, and why the systems of record layer will survive the so-called SaaS apocalypse. He also shares how he uses Claude to...

What if your SaaS product built itself to fit every user the moment they signed up? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Pipedrive CPTO Joe Futty will be speaking on why customer expectations are about to shift more dramatically than at any point since mobile went mainstream and what that means for how product teams build, hire, and think about personalization. He also shares his three-bucket framework for navigating any new CPO role, and why the lines between product, engineering, and design are dissolving into something new.

What happens to product leadership when anyone in the company can build? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Digitalzone CPO Sonjoy Ganguly, Brainlabs CPO Adam Edwards will be speaking on how AI is eroding the technical moat and elevating judgment and scalability as the new competitive advantages for product leaders. He also shares how his team built a triad governance structure to democratize AI-building across a thousand-person ad agency without losing control of quality or client outcomes.

What does it take to build AI when failure means someone gets hurt? In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Motive CTO Amish Babu will be speaking on the unique engineering and product challenges of building AI for the physical economy fleets, construction sites, and high-stakes environments where milliseconds matter and hallucinations aren't a product flaw, they're a safety crisis. He also shares how Motive's AI dash cam has helped prevent over 170,000 accidents since 2023 and what SaaS product leaders consistently get wrong about building for the physical world.

What does it mean to govern a decision model instead of a roadmap? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Rakuten Rewards CPO Nilesh Khandelwal will be speaking on how AI is shifting the product leader's job from execution management to decision architecture. He also shares his three-bucket prioritization framework, the concept of "glues" as a retention lever, and why saying no to guaranteed revenue is sometimes the most strategic move a CPO can make.

What does it actually take to turn a sales-led organization into a product-led one? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Medbridge CPTO Sarah Singh will be speaking on how AI is reshaping the product engineer role and why the CPO's job is no longer separate from engineering. She also shares how her Big Bet Framework builds organizational trust and how AI tools are compressing the innovation cycle from four bets a year to one every month.

What happens to the entire product development process when creating software becomes as easy as creating a Google Doc? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Cartwheel CPO Sarah Turrin speaks on how the collapse of software costs is reshaping healthcare product leadership, why the era of CPOs as pure strategists is already over, and how she thinks about deploying AI in healthcare environments where a probabilistic model simply cannot be unleashed on patients without deterministic guardrails. Thirty days into her role at one of the nation's largest K-12...

What does it mean when a seasoned CPO with experience at Disney, Apple, Airbnb, and Walmart.com walks away from the C-suite to go build products by himself? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, former Remix AI co-founder and CPO Kevin Swint speaks on why this moment in AI demanded that kind of move, what he learned building an agentic application in two weeks that would have taken a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars before, and why the feedback loop between domain expert and builder has...

What happens when the cost of building software trends toward zero? When anyone can ship anything at any time, code stops being the competitive advantage. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Vercel CPO Tom Occhino speaks on what the moat actually looks like in an AI native world, why he shifted from roadmap curator to market interpreter and narrative builder, and what it took to build a culture where reliability and innovation do not fight each other but feed each other. From inventing Facebook mentions to creating React to scaling...

What happens when the pace of AI makes even the most recent college graduate's knowledge obsolete within six months? In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Salesforce EVP and GM of Agentforce Service Kishan Chetan speaks on what it really takes to drive AI adoption at scale, why adoption is fundamentally a social phenomenon, and how he thinks about product success through one simple lens: do customers buy it, use it, and love it? Leading a product line approaching $10 billion in revenue, Kishan brings a grounded, practical perspective on...

What if the strategy you just shipped is already obsolete? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Digitalzone CPO Sonjoy Ganguly, Syntheseed CPO Sam Somashekar speaks on what it means to lead product in an era where the pace of change has outrun the annual planning cycle, AI is generating strategies that all sound the same, and the pressure to experiment is pulling leaders further from the strategic thinking they were hired to do. Sam and Sanjay explore why the human element is more important than ever, how shared KPIs across functions unlock real alignment, and what product...

What happens when software powers every customer-facing interaction a business has, from the app to the agent interface to the care experience? Everything becomes a product. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Comcast SVP of Connected Living Products Randall Hounsell speaks on what it means to lead product at one of the most complex consumer technology ecosystems in the world. Randall shares why data-driven is misunderstood, how he is rewiring Comcast's entire product lifecycle to be AI-first, and why vision and strategy are the most durable skills a...