Productside Stories

Vibe Coding for Product Managers: How AI Is Redefining Prototypes, MVPs, and Who Gets to Build  AI made building cheap. Nobody sent the memo about maintenance. In this episode of Productside Stories, Rina Alexin sits down with Elena Avramenko, founder and CEO of Modaal.dev, to talk about vibe coding for product managers without the hype. Elena shipped dozens of iPad apps long before AI could write...

How Product Managers and Designers Use AI to Transform Product Discovery  AI product discovery won't save you if your designer first hears about a feature when it needs to "look nice." By then you've already paid for the mistake, and the invoice just hasn't landed.   In this episode of Productside Stories, Rina Alexin talks shop with Snehal Ghag, Design Manager for AI Product...

Pawana Burlakoti on AI, Empowered Teams, and Product Sense  Everyone says their team is "using AI." Pawana Burlakoti, Product Management Executive, can show you what hers has built. In this episode of Productside Stories, she tells host Nicole Tieche how her teams make AI in product management part of the job, not a side hobby. She also covers the hiring bar she won't lower and why h...

Your Velocity Doubled. Did Anything Get Better?  Shipping faster is easy to prove. Shipping better is the part nobody has instrumented yet.  Katherine Man has spent six years at HubSpot and over a decade building the platforms that go-to-market teams run on. She sits down with Rina Alexin for a deliberately moderate take on AI: what it has genuinely changed about product work, what it has only mad...

AI Wrote the PRD. You're Still Accountable for It.  Seven pages out of the model in minutes. Formatted, confident, and not necessarily right.  Advaita Nigudkar has spent eight years at BILL and helped launch the company's first agentic AI platform, in a category where a wrong number means somebody's money moved. She sits down with Rina Alexin to talk about the context work that makes A...

AI Can Build Ten Prototypes. It Still Can't Tell You Which One Is Right.  AI will hand you ten prototypes before standup ends. It cannot tell you which one deserves to exist.  That gap is where this conversation lives. Jared Hall-Dugas has spent 20 years designing for Warner Bros., the US Air Force, and now National Grid. He sits down with Rina Alexin to talk about product and design collabora...

AI Won’t Save Your Roadmap: How Product Managers Stay in Charge with Roger Snyder  AI is everywhere… including in your backlog, your boss’s OKRs, and probably your next performance review. In this episode, Rina sits down with Productside Principal Consultant and Trainer, Roger Snyder, to cut through the noise. They dig into what AI is actually good at, where it goes off the rails, and why product...

Leading Product Work in a World Where Failure Isn’t an Option  When your “product” is clean drinking water, the margin for error is… basically zero. In this episode, Portland Water Bureau Interim Director Quisha Light  takes us inside the realities of leading innovation in a space defined by public trust, mission-driven work, slow-moving systems, and life-or-death stakes. From navigating union con...

How to Find Product-Market Fit (Without Fooling Yourself)  Founders love to sprint. Markets prefer you walk, listen, and maybe ask a few humans what they actually want. In this episode, product leader and startup advisor Shweta Agrawal joins Rina to break down why so many early-stage teams skip the fundamentals  (customer discovery, focus, ICP clarity) and pay the price later. From health-tech to...

From Best Buy to Oldcastle: How Jennifer Sabetti Built a Career on Customer-Centric Leadership  Early in her career, Jennifer Sabetti learned a simple truth at Best Buy: “Have fun while being the best.” Today, as VP of Product Strategy at Oldcastle Infrastructure, that mindset shapes how she leads teams, hires talent, and mentors the next generation of PMs. In this episode of  Trailblazing Women i...

From Layoff to Launch: Building an AI Businessfrom the Ground Up with Cooper Craig When a product manager loses his job, what happens next? For Cooper Craig, it meant building his own AI automation agencyfrom scratch. In this episode, he shares how grit, community, and product thinking helped him rebuild—turning job loss into a thriving business. From building voice agents that actually sound huma...

Building an AI-First Organization the Typeform Way with Aleks Bass  What does “becoming AI-first” actually look like inside a real company? Aleks Bass, Chief Product Officer (and interim CPTO) at Typeform, joins Rina Alexin to reveal how she’s leading an AI transformation that’s as human as it is technical. From breaking down walls between product and engineering to turning procurement into a part...

The Future of AI Product Management with Digvijay Singh (YouTube Ads)  AI has been around for a while now but the PM role within it is evolving faster than ever. In this episode, Digvijay Singh, Senior Product Manager at YouTube Ads , joins Rina Alexin to unpack the three layers of AI Product Management: infrastructure, models, and applications. From writing evals to training “intern” models, Digv...

Trailblazing Women in Product Management with Pinky Panjwani In this episode, Nicole Tieche sits down with Pinky Panjwani, Director of Product Management for Striven at Miles Technologies, to talk about what it means to lead through learning. From crossing the chasm to building a team culture rooted in growth and simplicity, Pinky shares how persistence, patience, and a sharp sense for clarity hav...

Building Platform Products That Scale — Without Drowning in Stakeholders  Platform products are some of the most complex beasts in product management. They have to serve multiple teams, stay flexible, and scale across the org—all while keeping technical and business needs in sync. In this episode, Rina Alexin chats with Aindra Misra, Director of Product Management for AI, Data, and Developer Exper...

Jose Quesada on Discovery, Strategy, and the Value of Product Management  Jose Quesada, VP of Product Management at American Express, joins Rina Alexin to unpack how Amex built a globally recognized mobile app by running discovery and delivery in parallel. From killing bad ideas quickly to making strategy concrete, Jose shows how product leaders can balance long-term vision with day-to-day executi...

How Scientists and PMs Really Build: Dr. Christina Agapakis with Rina Alexin A synthetic biologist who became a creative and marketing leader? Yes, please. In this kickoff to Season 4, Dr. Christina Agapakis (Founder, Oscillator; former SVP Creative & Marketing at Ginkgo Bioworks) joins Productside CEO Rina Alexin to explore the messy, very human loop between research, product, and story. From...

Product and engineering love to blame each other—but the best teams skip the turf war and figure out how to move forward together. In this episode, Rina talks with Guy Gershoni, Head of Engineering at genesIT, about what makes that partnership work (and what breaks it). From lean experiments to shared metrics to real talk about trust, this one’s packed with hard-earned lessons from someone who’s s...

Product transformations don’t fail because of bad tools—they fail because of ignored people. In this episode, transformation expert Joeri Devisch joins Productside CEO Rina Alexin to break down what real change leadership looks like. They talk through the difference between change and transformation, why words matter more than you think, and how to avoid top-down change that fizzles out.  Key Topi...

What do you do when you inherit a product that’s already failed—twice? If you’re Orly Stern, you take full ownership, break down what went wrong, and rebuild it the right way.  In this episode of Trailblazing Women in Product, Orly—now General Manager of Business Applications at Payoneer—shares how she turned a struggling product into a success, navigated leadership at a global scale, and made bol...

Scaling a product isn’t just about selling more—it’s about refining product-market fit, unlocking the right growth levers, and making sure your go-to-market strategy actually aligns with what your customers need. In this episode of Productside Stories, Rachel Owens, product executive and growth expert, shares how she’s helped SaaS products scale from $1M to $10M in a year. Learn how to avoid commo...

What’s the difference between being a product manager at an agency vs. in-house?  In this episode of Productside Stories, host Rina Alexin sits down with Anne Veit, Head of Product Strategy at Razorfish, to dive deep into how agency product management works, how to navigate rapid innovation, and why problem-solving skills matter more than industry expertise.  If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like...

Stepping into product leadership means balancing strategic vision, customer focus, and emerging tech. In this episode of Productside Stories, Neha Bansal, Head of Product at Meta Ads Manager Reporting, joins Nicole Tieche to discuss her career, the high-speed role of AI in advertising, and how PMs can stay ahead of industry shifts.  Key Topics Discussed in This Episode  Key topic #1  From Consulti...

In this episode, Rina Alexin chats with Brian Fugere, a product veteran who’s led M&A strategies at symplr and beyond. They dive into the good, bad, and downright shocking sides of acquisitions—covering why some deals fail, how to avoid due diligence pitfalls, and tips for making cultural integration actually work. Whether you’ve been through M&A chaos or are bracing for your first, this e...

Meet Ravi Ramsaran, Chief Product Officer at Nextria, who’s built a reputation for turning bold ideas into tangible products. In this episode, he and host Rina Alexin explore uniting teams around a product vision, leveraging deep customer insights, and staying resilient through market shifts. Hear how Ravi fosters a culture of curiosity to deliver winning outcomes time and again.  Key Topics Discu...