Product Leader's Journey

Ritu Bhargava is xPresident and Chief Product Officer of SAP Customer Experience (CX/CRM) & Consumer Industries. Prior to that she was SVP of Software Engineering at Salesforce for Sales Cloud (CRM) and held various engineering leadership roles at Oracle. Ritu is a sought-after advisor, investor and has also served as a Board Member at Qualtrics.    In this conversation, Ritu is disarmingly ho...

In this engaging conversation, Michael Margolis, CEO of Storied and Author of Story 10X , shares his unique journey to storytelling expert, emphasizing the importance of narrative in leadership and product management. Michael is a thought provoking storyteller, who has tranied product, data and Go to Market teams at companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, NASA, SAP, Salesforce, Uber .. the list...

Fred Koopmans is Chief Product Officer at BigPanda, an AIOps company. He is someone who has managed to ride the tech waves being at the right place at the right time - mobile video optimization on wireless networks, cloud, data platforms, open source, and now AI. Prior to BigPanda, Fred was SVP of Product Management at Cloudera, and Sr. Director Product Management at Citrix, and in engineering rol...

My guest in this episode is Elizabeth Samara-Rubio, Chief Business Officer of SiMa.ai, which offers MLSOC and platform for Edge AI, and one of the ten hottest semiconductor startups of 2024. In our conversation, we dive into how to help customers build business cases for GenAI, use cases and business models. In her previous role, Elizabeth led GTM and business development at Amazon for the worldwi...

In this episode, Luke Freiler , CEO of Centercode , which provides user testing solutions to leading tech companies. Luke shares his journey from hardware engineering to founding a company that revolutionizes product testing. He discusses the importance of continuous user testing, the shift from waterfall to agile methodologies, and how Centercode has established itself in a new market category. L...

Jyotika Athavale is the 2024 President of the IEEE Computer Society. In this role she oversees the global roadmap for the organization and plays a leading role in international safety standardization. She was honored with the IEEE Women in Technology and Leadership Award for her contributions towards diversity in engineering and STEM. Jyotika is one of the leading experts in the area of automotive...

Purvi Shah is Vice President of Product Development for Enterprise Data Platforms at American Express. Prior to that she led a team of consultants at Deloitte in the public sector working with many state governments to build solutions for citizens to avail services for food stamps, child care and other interventions. Purvi was recently recognized on the 2024 Global Data Power Women List by CDO Mag...

Jeff Lash is SVP of Global Product Management at Forrester. Jeff has been a long time thought leader on all things product. He led the product management practice at SiriusDecisions (acquired by Forrester) where he worked with many companies on assessing and benchmarking their product function competency and maturity. Jeff started his career as an information architect and usability at Elsevier an...

Lara Shackelford is a veteran Chief Marketing Officer many times over, and has led marketing teams to create impact at companies such as Oracle, Intel, Datastax, Looker (both before and after the acquisition by Google), and has also led global demand generation at Microsoft. She is currently senior vice president of marketing at iCapital. In this episode, Lara talks about how the B2B buying experi...

Nathan Gold is highly sought after as a coach for presentations at the TED conference, keynote speeches, entrepreneurs pitching on Shark Tank and startups raising funding from investors. He has delivered thousands of hours of professional coaching while working with companies such as Netflix, SanDisk, Kaiser Permanente and IBM. In this episode Nathan shares some very useful tips on how to do a per...

Sudhakar Ramakrishna became CEO of SolarWinds at a very pivotal moment in the company's history, just as it became the target of a cyberattack that affected not just SolarWinds but its large base of enterprise and government customers. Since then, Sudhakar and the people at SolarWinds have led a remarkable turnaround. We are going to learn about how they did that. Before coming to SolarWinds,...

Himanshu Palsule is CEO of Cornerstone , which provides a workforce agility platform to identify skill gaps and development opportunities within organizations. Himanshu joined as CEO in Jan 2022, bringing more than 35 years of diverse experience leading global organizations. Prior to joining Cornerstone, he was President of Epicor where he was responsible for managing vertical businesses and overs...

Join host Rahul Abhyankar and Aleks Bass, Chief Product Officer of Typeform on this episode. At Typeform, Aleks leads product strategy, development and execution. Typeform helps brands with thoughtfully-designed tools that turn digital interactions into lasting personal connections, with no-code forms, quizzes, surveys, and asynchronous videos. Aleks is a product leader with a 18+ year career that...

Chris Johnson is Co-founder & Managing Partner of Artisanal Talent Group , a highly specialized boutique executive search firm known for building some of tech’s most talented executive teams. Chris leads the Product and Engineering Leaders Practice, and is one of the most highly sought-after search consultants in the field for these critical roles at tier-1, high profile, VC backed and public...

Al Zollar has had a distinguished 34-year career at IBM where he held several important roles across the entire software stack, including General Manager of IBM Tivoli Software, General Manager IBM iSeries server product line, and President of IBM Lotus Software. He spent the first 9 years in customer facing roles in pre-sales and post-sales engineering, before becoming a product manager for DB2,...

Donald Hasson , Chief Product Officer of  Dashlane , a leading provider of password management to consumers and businesses, joins host Rahul Abhyankar in this episode. With a long and successful career in cybersecurity, Donald is an expert in identity and credential management.  How to build user delight for heightened emotions that are associated with creating, forgetting and protecting passwords...

Amanda Richardson  is CEO of  CoderPad , an online talent assessment platform used by companies such as Spotify, LinkedIn, Shopify, Lyft and many others. In just four years as CEO, she has led the company's growth in 160+ countries, over 4000 customers doing over 3 million assessments per year. Amanda started her career as an equities analyst on Wall Street, but she wanted to "be in the r...

Rich Mironov , author of The Art of Product Management, and a veteran product leader with over three decades of experience tells it like it is in this engaging episode of Product Leader's Journey. We discuss the emotional aspects of product leadership, why prioritization is a political problem, why a product role in the B2B enterprise domain is more challenging, what product leaders owe their...

Rich Fernandez is the CEO of SIY Global. SIY Global comes from the renowned Search Inside Yourself program, mindfulness and emotional intelligence training originally developed at Google, where Rich was director of executive education and people development. He was also one of the first SIY teachers. Rich has also served in senior roles at eBay, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. In this episo...

Stuart McClure is one of the foremost cybersecurity experts in the world and a serial entrepreneur with successful exits. He has built successful products leveraging ML & AI for cybersecurity. Stu is also a student of psychology and his new company, Wethos AI, leverages AI to codify traits of high performing teams.

We hear often that careers are nonlinear. So how can we be thoughtful about the zig and deliberate about the zag? My next guest on Product Leader’s Journey, Nadim Hossain, VP Product Management at Databricks, has done exactly that. In this episode, Nadim shares insights about his experience at Uber and Databricks in building open and closed-loop ML products, product-led vs engineering-led product...

Natalia Baryshnikova is GM of Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Prior to that she was Head of Products at SmartRecruiters. In this episode, Natalia shares her highly useful insights from her career journey. We dive into topics such as resume tips, cover letters, career growth, and driving alignment.

Don Weinstein is ADP’s Global Chief Product and Technology Officer, responsible for all aspects of ADP’s global technology strategy and delivery. Don's career journey started at GE and then at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and ADP. In this episode, Don shares his playbook on how to lead technology transformations inside large organizations, the career graph from product manager to product leader to gene...

Inbal Shani is Chief Product Officer of GitHub. Having led engineering and product teams at Amazon and Microsoft and serving as a General Manager for most of her career, she specializes in crafting solutions that maximize customers’ most business-critical outcomes. Inbal’s development experience has spanned the entire tech stack. She was among the pioneering technologists who applied AI in the lab...

Raj Yavatkar has had a distinguished career being a Fellow at Intel and VMware, leading engineering teams at Google Cloud, and spearheading technology strategy as CTO at Juniper Networks. In this episode, Raj shares insightful stories and practical advice from his career driving innovation inside large companies, building billion dollar businesses, and building an innovative culture in an organiza...