Grown Up Product: How Post-PMF Companies Build Durable Product Organizations

Episode Show Notes: In Part 2 of Brian's conversation with Meraj Imani, the focus shifts from vision and strategy to the people challenges of scaling. How do you assess whether your current team can make the journey? What should you look for in new hires? And why does team topology matter more than most leaders realize? In this episode, Brian and Meraj explore: The generalist-to-specialist shift....

80% of venture-backed SaaS companies never make it past $30M ARR. Instead, they get stuck in "the messy middle", caught between startup chaos and real scale. When boards go looking for answers, they usually look at product. Meraj Imani has been one of the people they call. With fifteen years of experience scaling B2B SaaS organizations, Meraj joined Enable as their first product leader with a mand...

Episode Summary In this episode of Grown Up Product, host Brian continues his conversation with Chris Kincanon, fractional CTO and co-founder of Ready Steady. Part two dives deeper into the practical realities of AI in product development, the dangers of firefighting culture, and how leaders can translate technical problems into language that resonates with executives. Key Topics Discussed: The "W...

Episode Summary In this episode of Grown Up Product, host Brian welcomes Chris Kincanon, fractional CTO and co-founder of Ready Steady. With a career spanning from Accenture to startups to major corporations like Kohl's and Unity, Chris shares battle-tested insights on building scalable engineering organizations without burning out teams. Key Topics Discussed: The Evolution to Fractional Leadershi...

Episode Summary In this episode of Grown Up Product, host Brian welcomes Richard Abi-Chahla, a fractional CPO with 18 years of product management experience and founder of Purple Brains agency. Broadcasting from Beirut, Lebanon, Richard shares invaluable insights from his work across 50+ products in 15 different industries. Key Topics Discussed: The Fractional Advantage Why fractional executives a...

Welcome to Grown Up Product, the podcast for founders who’ve figured out how to sell something and are now stuck figuring out how to scale it, for CEOs who feel like product is chaotic, slow, or unaccountable, and for VCs and PE firms watching their portfolio companies burn money instead of building real systems. I’m Brian Root, a fractional Chief Product Officer with years of experience helping p...