LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

We’ve all been witness to how AI collapses the org chart: leaders are back to doing IC work, ICs are shedding the busy work, and teams are shipping features in two-week sprints that used to take a year. Our guest today is Eric Anderson, SVP of Product at Datasite, the virtual data room platform where billion-dollar M&A deals get done. He walks us through how a real-life, AI-first team has made...

We’ve all been witness to how AI collapses the org chart: leaders are back to doing IC work, ICs are shedding the busy work, and teams are shipping features in two-week sprints that used to take a year. Our guest today is Eric Anderson, SVP of Product at Datasite, the virtual data room platform where billion-dollar M&A deals get done. He walks us through how a real-life, AI-first team has made...

Our guest today is Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, the video editor that’s been AI-native long before “AI-native” was something you put in a pitch deck. Laura's route to the CEO seat started as a customer. She loved the product enough to knock on founder Andrew Mason's door and ask to work on it. She joined to lead product, but only three years later she's succeeded the well-known founder and i...

A program manager told Sriram Iyer it would take 6 to 9 months to ship the first slice of their new product. Sriram challenged the team to do it in just five days. At first, they laughed. Then he rolled his sleeves up, dug in with the team, and they did it. 5 days, from Monday to Friday. Sriram has spent his career walking into companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and Freshworks, and pulling timeline...

Long before “AI Agent” was the buzzword in every product discussion, Julia Dalton was already deep into solving the problems of coordinating thousands of worker agents, creating clear instruction prompts, and evaluating output quality. Julia is SVP of Product at the AI-support automation platform, Capacity. Previously, she helped scale workflow orchestration at OneSpace, formerly known as Crowdsou...

In this week's repeat episode, we’re joined by the undisputed queen of B2B positioning: April Dunford. April is the best-selling author of the seminal book "Obviously Awesome" and the new hit "Sales Pitch." She has spent 25 years as a startup executive and consultant, helping companies stop guessing and start winning. If you have ever struggled to explain exactly why customers should pick you over...

Our guest today, Jen Wang, holds a PhD from Stanford in behavior sciences, judgment, and decision-making. She built her product career at ThredUp, and now serves as Chief Product Officer and go-to-market lead at Framework. That combination — behavioral scientist plus operating CPO — gives her a rare lens into the most urgent question in product leadership right now: how do you lead and build when...

Raul Parquet is the Director of Ecommerce at Princess Cruises, where he’s helping to lead them into a more digital future where visa requirements, multi-destination itineraries, and endless customization options are something customers can actually complete online. In this episode, Raul shares: The unglamorous but vital elements of a complete eCommerce analytics stack, and the table-stakes things...

I keep meeting teams across the country that are facing intense pressure to shoehorn AI into every feature, often without a coherent thesis on the problem it’ll solve. But what if the smartest move in the AI gold rush is to actually slow down? Angela Clark, VP of Digital at Patagonia, is doing exactly that. At a brand known for its fierce commitment to the planet, Angela is applying that same inte...

How many engineers does it take to run the ecommerce site for a retail company that does over a billion dollars in revenue per year? Well, if you’re Rainbow Shops, the answer is just 2. Most ecommerce teams assume scale requires more engineers, more tools, more complexity. Chief Digital Officer David Cost has built something many people in ecommerce would say isn't possible — a lean, fast-moving d...

40,000 people a year die from traffic accidents in the US. Our guest today is Chinmay Jain, Director of Product Management on Waymo's Driving Behavior team, who is working to make that number 90% smaller. In this episode, Chinmay shares: How he thought through leaving YouTube at its peak to join a moonshot company that could have civilization-level impact Waymo’s actual AI eval process, using mass...

Most financial products are optimized for transactions, not human emotion. For many people, this transforms an already fraught topic into pure anxiety. Our guest today is building banking for what she calls the Cortisol UI. Melissa Douros has spent over 26 years in financial services, starting in debt collection and now serving as the Chief Product Officer at Green Dot. Early on, she learned first...

How do you redesign the most visited e-commerce webpage in the world? Rahul Chaudhari helped reshape the Amazon homepage during his years as a product leader there, before becoming VP of Product and Technology at Kohl's. In this episode, Rahul shares: Amazon’s “customer backwards” approach - and how he used it to unlock half a billion dollars of value on the Amazon homepage The secret to product a...

In this episode, we’re joined by Maryam Ashoori, VP of Product and Engineering at IBM’s Watsonx platform. With a background that includes 2 master's degrees in AI, a PhD in Systems Design Engineering, and named on over 30 patents at IBM, she’s been on the bleeding edge for over a decade. Currently leading the charge on Agentic AI and AI Governance at IBM, Maryam is a bridge between the theoretical...

In this episode, we’re joined by Deepika Manglani, VP of Product and Program Management at the LA Times. Deepika’s career in media spans over 15 years, culminating in her current role, where she’s bringing the 140-year-old institution into the future. In this episode, Deepika shares: How her team is using AI to preserve a unique trove of historical data, over 12 million pages of news archives from...

In this episode, we’re joined by Ben McAllister, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at CrossFit, and one of the most thoughtful product leaders I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with. Ben’s path is anything but linear: with a degree in physics, a short stint in consulting, and time spent as a creative director at a design agency before moving into senior product roles at Under Armour. Now he...

In this episode, we’re joined by Karthik Viswanathan. Formerly a product leader at AT&T, Macy’s, and Optum, he’s now the founder of TalAiro, an HR tech startup that is rethinking the operating system for recruiting. Karthik argues that the hidden failure of the modern tech stack is forcing the user to serve as a “manual integration layer. He explains how the push to "unbundle" features results...

This week, we’re joined by the undisputed queen of B2B positioning, April Dunford. April is the best-selling author of the seminal book "Obviously Awesome" and the new hit "Sales Pitch." She has spent 25 years as a startup executive and consultant helping companies stop guessing and start winning. If you have ever struggled to explain exactly why customers should pick you over the other guy, this...

From U.S. Army sniper to VP of Product, Robert Henkhaus knows a thing or two about high-stakes decision-making. Today, he’s a product leader at Enverus, the software platform guiding billions of dollars in global energy capital. Fresh off Enverus’ acquisition by Blackstone, Robert joins us to discuss how to innovate when the pressure is on. In this episode, we cover: Why "Black Box" AI Fails: How...

In this repeat episode of LaunchPod, originally published on Aug 12, 2025, we’re talking with Bret Tushaus, VP of Product at Deltek. In this episode, we discuss: How Deltek built Dela — an AI agent framework powering everything from smart summaries to autonomous accounting Why AI is rewriting the role of Product Management, and what leaders need to know now How Bret’s team leveled up their AI skil...

This week, we sat down with Berni Fisher, VP of Product at Appcues and a self-described "first principles goddess." Berni goes deep on what it was really like behind the scenes during the notorious 2012 Apple Maps launch, the triple threat problem at ButcherBox where they exist at the intersection of grocery, eCommerce, AND SaaS, and more. In our conversation, Berni discusses: Surviving the "2012...

Today, we’re joined by Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED. We all know TED Talks — but behind the scenes, TED is undergoing a massive product transformation to adapt to a post-AI media landscape. In this episode, Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED, pulls back the curtain on how they’re solving the “discovery” crisis facing digital media today. Tricia shares: Why “views” are dead: Explaining why...

Today, we’re joined by West Stringfellow, currently VP of Product at Blackhawk Network and former VP of Innovation at Target. In this episode, West shares: How he went from stealth startups to leading innovation at a company with over $77 billion in annual sales The methods he uses to manage up and influence leadership in order to achieve the outcomes necessary to create successful organizations t...

Today, we’re joined by Sarah Jacob Singh, CPTO at Medbridge, a digital healthcare platform. In this episode, Sarah shares: Why AI means all companies have to act like startups again, with product more tightly integrated from engineering all the way to go-to-market How many Product Managers are evolving into Product Engineers - building prototypes, shipping code, and helping developer teams innovat...

Today, we’re joined by serial entrepreneur Raj Singh. His multiple exits have landed him in product leadership roles at companies like Salesforce.com, and, most currently, as a VP of Product at Mozilla, where he’s leading the team creating new AI products for SMBs. In this episode, Raj shares: How his companies navigated multiple pivots, with innovations from ChatGPT and Zoom leading most recently...