The Product Pivot: Real conversations with product people.

David Nduka had one week left in Canada when a single mistake on his work permit caught up with him. What he did in the four days that followed became a company. David is the founder of Navim AI , an immigration tech startup, that has helped several people navigate the difficult path of gaining residency.  He is also a product manager at Kweeve , and a two-time founder who's built most of his...

Everyone has advice about getting hired in product. Andres Tenias has insights from a technical recruiter perspective.  As a recruiter for close to a decade and now Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at Lantern, Andres got tired of nodding along to engineers and went and earned a software engineering diploma, so when he screens product and technical candidates, he can tell who actually did the w...

⁠Steve Johnson⁠ asked a training room full of product managers how many had spoken to a customer in the past year. Most hands stayed down. One person admitted they'd been at the company three years without ever meeting one. Steve is CEO and co-founder of Product Growth Leaders, a former VP at Pragmatic Marketing, and one of the original architects of the ⁠QUARTZ Open Framework⁠ . He's wr...

What if AI could handle the hard part of being a boss for you like telling someone they're not getting the promotion, weighing empathy against the P&L, or being the bad guy? ⁠Aaron Kesler⁠ , VP of Product at RozieAI and author of an upcoming book on breaking into product management, has been sitting in that exact seat for a year. He's also sitting on a $4.5M AI story that nobody knew...

Zach O'Neal spent five years running the subscriber experience as a Product Marketing Manager across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. He now leads the same function at a B2B SaaS startup, at a fraction of the headcount. Most PMs have never worked with a product marketer who sees the role through his lens. Zach gets specific about why, including the four years it took him at Disney to find a real str...

Most PM content is the highlight reel. This episode is what gets said after the camera turns off. Alyx Priestley is a Product Director who came up running her own creative agency before someone called her "the product person" and she had to go figure out what that meant. She now writes some of the sharper PM essays on Medium and is rebuilding her consultancy alongside an in-stealth sport...

He has a spreadsheet. 350+ contacts and still emails 30–40 of them every couple months. It didn't land him a PM job. What it did was keep him in motion long enough to take the advice that actually worked: stop waiting for the title. Kartikeya Shah is now Project Manager II at RozieAI, where he's been handed a product to manage about a year into a job he took instead of holding out for a...

She'd been doing the job for nine years before she found out it had a name. ⁠Riëtte Verster ⁠ spent the first chapter of her career as a "publisher" at Pearson in South Africa, running Scrum, leading a national reading program in 5 languages, doing all the work of product management without ever calling it that. Then she moved to Canada and discovered her job had a title. Now she&ap...

A company fired its entire product team because nobody could explain what they did. Three months later, they called every one of them back. Steve Johnson has been coaching product teams for 30 years, started as a programmer, stumbled into sales, got pulled into product management by a VP who watched him train salespeople and said "that's not your job." And is the founder of Product...

Most PM careers don't go in a straight line. Christina Aragon 's went through civil engineering, software, sales, and a seven-month job search before she landed her first associate PM role. In this episode, Christina gets honest about what that non-linear path actually taught her, and why it might make her better at the job than someone who went straight in.  We dig into what the associa...

We brought Heidi Ram back, and she came with receipts. Heidi is the Practice Lead of The Product Recruiter and has spent 25 years placing product leaders across North America. She's seen every version of this market: the boom years, the layoffs, the slow rebuilds. And right now, she's watching a lot of talented product people make the same avoidable mistakes. This episode picks up where...

The best PMs don't wait for perfect conditions. They build anyway. In Season 3's opener, Meagan and Santi get honest about the past year — gestational diabetes, a toddler, a day job, and somehow still shipping Prodfolio and recording a full podcast season before maternity leave. This episode covers how they ran discovery, why they think low pressure ships more than urgency, and what buil...

Everyone’s hyping AI like it’s a magic trick. Aaron Kesler sees it differently — it’s just really good at boring stuff. Now VP of Product at RozieAI , Aaron’s focused on solving the unglamorous problems that make real business impact. But his path to product didn’t start in a boardroom. In college, he built a startup that got acquired. Then he realized he hated coding but loved talking to customer...

Some pivots don’t start with a master plan, they start with saying yes and figuring it out along the way. In this episode, Eduardo (Eddie) Rosenfeld , VP of Applied AI at Lavender 💜🔮 , shares how studying philosophy and writing comedy scripts in L.A. somehow led to product ops at one of the fastest-moving AI startups in sales tech. We talk about: → Why curiosity and grit matter more than credent...

Not every career pivot starts with a master plan. Sometimes it starts with curiosity or even a lemonade stand. In this episode, Nikhil Punjabi (PM at Dash Social) shares how working with founders at an incubator sparked his shift into product management, and why small experiments can teach the biggest product lessons. We cover: → The power of transferable skills when moving into product → Why “don...

Santi and Meagan sit down with Heidi Ram, a seasoned product recruiter, to uncover what hiring managers really look for in product candidates. Heidi breaks down: Why storytelling sets great PMs apart How to optimize LinkedIn and resumes to stand out The truth about career pivots and internal moves Why understanding your impact (and your “why”) matters If you’re job seeking, pivoting into product,...

When’s the right time to hire Product Ops? In this episode of The Product Pivot , hosts Santi and Meagan sit down with Graham Reed , Head of Product Operations at Helios, to unpack the rise of Product Ops and what it really means for growing teams. Graham shares how he “fell into” the role after a decade in product management and why he’s built product ops functions from scratch at multiple compan...

Join hosts Santi and Meagan as they dive into the world of product management with Gabor. Discover Gabor's unique journey from a programmer to a product manager, his experiences with major tech companies, and his insights on the evolving role of AI in product management. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of breaking into the tech industry and the importance of continuous learning and ad...

We’re back with Season 2 of The Product Pivot and this time, it’s bigger than just product management. This kickoff episode is part reflection, part roadmap. We look back at what worked in Season 1, what surprised us, and where we’re going next. From PM career pivots to deeper dives into leadership, operations, and scaling impact, this season will bring even more real stories and actionable lesson...

In this episode of The Product Pivot, we chat with Trevor Acy—a fractional product manager and coach—about his journey from marketing into product, how he broke in without the title, and what real product thinking looks like inside companies. We also dig into: What founders and early-stage teams get wrong when scaling Why unscalable work is often the smartest work How Trevor built his fractional p...

Olympia Bardis, Product Manager at CNBC, joins us to share how she made an unexpected pivot from journalism into product management. From managing content at Fox News to building investment tools for retail users, Olympia’s story is a masterclass in self-advocacy, transferable skills, and building confidence through rejection. We dive into: How Olympia transitioned from journalism to product Advoc...

In this episode of The Product Pivot, we sit down with Brody Clemmer, Lead Product Manager at Little Otter, to discuss the future of product management and how the role is evolving. We cover: • How Brody landed in product without a degree • The biggest misconceptions about product management • Why living in the problem space is the key to success • The real difference between PMs at startups vs. l...

In this episode of The Product Pivot, Santi and Meagan sit down with Varsh, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, to discuss her journey from solutions engineering to building Gen AI products like Copilot. She debunks myths about breaking into big tech, shares actionable advice for aspiring PMs, and highlights the power of transferable skills. Whether you're looking to pivot into product man...

From Marketing to Product Management – Tyler Johnson, Product Manager at Nectar, shares how he made the leap from customer and product marketing into a PM role.  In this episode of The Product Pivot, hosts Santi and Meagan sit down with Tyler to discuss:  How his marketing background helped his transition  Why customer obsession is crucial for product managers   Challenges he faced as a first-time...

Welcome to another episode of The Product Pivot! In this episode, hosts Santi and Meagan share their personal journeys pivoting from customer support to product management. They also answer the lingering question: how did The Product Pivot get started?   What you'll learn in this episode: Meagan’s transition from customer success to founding PM at a startup  Santi’s unique journey from retail...