LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

By LogRocketBusiness Technology Careers Management

LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast episodes

October 20Your CEO Thinks AI is Working. Your Team Doesn’t. Here’s Why. | Annan Patel, VP Product (Tricentis)
Ask a CEO how their AI roll-out is going, and 81% will tell you that they're highly confident. Talk to the people doing the work, and that number drops to 56%.
Our guest today sits right in the middle of that gap. Annan Patel is VP of Product at Tricentis, a leader in enterprise software testing, where he builds AI products for companies where a bad release can cost tens of millions of dollars. He's spent over 15 years in product across ad tech, Microsoft, and WP Engine.
Tricentis recently surveyed more than 2,500 people across the tech industry. The headline: 83% of companies say they trust AI agents to make release decisions, while 60% admit they're shipping untested code. The unsurprising top reason why? Pressure from leadership to move faster.
Annan's take: AI gets sold as a tool you plug in. In practice, it's a new operating system for how work gets done.
In this episode, he shares:
Why "plug and play" AI only gets you about 60% of the way there, and why the rest is context your team has never written down
Why their first AI products stalled after a strong start, and how they rebuilt them around one key concept: the AI is never the one held accountable
And why tokens spent and lines of code shipped tell you nothing about whether your AI initiatives are actually adding value
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annanpatel/
Tricentis: https://www.tricentis.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:53 Why executives and teams see AI’s capabilities differently
03:39 Adopting AI as a new operating system, not a plug-and-play tool
07:40 From coding assistants to unattended agent workflows
10:38 AI theater on LinkedIn vs. What advanced teams actually achieve
12:27 Enterprise risk and treating AI as a long-term investment
14:55 Survey findings on agent trust, untested code, and the wrong metrics
17:13 How product teams use AI beyond vibe coding
19:05 Why early AI products stalled and how to build tools people trust
22:44 Thinking like a CEO: Customer empathy and matching velocity to your market
29:20 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Annan Patel.
31 min
October 13A Real-Time Look Inside a CPO’s First 30-60-90 Days | Maya Keekattil, CPO (Cin7)
If you built your product team from scratch today, what would it look like? How does it change in an AI world? Usually these answers are hypothetical. Our guest today is working hers out right now, three weeks into a new leadership role at a new company, in a new vertical.
Maya Keekattil had just started as Chief Product Officer at Cin7 when we recorded this, after nearly five years leading product for Smarsh's small and mid-market business. Cin7 is PE-backed, with a new leadership team and a board that wants results fast. Most leaders tell their first-90-days story years later, after the mistakes have been edited out. Maya is telling hers from the middle of it.
In this episode, Maya shares:
Her 30-60-90 day playbook that actually started before day 1 at Cin7. To date, she’s done over 50 one-on-one meetings across the company and asks these 3 questions at every one.
How she's organizing her product team around customer outcomes instead of product lines, and why she'd rather develop the team she inherited than hire around it
And what to tell a board when its mandate and your customers point in different directions. Her focus is always based on 2 things: why do customers buy from you, and why do they leave?
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayakeekattil/
Cin7: https://www.cin7.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:38 Maya’s path from software engineer to chief product officer
01:42 Why the first 30 days are for listening and learning
04:20 Three questions to ask in every cross-functional one-on-one
06:08 Finding quick operational wins without breaking what works
09:12 When to shift from operational fixes to long-term strategy
13:52 Defining success by why customers buy and why they leave
19:28 How AI is reshaping product team structure around outcomes
24:20 Developing the team you inherited vs. hiring for talent gaps
26:21 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Maya Keekattil.
29 min
October 06PM Was Scrumful, Not Agile: Why AI Can Give Product Its Real Job Back | Naomi Lariviere, CPO (ADP)
AI has made building faster and cheaper than ever. That leaves product leaders with an uncomfortable question: if engineering isn't the bottleneck anymore, what is? And do we still need product managers?
Our guest today thinks much of the PM job over the past decade was spent more on tickets and stand-ups than on understanding customers and markets. She calls it getting "Scrumful, not Agile," and AI is finally a chance to hand that work off and get back to the real job.
Naomi Lariviere is Chief Product Officer at ADP, where she runs a roughly $4 billion mid-market portfolio for a company that pays one in six Americans.
Her take: AI makes building cheaper, but it doesn't make choosing what to build any easier.
In this episode, Naomi shares:
What happened when ADP's dev team tried to deliver without a product team, and why they came back
How ADP studied what its PMs actually do all day to find the busywork AI can take off their plates, and what they want PMs doing with that time instead
Why she's skeptical of the push to turn every PM into a "product builder" who ships code, and why storytelling, empathy, and judgment matter more than ever
And how ADP keeps innovating quickly when a single mistake could mean thousands of people don't get paid
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomilariviere/
ADP: https://www.adp.com/
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:51 Naomi's path from business analyst to ADP product leader
02:40 Is AI the end of product management? (Spoiler alert: No)
04:28 AI makes building cheaper, but it doesn't make choosing easier
06:47 How product teams became "Scrumful, not Agile"
11:18 Why ADP has to innovate carefully at its scale
13:52 Process with a purpose vs. Process for its own sake
15:50 Should product managers become product builders?
18:42 ADP's jobs-to-be-done study of the PM role
20:30 Fluid roles and why less technical PMs can deliver more
24:10 Storytelling, empathy, and the human skills AI can't replace
26:46 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Naomi Lariviere.
28 min
September 29Your AI Doesn't Have a Feature Problem. It Has an Adoption Problem. | Charanya Kannan (Navan)
Every product team is shipping AI. But the dirty secret is that, for many companies, very few users are adopting. The feature launches, the people who try it love it, and adoption stalls anyway.
Our guest today thinks that's because teams obsess over building AI and barely think about adoption. Charanya Kannan is VP and GM of Navan Anywhere, which puts Navan's AI travel and expense tools inside Slack, Teams, and Gemini, where people already work, instead of asking them to open another app.
She joined Navan when the company was still called TripActions and doing under $50 million in revenue... now it's well on its way to a billion.
Her take: if customers have to work harder to use your AI, it isn't actually better.
In this episode, Charanya shares:
How Navan Anywhere was built distribution-first, bringing booking and expenses into the tools people already use every day
Why Navan's margins went up in the AI era, while the rest of SaaS braces for compression
And why she believes PMs who mostly manage process and Jira tickets will fade away, while those who can actually drive user benefit and business outcomes will matter more than ever
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetcharanya/
Navan: https://navan.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
04:17 Why AI features don't always get adopted
06:30 Building Navan Anywhere distribution-first
10:13 When to use AI vs. deterministic systems
12:01 Conversational cognitive load and why good UI still matters
15:57 Evals, distilled models, and the AI reliability pyramid
20:14 Product owners vs. product managers in the AI era
26:10 How Navan is growing margins while SaaS faces AI compression
31:40 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Charanya Kannan.
30 min
September 22Building AI Products for the Other 95% | Brian McMullin, SVP Product (Network Solutions)
Most of the AI products getting hype right now are built for people like us, the tech industry. But your customers don’t care how the AI works — they just want their problem solved in a way that’s easy for them.
Brian McMullin, SVP and Head of Product at Network Solutions, has spent 15 years building for small businesses at companies including HubSpot, ezCater, Wayfair, and SamCart. In that time, he's yet to meet a business owner who wakes up thinking, "I can't wait to use AI today." For many of them, a prompt box might as well be a terminal window.
So his team doesn't ship the box. They ship the finished work artifact, and all the user has to do is claim it.
In this episode, Brian shares:
Why doing the work for small businesses first, instead of handing them an empty prompt box, is what gets them to try AI
His warning about baking inference into the core of your product before token pricing settles — and the two models he's testing to find out what small businesses will actually tolerate
And what SamCart taught him about churn: customers left because basic things were broken, not because features were missing.
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianemcmullin/
Network Solutions: https://www.networksolutions.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Brian's product journey from developer to SMB product leader
02:42 How small businesses went from distrusting AI to have AI FOMO
06:10 SMBs don't wake up excited to use AI, they want to close the deal
08:42 Stop showing the agent, ship the finished work
11:48 Inference costs break the old SaaS margin math
15:00 Testing free credits and tiered usage with small businesses
16:47 What usage-based pricing does to ARR and predictability
22:28 Churn is a pile of micro-annoyances, not one event
25:06 What SamCart's churn data revealed about broken basics
28:55 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Brian McMullin.
31 min
September 15What Do You Do When AI Agents Replace Your Human Users? | Brandon Harris, VP of Product (Pantheon)
Every day, more of your traffic isn't human. AI agents show up, grab what they need, and leave — and YOU pay to serve every visitor, whether they see your brand or not.
Today’s guest has seen this from both sides. Brandon Harris is VP of Product at Pantheon, the WebOps platform behind a huge slice of the WordPress and Drupal world. But before that, he was sending the bots — at Wiser, where his team scraped millions of pages a day to power retail pricing intelligence.
His take: agents aren't killing the web. They're just the next way information travels — and the companies that adapt are about to pull way ahead of the ones that don't.
In this episode, Brandon shares:
How AI is turning the whole web into one giant CMS — and quietly rewriting the job of anyone who publishes content
Plus, why visits are the new impressions, why trying to keep agents out is the modern-day version of blocking Google from indexing your site — and what to do instead
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cxoplus/
Pantheon: https://pantheon.io/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:02 Brandon's product journey: From film school to Wiser and Pantheon
02:24 The dead web debate: Agents are just the next mode of transport
05:51 Why traffic-based pricing can break when the majority of your visitors are agents
08:15 Site visits are becoming the new impressions
10:46 Grading traffic and the identity arms race it will start
14:11 When the whole web becomes your CMS
16:40 Putting your brand's fingerprints in content that AI will pull without accessing your site
21:23 How people decide to trust a site
26:17 Watching sessions to catch user drift before customers quietly leave
31:09 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Brandon Harris.
33 min
September 08Product Sense: What It Is and Why AI Makes It Vital | Kevin Sung, VP of Product (Life360)
“Product sense” is the thing that nobody can define, but everyone says will keep product managers employed in the age of AI.
Our guest today has a definition, with receipts. But he takes it somewhere that’s less comfortable than you might assume: if all you do is move numbers, you’re obsoleting yourself because AI will eventually do it better than you can.
Kevin Sung is VP of Product at Life360, the family safety app with roughly 100 million monthly active users. Before that, he spent years at Dropbox, Smule, Zynga, and Google, a path that took him from a growth-hacking playbook to a very different conclusion about where product management’s value actually lives.
In this episode, Kevin discusses:
What the PM job becomes once engineering isn’t a bottleneck, and why the line between lazy product management and good product craft is the strength of your opinion
How he got Dropbox leadership to fund a year of unglamorous quality work that no financial model could justify, and how it produced $24 million in ARR from churn reduction
And what this all means now at Life360 — where the question in a product review isn’t “how’s this move the number”, it’s “does this create a moment of worry for a parent?”
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsung/
Life360: https://www.life360.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
04:06 Defining "product sense"
07:45 How the PM role is evolving
10:20 Kevin's growth lessons from Smule
14:22 The $24M retention bet
18:29 Resentment builds until users snap
22:38 Selling a bet you can't model
24:36 Enshittification and paper cuts
27:51 Life360, where trust is the product
32:23 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Kevin Sung.
34 min
September 01When to Add Product Friction & How to Reduce 12 PM AI setups to One Team OS | Kunal Thadani (Houzz)
At dating app The League, Kunal Thadani's team found that when daily matches took longer to load, people stopped skimming profiles and started actually reading. The wait wasn't a cost — it was the product saying these matches are worth your time.
Now he's Senior Director of Product at Houzz, a platform for homeowners to plan renovations, and his take is that the goal was never no friction. It's to create the right kind of friction.
In this episode, Kunal drops his:
His three-part framework for productive friction, and
The two ways friction turns toxic, including the one that punishes your most loyal customers
Plus, everyone is building AI workflows for themselves right now. Almost nobody is building them for a team, and Kunal has the clearest answer I've heard in a long time for what that looks like.
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunal-thadani-72a13722/
Insider Growth Group: https://www.insidergrowthhq.com/
Houzz: https://www.houzz.com/
0:00 Introduction
0:28 From The League to Houzz: Finding the DIY Decorating Gap
2:03 Not All Friction Is Bad
4:39 Trust Signals, Progress Arcs, Commitment Moments
6:41 The Signup Test That 10X'd Email Conversions
10:25 Two Ways Friction Fails: Fake Protection and Endless Re-Verification
15:16 Why Personal AI Setups Break Down at Team Scale
16:47 Inside the Team OS: One Repo and a Shared Product Context Layer
20:38 Claude Code in the Terminal: Mining Gong Calls and Killing Handoff Tax
24:41 Feedback Loops: Why a Team OS Improves Faster Than a Personal One
25:58 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Kunal Thadani.
28 min
August 25Just Say No to "Yes-Man Agents" & "Process Barnacles": How Miro Builds Post-AI | Jeff Chow, CPTO
On a Friday, one of Miro's architects set his agents loose on the company's AI engine. Nobody asked him to. By Monday, he demoed a full refactor. Tuesday, it had a kickoff, and a few months later it was the headline of their user conference.
Here's the twist. Miro has refused to rebuild its process around AI. They've kept the same three milestones they've always had...they just changed what happens around them.
Our guest today is Jeff Chow, Miro’s Chief Product & Technology Officer. He helps lead a company whose entire job is helping cross-functional teams work better together, which makes it an unusually good place to watch what AI is actually doing to how teams build.
Jeff's take: AI hasn't moved the milestones — It's rewritten everything that happens between them.
In this episode, he shares:
The false confidence trap of building alongside an agent that tells you every idea is brilliant, and why that makes the moments where humans actually align more important than ever
Why product "process barnacles" accrete on companies as they scale, and how that quietly turns a culture of invention to optimization at just the wrong time
And why saying no is the next organizational crisis. Now that anyone can build almost anything, it’s become clear that coding was never the hard part
Links
Jeff's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjchow/
Miro: https://miro.com/
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
2:20 Why Miro refused to rebuild its process around AI
5:20 What shows up at kickoffs and solutions reviews now
12:15 The false confidence trap: Say no to "yes-man" agents
14:30 From optimization culture to invention culture
18:20 How one IC's side project reshaped Miro's AI engine
22:30 Process barnacles and why saying no is the next crisis
27:30 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Jeff Chow.
31 min
August 18This Product Leader Built Her Own PM OS with Claude Code: LIVE Demo | Parul Goel (ex-Indeed/PayPal)
We’ve got something different today: a live demo and walkthrough of how an actual product leader built a real, PM-focused tool with AI.
Our guest today put her proverbial money where her mouth is when she got sick of the AI hype and anxiety and grew tired of writing the same status update five different ways for five different audiences. So she decided to build her way out of the never-ending loop of draft, then repackage again and again and again.
And today, she’s going to demo it for us and show how she and a team of collaborators built an entire AI PM operating system to help with the myriad of similar, repetitive tasks that product leaders face!
Parul Goel has spent nearly 20 years in product, including almost nine at PayPal building a zero-to-one payments platform for marketplaces, and her recent stint as Senior Director of Product at Indeed.com, leading the payments and billing platform through a major scaling challenge.
In this episode, Parul shows:
A live demo of the PM operating system she built with 3 fellow product leaders and the four-layered architecture behind it
Why the "context library" and codifying company identity, stakeholders, and voice is the layer most people skip, BUT the one that matters most
And how the system handles core PM workflows like exec updates, cross-functional communication, customer interview synthesis, and PRD drafts
Links
Parul's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pg2121/
PM OS GitHub project: https://github.com/goelparul-cyber/AI-PM-OS
Parul's collaborators:
Vidya Sarangapan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsara/
Priyank C.: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyankachaturvedimit/
Bhagyashree Prabhakar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhagya-prabhakar/
Chapters
00:00 Introcution
02:58 The inspiration behind Parul's PM OS tool
07:26 Live Demo: Exec update (Video version on YouTube!)
12:54 Other PM OS skills
13:55 Why building the context library is the most important part of the process
20:48 The future of PM with AI
21:57 Conclusion
Follow LaunchPod on YouTube
We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe!
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.
Special Guest: Parul Goel.
23 min

About LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

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LaunchPod is a product management podcast hosted by LogRocket's CEO, Matt Arbesfeld, and VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, where they talk to product leaders about the issues they faced in their careers,…

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LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast episodes

About LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast