LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

By LogRocketBusiness Technology Careers Management

LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast episodes

November 10AI Made Us 4x Faster. User Adoption Is the New Speed Limit Now | Sharon Hunt, VP Product (JLL)
Everyone says building is free now. But when today’s guest pointed AI at her eight-year-old commercial real estate platform, it choked on the same messy code her new engineers did.
So she paused major feature development for six months and rebuilt for AI first. Now her team ships four times faster, and the new speed limit isn’t engineering - it's how much change humans can absorb.
Sharon Hunt is the VP of Product Management at JLL. In this episode, she shares:
How a team of four rewrote a key user-facing portal in a single quarter instead of a year, and became the playbook for 70 engineers
Why the real speed limit has become the pace of human adoption, and how that’s led to larger, more feature-packed releases than she’s seen since Agile became a trend over a decade ago
And how rallying the team around customer benefit metrics has developers prototyping fixes on-premise with customers, the same day they spot a problem
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonehunt/
JLL: https://www.jll.com/en-us/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
04:08 Why AI struggles with an aging codebase
05:16 Making JLL's Prism AI-ready by rebuilding the tenant portal in one quarter
09:03 AI lets you ship 4x faster, but users can only absorb so much change
12:07 JLL paused major features for six months to go slow to go fast
19:57 Improving existing workflows instead of building new features
22:19 Finding friction with data, site visits, and engineers’ own ideas
27:22 When to ship small tweaks and when to hold back for big releases
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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: Sharon Hunt.
31 min
November 03AI Can Design Now. Does UX Still Need a Human? | Mykola Konrad, CPO (Euna Solutions)
Ask ten product leaders what AI means for UX and Product teams, and you'll get ten answers. Our guest today is working it out in real time, with his own team right now.
If Engineering is 10x faster and AI can build, then what’s left for Product and UX teams?
Myk Konrad is Chief Product Officer at Euna Solutions. After spending 25 years in product at companies like Microsoft, Avaya, and Brightcove, he now leads a team building software for government agencies, where both stakes and scrutiny are exceptionally high.
That gives him a front-row seat as responsibilities across the product delivery cycle change seemingly day-to-day, leading to one of the biggest open questions in product: What happens to UX now that AI can design?
In this episode, Myk shares:
Which parts of UX he sees moving to PMs, developers, and agents, and which — like payments and compliance — still need a human in the loop
How he's evolving his team with clear goals, hands-on training with AI tools, and a simple mantra, "If you can, then do."
And why token spend is a bad measure, but a good signal, of AI adoption, and why the real speed limit is how fast your customers can absorb change
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykolakonrad/
Euna Solutions: https://eunasolutions.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:42 Myk's path from electrical engineer to product leader
01:43 Will AI replace UX? What's shifting to PMs and devs
04:57 What stays human: Research, high-stakes flows, and accessibility
07:44 Fewer UX roles with more output, and moving from a triad to a pod of two
12:04 Getting your team through change: Tools, training, and new timelines
14:56 Token spend as an adoption signal and finding team bottlenecks
17:28 Inside Euna's AI-enhanced software factory
19:48 The road to full autonomy, from product agent to dev agent
22:42 Why customers' tolerance for change limits how fast you can ship
24:05 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: Mykola Konrad.
25 min
October 27“Give the Model a Layup”: How to Cut AI Cost Without Cutting Quality | Arjun Singh Jamwal (Verizon)
When AI does the heavy lifting inside your product, it changes the historic economics of software: you pay for that work every time a user touches it. For a funded team, that’s a line item. For a bootstrapped project, it can destroy the business.
Arjun Singh Jamwal is a Senior PM at Verizon, where he’s worked on Verizon Cloud and now Verizon Home. On the side, he’s bootstrapping Goodmuncher, an app that helps people eat fewer ultra-processed foods, so every token comes out of his own pocket.
His solution is to give the model a layup, as he puts it. Instead of having AI analyze every ingredient from scratch each time a user scans a label, Goodmuncher scores ingredients and products ahead of time and stores embeddings in a vector database. When a user looks something up, the model finds the answer that was already processed instead of analyzing from scratch each time. Same result for the user, a fraction of the inference cost for the company.
In this episode, Arjun gives a live demo of that approach with a pipeline that turns a single command into a 10-slide social carousel in about 30 seconds. Along the way, he shares:
How better upfront prep lets smaller, cheaper options perform like frontier models and makes swapping models easier down the line
Why he hard-codes the rules he can’t break instead of trusting the model to remember them
His step-by-step framework for evaluating agents, from golden datasets to LLM-as-judge and observability tracing
Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunjamwal/
Goodmuncher: https://goodmuncher.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:16 Treating tokens as unpredictable OpEx vs. a One-time CapEx
06:21 Giving the model a layup by pre-processing data upfront
10:58 Arjun's demo: Turning one command into a 10-slide social carousel
15:44 Inside the pipeline architecture and its agents
19:09 How breaking up workflows cuts costs 30x and lowers user pricing
23:15 Arjun's framework for evaluating AI agents
27:56 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: Arjun Singh Jamwal.
29 min
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

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