People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

Plenty of mid-market food and beverage brands, some doing hundreds of millions in revenue, still run product development out of spreadsheets. A single launch can take 12 to 18 months and move through R&D, brand, operations, and a co-manufacturer, with a lot of places for things to go wrong.

Before starting Zucca, Jesse Guzman had more than 100 conversations with people inside that process and heard the same problem over and over: details slip through the cracks. Jesse is co-founder and CEO of Zucca, a Seattle startup building an operating system for CPG product development. Before that he worked in brand strategy at Prophet, in biz ops at NerdWallet, as chief of staff at Rain, and at the venture studio Pioneer Square Labs, where Zucca started.

He joins Jeremy Pomp and Chad Brinton to talk about why product development is under so much pressure right now. New federal and state rules on healthy claims, front-of-pack labels and food dyes. GLP-1s changing what people want from their food. Consumers who expect brands to react in weeks, not years. And AI finally making the problem workable. Jesse walks through what really happens when you pull one dye out of a product: the replacement can change the taste, texture and cost, push you outside your current supply chain, and break claims you were printing on pack.

Also in this one: why enterprise PLM software never came downmarket; turning a SharePoint folder of ingredient specs into a structured ingredient database; a brand lead who got in front of a national retailer's buyer in a few months instead of over a year; capturing the reasoning behind product decisions so expertise stays when people leave; why Zucca paid an independent evaluator to try to prove its own nutrition label engine wrong; and Chad on what a missed launch did to the revenue and inventory plan at Made In.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:10 Jesse's path: Prophet, NerdWallet, Rain, Pioneer Square Labs
02:32 What's broken in CPG product development
04:45 Running development in parallel instead of in sequence
07:16 Why now: regulation, GLP-1s, and speed
11:39 From over a year to a few months with a national retailer
13:44 What a missed launch does to the plan
16:48 Why enterprise PLM never reached mid-market brands
21:03 Capturing the "why" before people leave
21:56 Paying someone to prove your product wrong
24:07 The unglamorous middle
28:30 What's next for Zucca

Guest: Jesse Guzman, CEO & Co-Founder @ Zucca
Hosts: Jeremy Pomp & Chad Brinton, Atomic

Everybody knows what S&OP is. Everybody has an idea of how it works. And nobody is happy with theirs.

Aaron Alpeter has seen that problem from both extremes. He came up through Unilever's supply chain program when it was ranked the best in the world, then spent a decade in C-level operating roles at Lululemon, The Farmer's Dog, The Flex Company, and Hubble. In 2016 he founded izba, which helps consumer brands start, scale, and eventually sell.

He joins Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter to strip S&OP down to something a founder can actually run: three questions, every month. What do we want to happen? What do we think is going to happen? What actually happened? The meetings, the templates, the models — all of it is downstream of holding the tension between those three.

Then the harder half: culture. Aaron walks through the archetypes his team developed at izba — command-and-control (Ralph Lauren, in his 90s, still signs off on every piece of merchandise with his name on it), franchise and bottoms-up (KFC corporate asking its franchisees, politely, to please sell more), and consensus-driven (Unilever, P&G, everyone locked in a room until somebody gives up). His argument: the failure mode is almost never the process. It's running the wrong process for the culture you actually have. Don't fight the culture. Harness it.

Also in this one: why he wants to retire the word "forecast," or at least demote it to a verb; why the hardest cultural transition in planning is post-acquisition, told through a target-setting mismatch between Mirror and Lululemon that nobody caught for six months; Michael on turning tribal knowledge into executable code, and why operations runs half a click behind finance on AI adoption (finance has a general ledger — ops has no unified data model); and Aaron's closing advice to founders, which is just consistency — with the Hubble Contacts story where eighteen months of boring, repeated forecasts bought enough factory trust that they wildly oversold launch on thirty days of inventory without a single stockout.

Disclosure: Aaron is an advisor to Atomic.

Guest: Aaron Alpeter, Founder & CEO @ izba
Hosts: Jeremy Pomp & Michael Rossiter, Atomic

People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

People Who Plan — Ep. 17Running a Supply Chain on Spreadsheets (feat. Jennifer Hernandez, Director of Operations @ BK Beauty) 

Two months ago, Jennifer Hernandez downloaded Claude for the first time. Today she runs the entire supply chain of a fast-growing beauty brand with it. 

Jennifer is Director of Operations at BK Beauty, where she owns planning, forecasting, purchasing, freight, and fulfillment — on a deliberately lean stack. No ERP. No WMS. Shopify as the source of truth, and spreadsheets for everything else, by design. 

She joins Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter to walk through what changed: purchase orders that took hours now take ten minutes, a freight-and-customs document workflow that runs off a single uploaded PDF, and a daily brief that reads her email, Slack, and project board before she sits down. In her words, "it's like having four more people on my team that I don't have." 

We also get into the path that got her here — 15 years at Target, a promotion ceiling she couldn't get past without a degree, the overnight logistics job she took on purpose, and the boss who gave her what she calls the kindest kick in the ass she could have received. If you've been meaning to find time for this stuff, watch what two months did. 

Guest: Jennifer Hernandez, Director of Operations @ BK BeautyHosts: Jeremy Pomp & Michael Rossiter, Atomic People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Buying AI-native software isn't like buying traditional SaaS — and treating it like it is is why a lot of rollouts stall. Atomic AEs Brian Quinn and Daniel Spurlock join co-founder Michael Rossiter to unpack what really happens when a company moves off spreadsheets: why the old flexibility-vs-precision tradeoff is disappearing, how growth quietly manufactures its own complexity, and the point where adding one more planner (and one more spreadsheet) simply stops working. If you plan, forecast, or run ops for a growing business, this one's about the decision behind the decision. Guests: Brian Quinn & Daniel Spurlock, Account Executives @ AtomicHost: Michael Rossiter, Co-Founder @ Atomic People Who Plan goes inside the minds of modern operators. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

What if the next wave of electrification isn't four wheels in California — but two wheels in São Paulo?

In this episode of People Who Plan, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter reconnect with their former Tesla colleague Billy Blaustein, Co-Founder & COO of Vammo — now Latin America's largest electric-motorcycle and battery-swapping platform. From the Model 3 trenches to building on the ground in Brazil, Billy breaks down the operations story behind 5,000+ electric motorcycles, a million-plus battery swaps, and 700 swap stations doing 30,000 swaps in a single day.

We get into why Brazil is the prime place to electrify a fleet (a 90% renewable grid, the cleanest of the G20), the CapEx-vs-OpEx math that makes electric cheaper for high-mileage riders, building a factory in the Amazon Free Trade Zone, and his thesis that the West is reading global electrification through the wrong lens.

Jesse Hartman took an unconventional road into data science — music theory, a stint running coffee shops in Austin, and a long-running coffee podcast before a boot camp landed him in supply chain. In this episode, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter dig into how that winding path shaped the way he thinks about operations, and what it actually means to be a "data scientist" in the age of AI.The conversation centers on how radically the work has changed. Jesse explains the difference between cognitive offloading (handing work to AI while staying firmly in the loop) and cognitive surrender (the trap of trusting it blindly), and why reviewing and approving code all day is its own kind of exhausting. He shares how tools like Claude Code have dissolved the old silos at Atomic — now he's shipping front-end fixes, and a customer feedback feature that once felt like weeks of work went live in about two hours.Along the way: managing the impossible economics of low-temp, non-homogenized milk at a coffee shop (you can't run out, but you can't overstock), why "the best fertilizer is the gardener's footsteps," and the throughline that ties it all together — AI hasn't changed the fundamentals of good operations, it's just exposed where planning is weak. As Jeremy puts it, the hard part was never doing more; it's making things simple.Plugs: Jesse's music on SoundCloud (EP in the works) https://hartman.coffee/music/ and thecoffeepodcast.com.

Ep. 13 | Sean Agatep, Co-Founder @ Vincero CollectiveChapters 00:00 — Welcome and origin story: Gonzaga, China, and five years in Guangzhou02:00 — Launching Vincero on Kickstarter with Italian marble watches04:00 — Twelve years in: building a brand around sentimentality06:00 — The gifting business: 40% of sales in Q4 and the cost of missing08:00 — The 2022 down year and the shift to disciplined operating10:00 — Engraving at scale and the discipline of doing less13:00 — Rebuilding the org chart by going senior offshore15:00 — Why hybrid only works with 30+ people in one city20:00 — High agency, AI, and outputs over presence22:00 — Three co-founders, lifelong friends, and built-in checks and balances25:00 — "Just fucking use it": Vincero's stance on AI adoption27:00 — Connecting tools to AI and adjusting prompts in real time

Andy Hicks is Chief Transformation Officer at Driven Distribution Group, and he has spent his career inside an industry where the customer expectation is one hour from order to part in hand — up there with blood logistics for pure speed pressure. The conversation moves through the three forces reshaping automotive parts distribution: SKU proliferation (Ford used to make two starter motors; now it's 1,800 SKUs), tariffs that flipped from a constant to a variable and forced sourcing pivots from China to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and the rise of AI-enabled platforms like Parts Tech and Nextpart that are reshaping how distributors price and stock. Andy also gets into Chinese New Year planning (the real shutdown is four weeks down plus a 50/75/100 ramp), his people-process-systems approach with IT pulled in early, and why scenario planning only works when finance is in the room before the PO button gets hit. Topics Covered:- The one-hour delivery expectation in automotive parts distribution- SKU proliferation: from 2 Ford starter motors to 1,800- Tariffs as a variable, not a constant — and the 40% "Made in Vietnam" rule- AI platforms reshaping cross-distributor pricing and stocking decisions- Chinese New Year: the real four-week shutdown plus 50/75/100 ramp- People-process-systems, with IT brought in early- Scenario planning that survives contact with the 13-week cash flow

Cody Berenson started his career closing up a burrito restaurant at 2 AM for drunk college kids in Boulder. He fell in love with operations — the sheer amount of time, money, and energy it takes to get a product onto a shelf — and never looked back. That path took him from managing supply chains for nationally distributed brands to his current role as SVP of Operations & Services at Siddhi Capital, a growth equity firm with a twist: a full operating team of ten embedded alongside the investment side.

It's a model that exists because Cody saw something that shocked him when he entered the investment world — how many people write checks without understanding the operational backbone of the businesses they're funding. Siddhi's team plugs into portfolio companies and beyond, rolling up their sleeves on everything from building manufacturing lines for products that have never been made at commercial scale to setting up S&OP processes for brands doing $200–300 million in revenue that still don't have the right planning infrastructure in place.

The conversation covers what changes operationally at each stage of a brand's lifecycle — and what goes wrong when teams don't recognize the shift. Pre-revenue is its own animal: no data, high aspirations, and a foundation that has to be built on assumptions. The $1–10 million range is, in Cody's view, actually harder — everything is changing, retailers are calling, innovation is flying, and you're building systems while the plane is taking off. Past $20 million, the mistakes stop being small. A hundred thousand dollars. A million dollars. The margin for error compresses and the need for real planning rigor becomes non-negotiable.

Cody's sharpest point lands on capital. S&OP isn't just sales and operations planning — it's working capital planning. In today's funding environment, where brands actually have to be profitable or on their way to it before they get their next check, getting inventory right can extend your runway by six months to a year. Getting it wrong means burning cash you can't replace.

The episode also goes deep on how product characteristics shape operations in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. A sparkling water brand has dozens of co-manufacturers to choose from at every scale. A brand making something specialized might have two — or might need to build its own line. That constraint changes everything about how you plan, and getting founders and boards to understand the landscape they're operating within is half the job.

Also in this episode: the cottage cheese revolution and why Good Culture couldn't make enough product even if they wanted to, how AI is flipping the 80/20 rule for operators who used to spend most of their time just organizing data, and Quality Italian's chicken parm pizza — which sounds gross and is absolutely overkill, but apparently phenomenal.

Topics Covered:

- From managing a Boulder burrito restaurant to SVP at a growth equity firm: Cody's path through operations

- How Siddhi Capital embeds a full operating team alongside its investment portfolio — and why that model exists

- Brand lifecycle stages: what changes operationally from pre-revenue to $10M to $200M+

- Why the $1–10M stage is actually harder than pre-revenue for operators

- S&OP as working capital planning: why getting inventory right can change your fundraising plan entirely

- The cottage cheese problem: what happens when demand explodes and manufacturing capacity doesn't exist

- How product characteristics and co-manufacturer availability fundamentally shape your planning constraints

- AI for operators: moving from 80% data wrangling to faster, cheaper decision-making

- Why writing a good AI prompt is actually an operational discipline — you still need to know the answers to the test

- The case for formalizing processes before automating them

Corey Sisson spent 16 years at General Mills — one of the largest CPG companies on the planet, home to billion-dollar brands and decades of institutional process. Then he left for Smart Sweets, a scrappy Canadian better-for-you candy startup, to build its sales planning function from scratch. The two worlds could not be more different, and Corey has thought harder than most about exactly how and why.He is now the VP of Sales Strategy and Planning at Smart Sweets, where he oversees the planning function that bridges field sales and supply chain, and has recently taken on the company's US club channel — including a Costco rollout that was literally happening as they recorded. Four years in, he describes the ride as equal parts adrenaline and gray hairs.The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to plan for an emerging CPG brand. At General Mills, you have 19 cuts of data, a merchandising team fixing your shelves, and layers of process built up over 150 years. At Smart Sweets, you have fewer data points, no dedicated merchandiser, and a pace of change that makes every retail call a potential re-forecast. Corey is remarkably honest about the gap: the math of demand planning looks simple from the supply side — units per store, per week, times store count — until a retailer calls two days later and contracts your shelf space, pulls a display, or shifts your facings. That's not a forecasting failure. That's just the reality of how the CPG world works.His take on healthy tension between sales and supply is one of the sharpest in the series: you can't build a brand if you don't have product on shelf, and you can't have product on shelf without a supply plan that can move fast enough to capture opportunities when they show up. Miss that window and you've handed revenue back to a behemoth competitor — one who absolutely has a merchandising team.Also in this episode: what Corey had to unlearn after 16 years at a highly matrixed organization, why making a call and owning it is a skill you have to actively develop, and what Smart Sweets has coming down the innovation pipeline in 2026.