Product Pals

How to make a good decision?

How to define a good decision? 

Why does this question matter? 

In this episode of Product Pals: Beyond the Build, Charlotte and Kiet sit down with Gareth Holebrook — author, former Royal Navy weapons engineer, product and technology leader, executive coach and endurance athlete with more than 30 Ironman-distance races behind him.

Across a career spanning engineering, physical products, startups, banking, Agile and leadership, Gareth has become fascinated by one question: how do we make better decisions when everything around us is moving faster?

Gareth shares a powerful idea: a decision isn’t a moment in time. It has a lifecycle.

A decision can be right when we make it, then become wrong as the context changes. The challenge is knowing when to persist, when to rethink — and when to stop.

Together, we explore:

→ Why good decisions can still have bad outcomes → How to govern decisions without slowing teams down → How to say yes to the right thing, and no to everything else → The impact of AI on how we think and make decisions

 → Why Intent-Based Leadership still matters as teams and technology change

 → The evolving role of Product  

This is one for product people navigating AI, uncertainty and the growing pressure to move faster, while still making thoughtful decisions.

A few of the books, thinkers and ideas Gareth references in this conversation:

📚 David Marquet — Turn the Ship Around! and Leadership Is Language Gareth has worked with David Marquet on Intent-Based Leadership since 2020 and credits his work with influencing how he thinks about leadership, agency and moving decisions closer to the people doing the work.

📚 Annie Duke — Quit Gareth references the idea of “resulting”: judging the quality of a decision based on its eventual outcome rather than the information available when the decision was made.

📚 Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow System 1 vs System 2 thinking comes up as Gareth, Charlotte and Kiet explore deliberate decision-making and whether AI risks pushing us towards more automatic thinking.

📚 Eliyahu Goldratt — Beyond the Goal / Theory of Constraints Gareth references Goldratt’s idea that we don’t necessarily remove a constraint — we relocate it. As AI accelerates delivery, could decision-making become the next constraint?

💡 Anders Ericsson — Deliberate Practice Referenced in Gareth’s thinking around practice, continuous improvement and intentionally getting better rather than simply repeating the same behaviour.

💡 One-Way vs Two-Way Door Decisions Gareth references the idea of reversible and irreversible decisions: understanding whether we can easily change direction later, or whether a decision will become increasingly difficult and expensive to reverse.

💡 Kaizen, Kanban, Kata & Hansei Ideas that have shaped Gareth’s thinking across engineering, Agile, endurance sport and leadership — from continuous improvement and flow to deliberate practice and reflection.

💡 Intent-Based Leadership & Mission Command Creating clarity around what we are trying to achieve while giving the people closest to the work greater agency to decide how to achieve it.

Ishi: The Discipline of Determined IntentGareth’s work on personal self-governance, determined intent, persistence, reflection 

Amazon: amazon.com/dp/1067285512Leanpub: leanpub.com/ishidodi

Kaizen of the Day 100 improvements and practices based around the phases of Gareth’s Ishi Spiral.

leanpub.com/KOTD100

Kettei: The Discipline of Governed IntentGareth’s work explores how organisational decisions can be treated as living, governable objects, with ownership, boundaries and a lifecycle.

leanpub.com/kettei-dogi

Ishi + Kaizen Bundle leanpub.com/b/ishikaizen

✍️ Ishi Dodi Substack: ishidodi.substack.com 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garethholebrook 🎥 YouTube: @garethholebrook

🎙️ Product Pals: Beyond the Build Stories of product thinkers becoming outcome owners.

🧠 Knowledge Snacks📖 Explore Gareth’s Work

Do Product Managers still need to know how to code? And with AI changing the way we work, what skills will actually matter in the next few years?

In this episode of Product Pals, Kiet and Charlotte are joined by Deepika Pandhi, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, joining us from Silicon Valley.

With nearly 18 years in tech, Deepika's career has taken her from software development to customer engineering, and eventually into product management. Today, she works on cloud database platforms supporting some of the world's most critical systems.

We chat about her career journey, what being a technical PM actually looks like, and how AI is changing her everyday work.

One of the more interesting parts of our conversation was how Deepika uses AI to build working prototypes in hours rather than days. She also shares why she treats AI like a junior PM — incredibly useful, but still needing plenty of context, guidance and validation!

We also get into what it's like growing into a Principal PM role, influencing without authority, managing competing priorities, and why staying close to customers is still one of the most important things a PM can do.

And of course, we ask the big question: Is product management still a good career to pursue in the age of AI?

Whether you're looking to break into product, progress in your career, or figure out how AI fits into your workflow, we hope you enjoy this conversation!

Connect with Deepika

Deepika Pandhi — Principal Product Manager at Oracle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpandhi/

Resources & Recommendations

Deepika shared a few of her favourite learning resources and some additional recommendations for our listeners:

Product Management & AI Courses

Marily Nika — AI Product Management
https://maven.com/marily-nika

Shreyas Doshi — Product Sense
https://maven.com/shreyas-doshi/product-sense

Lenny's Newsletter — Product Management & Growth
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/

AI Podcasts & Channels

Andrej Karpathy
https://www.youtube.com/andrejkarpathy

Dwarkesh Podcast
https://www.dwarkesh.com/

NVIDIA AI Podcast
https://blogs.nvidia.com/ai-podcast/

Personal Finance Recommendations

A few personal finance videos Deepika recommended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoeQUNASmTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFhlibQJvYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TsjAaFZG20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPe-d8oKGoc

Product Pals — Where Product People Get Real.

Hosted by Kiet Truong and Charlotte Bian, Product Pals is a podcast and community for Product Managers, aspiring PMs, and anyone involved in building digital products.

Through our PM Spotlight and Beyond the Build series, we share real conversations about career journeys, challenges, lessons learned, and life in product.

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the episode, follow Product Pals on Spotify and share it with a fellow product person.

What does innovation really look like inside a huge government organisation?

In this episode of Product Pals Live at Signal Not Noise 2026, we sit down with Adam Reitsma, former Senior Manager of Innovation and Capability at Transport for NSW.

Adam shares how a five-person team worked across AI, VR, experimentation and organisational capability to create impact at scale — often without a large budget or a traditional delivery team.

We talk about what makes a proof of concept actually useful, how GitHub Copilot grew to more than 500 active users across Transport for NSW, why good innovation is often about reducing risk rather than chasing novelty, and how internal communities can help great ideas spread across a massive organisation.

Adam also reflects on more sensitive innovation work, including at-risk behaviour detection and suicide prevention, and what changes when the stakes are much higher.

A practical conversation about constraints, experimentation, scaling, and one simple definition of innovation:

Any change that creates value.

🎙️ Recorded live at Signal Not Noise 2026.

Content note: This episode includes a discussion about suicide prevention, at-risk behaviour on the transport network, and the impact of these incidents on individuals, families and frontline staff.

Links & resources mentioned in this episode:

• TrackSAFE Foundation — rail safety, suicide prevention and employee wellbeing
• Black Dog Institute — mental health and suicide prevention research and resources
• TrackSAFE Suicide Awareness Training — free training for the rail workforce

Heshan Jayavardhana shares how 15-plus years across enterprise, scale-ups, startups, and platform products shaped the way he thinks about product management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The conversation centers on the changing role of product managers in an AI-assisted world, plus the lessons behind his current venture, PyFi, and his broader “Project Freedom” mindset.

projectfreedom.xyz

https://pifiproperty.com

https://linktr.ee/productpalspodcast

How does product work in a non-product/ content organisation?

At the ABC, Paru Madhavan works in a world where customer value is created not just by Product, Design and Engineering, but by Content, Marketing and teams with decades of audience knowledge.

Recorded live at Signal Not Noise 2026, we explore what product thinking looks like when you don’t have all the authority, and why that might actually make you a better product person.

Paru shares how the ABC has experimented with a different kind of product trio, bringing Product, Content and Marketing together around customer problems. We get into prioritisation, strategic bets, working within constraints, building trust across very different teams, and why putting everyone into Jira is definitely not the answer.

And perhaps the biggest reflection: great product practice doesn’t have to look like the Silicon Valley textbook and we can all be pragmatic and creative! 

Sometimes the best product thinking starts with understanding the organisation you’re actually in. Hope you enjoy this episode

 #ProductManagement #ProductThinking #ProductLeadership #ProductStrategy #ProductPals

It’s one of the biggest questions product teams are asking right now.

If anyone can generate prototypes, build interfaces, and ship ideas faster than ever… what happens to the role of design?

In our latest Product Pals Live episode, recorded at Signal Not Noise 2026, we sat down with Emma Carter, Head of Design at MYOB and author of three books on design leadership.

One idea from our conversation has really stayed with me:

AI will make building easier. But it won’t replace the need to deeply understand people, ask better questions, or know whether we’re solving the right problem.

That shift changes the conversation.

Design is not just about creating screens. It’s about connecting customer needs, business goals, technology, and human judgement.

In this episode we also explore: 🎨 Why design is much more than UI and aesthetics 🤝 How Product, Design, and Engineering can become better partners 🗣️ Why engineers should spend more time talking to customers ⚖️ When to move fast with AI—and when slowing down creates better outcomes 🔮 How AI may reshape the future of product teams and specialist roles

This was one of our favourite conversations from Product Pals Live, and we hope it sparks as much discussion for you as it did for our live audience.

🎧 The episode is out now! Search Product Pals on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform.

💬 I’m curious what do you think?

As AI becomes better at creating, do you think the roles of Product Manager, Designer, and Engineer will become more specialised… or begin to merge?

AI isn’t just changing how we build products—it’s changing how product organisations work.

Recorded live at Signal Not Noise 2026, Herry Wiputra, Chief Product Officer at hipages, shares his vision for the future of product management in the AI era.

We discuss why leaders should think like system owners, how Product, Design, and Engineering roles may evolve, why judgement is becoming more valuable than execution, and how AI could replace traditional handoffs with rapid experimentation.

We also cover AI “slop”, hiring Product Managers, Claude, Figma Make, and the practical changes Herry is already making inside his teams.

A thought-provoking conversation for anyone building products in the age of AI.

In this episode of Product Pals: Beyond the Build, Charlotte and Kiet sit down with Justin Homer, Partner and Co-founder of Be Luminous, to explore what it really means to create meaningful change through collaboration, design and play.

Justin shares the journey from social policy and homelessness support to building world-class collaborative design practices across global consultancies and now Be Luminous. Together, they unpack why great work requires vulnerability, why creativity needs messiness, and why leaders must design systems that help people do their best work ,  not just manage change after the fact.

This conversation is for product thinkers, founders and leaders who care about craft, systems, people and the courage it takes to keep pushing for the last 5%.

🧠 Knowledge Snacks

Here’s a curated list from Justin’s learning library.

• Matt Taylor
• David Snowden & the Cynefin Framework

• Dieter Rams

• Too Good To Go, Reducing food waste one surprise bag at a time.
• Substack and the following subscriptions:

1. Fix The News-A newsletter focused on positive progress and solutions from around the world.
2. The Citerini Project- AI futures and emerging technology discussions.
3. Michael Burry-Investor and author known from The Big Short and his commentary on markets and economics.

• Vikings: War of Clans , Justin’s current gaming obsession.

• A fashion-focused podcast hosted by Bella Freud (fashion designer and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud), which Justin describes as surprisingly intimate, thoughtful and full of unexpected conversations.

Product Pals is going live!

In this special episode, Charlotte and Kiet sit down with Ed Wong, founder of LAST Conference and creator of Signal Not Noise,to announce the very first Product Pals LIVE podcast event happening in Sydney this June.

Together, we explore the evolution from LAST to Signal Not Noise, why authentic communities matter more than ever, and how product and tech professionals are navigating an industry shaped by AI, uncertainty, and constant change.

Ed shares the story behind building one of Australia’s most loved grassroots product communities, what it takes to sustain a community for over a decade, and why “finding your tribe” still matters in a world full of noise and hot takes.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The future of product management in the age of AI

• Why titles matter less than the value you bring

• Cross-functional careers and evolving roles

• Building meaningful communities in product and tech

• The vision behind Signal Not Noise

• What to expect from the upcoming conference

🎙️ Product Pals LIVE will be hosted at Signal Not Noise in Sydney on 25 June at the NSW Teachers’ Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills.

🎟️ Product Pals listeners can also enjoy 10% off tickets using the code: PRODUCTPALSLIVE

Find out more here: Signal Not Noise Sydney

If you’re curious about the future of product, community, and meaningful work — this episode is for you.

In this episode of Product Pals, we sit down with Kurt Yang to explore why every PM needs a stronger commercial mindset.

Kurt shares his journey from finance into product, unpacks the difference between commercial and digital product management, and reflects on how AI may reshape the future of the PM role.

We also discuss:

• commercial mindset in product

• AI and the future of PMs

• ownership, accountability, and product leadership

• startup lessons and common mistakes

• frameworks, substance, and career growth

A thoughtful conversation for product managers navigating change, ambiguity, and what comes next.

About Product Pals

Product Pals is where product people get real — exploring product craft, career growth, and the human side of building in tech. 

Follow and leave a review for more honest conversations with product leaders, builders, and operators navigating the real world of product management.

Contact [email protected] if you’d like to be part of the show. Guest enquiries, sponsorship opportunities, and feedback are always welcome.