Product Rising

By Women In ProductTechnology

Product Rising episodes

June 02(Replay) Sally Thornton on Today’s Job Market
There is a lot of debate about the state of the job market today. We definitely hear a lot about layoffs in the big tech companies and also about AI eliminating positions. But AI may be having a bigger impact in the requirements for specific roles and even perhaps new types of roles. We will be having periodic conversations with leading recruiters, hiring managers, and others about the evolving job market and what it takes to get hired/noticed.
Our first conversation is with Sally Thornton, CEO & Founder of Forshay, a firm that combines Executive recruiting with interim experts across Finance, HR, and Operations, and by aligning culture and leadership development skills to optimize team performance.
02:17 Forshay Firm Overview
03:27 Job Market Reality Check
06:09 Entry Level Pipeline Crunch
07:44 Where Hiring Is Growing
08:33 What Employers Want Now
09:56 Proving Curiosity in Interviews
11:34 Influence as a Core Skill
12:38 AI Transparency and Flatter Teams
14:47 Fractional Leadership Explained
19:36 How Orgs Are Reshaping for AI
22:43 The Rise of the AI Scout
24:55 Building an AI Experiment Team
25:43 Choosing Tools That Fit
27:16 AI in Hiring and Resume Filters
29:19 Beating the Rejection Machine
31:36 Community as Career Support
32:14 AI as Reflective Hiring Partner
34:37 Gut Instinct Versus Data
37:40 Future Proofing Through Community
39:56 Give More and Experiment Often
41:16 Tools That Reduce Overwork
43:42 Wrap Up and Where to Follow
📚Resources:
To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink
🌟 Where to find Sally:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallythornton/
Forshay: https://forshay.com
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
46 min
May 19Tracy Pizzo Frey on AI & Adolescence
We are reckoning with truths that are a bit uncomfortable. AI is not just a tool, but something people are relating to - personally. For kids and teens, we’re finding that that can be extremely dangerous.
In this episode, Shannon Peavey speaks with Tracy Pizzo Frey, a veteran technology leader including 11 years at Google where she oversaw Responsible AI for Google Cloud. As a consultant, she worked with Common Sense Media to develop a system for assessing the risks of large language models and AGI, with a particular focus on kids and teens.
Tracy brings deep technical experience and knowledge of how technology shapes behavior. Drawing on lessons from social media and emerging research, she explores what feels different about AI.
For young people who are still developing social and emotional skills, these interactions may have unique implications. AI systems are responsive and engaging, but they do not challenge users or help them navigate real-world complexity in the same way humans do. Over time, that difference may influence how teens build coping skills, relationships, and a sense of self.
Through her work with Common Sense Media, Tracy has evaluated leading AI systems and reached some important conclusions. Today’s models are not designed to serve as mental health companions for kids or teens, even though many young people are already engaging with them in ways that resemble emotional support.
Tracy shares how these assessments were created, what they measure, and what they reveal about the current state of AI safety. She offers a grounded perspective on building & using these technologies responsibly, especially when younger users are already deeply involved..
00:20 AI’s effect on kids
02:07 Why harms are specific to kids & teens
04:50 AI is not a search engine
07:27 Kids & teachers are often earliest adopters
08:06 Tech companies know more than they let on
09:15 Common Sense Media’s risk assessment project
09:57 Let’s not repeat mistakes
11:24 Tracy's involvement
13:11 Set your charter
14:50 Bring diverse, multi-disciplinary teams
16:25 Why psychological safety is important
17:38 Distilling masses of information into risk assessments
18:48 Why hype matters
20:30 How the team looked at social media
23:20 Early assessment of potential harms
25:10 Character.ai as precursor to interaction with LLMs
26:00 ‘Everything in the whole wide world’
27:13 Why kids are different
32:18 The danger of so-called frictionless relationships
33:02 The best way to test
36:50 Some surprising findings
39:08 How tech can reshape a worldview
41:02 There are good people, but - business models
43:30 Know the tradeoffs
45:07 The fact-to-fiction scale
46:30 Some positivity
48:00 Books, lawsuits, and resources
📚Resources:
Common Sense Media (CSM) AI Overview https://www.commonsense.org/ai
CSM’s Parents’ Guide https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/parents-ultimate-guide-to-generative-ai
CSM’s Parents’ guide to AI Companions & Relationships https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/parents-ultimate-guide-to-ai-companions-and-relationships
Google’s AI Principles https://ai.google/principles/
Social Media’s Harmful Effects on Children https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide
AI & Everything in the Whole Wide World benchmark study https://sites.rutgers.edu/critical-ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/586/2022/01/Bender_AI-and-Everything-in-the-Whole-Wide-World-Benchmark.pdf
Shannon Vallor’s research https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/shannon-vallor
Empire of AI by Karen Hao https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/
Where to find Tracy:
Tracy Pizzo Frey, Restorative AI https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-frey/
Where to find our host:
Shannon Peavey https://www.linkedin.com/in/spmad/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
50 min
May 12Leading the Transition to AI in Product with Gyanda Sachdeva
Gyanda joins Carmen Palmer for this episode in our monthly series, In The Lead.
Gyanda Sachdeva is VP of Product Management at LinkedIn where she currently leads the Consumer Experience team. She has over 15 years of product experience across a wide variety of domains including advertising, subscriptions, marketplaces and payments.
In this episode Gyanda shares her insights into managing product teams through the transition to AI and the changing role of PM. She also shares her personal career journey and the challenges of growing from an APM through individual contributor, group manager, director and now VP.
In The Lead is a monthly series on Product Rising sharing thought provoking conversations with a wide range of industry leaders hosted by Carmen Palmer, CEO of Women In Product.
Leading the Transition to AI in Product
00:00 Meet Gyanda at LinkedIn
02:34 Career Journey to Product
05:01 Long Tenure Lessons
08:11 Unlearning as a Leader
11:02 AI Shift Moment
14:35 Experimentation Over Roadmaps
19:36 Full Stack Building Culture
22:50 Trust Guardrails and Agents
24:44 Associate Product Builder Program
25:48 Early Adopters Drive ROI
26:20 Mentorship and Product University
28:26 Leaders Get Everyone In
30:42 Scaling AI Enablement
34:13 Keeping Up With Velocity
37:27 Diversity Access and Role Models
40:25 Three Day AI Jumpstart
43:30 Product Launch Gone Wrong
46:26 Daily Tools and Language Barriers
48:12 Embrace the Skill Shift
📚Resources:
Statistics on job skills change by 2030: https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/research/work-change-report
A guide for new grads on job trends: https://news.linkedin.com/2026/Grads-Guide-2026
✨Where to find Gyanda:
On LinkedIn
💫 Where to find Carmen:
On LinkedIn
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
51 min
May 05Rebecca Hinds, PhD: Avoiding the AI Productivity Trap
In this episode, host Shannon Peavey speaks with Professor Rebecca Hinds, PhD, a Stanford-trained organizational behavior expert and author of Your Best Meeting Ever. Rebecca, who runs the Glean Work AI Institute, explains why the future of AI at work is not about squeezing more productivity out of individuals, but about strengthening organizations as a whole. She shares her system for applying design principles to create effective meetings and illuminates the ways these can help leaders decide when technology enhances collaboration and when it risks undermining human trust, creativity, and emotion. She also highlights a growing body of research on how AI can expand access to insight and make work more effective – though today, she says, many organizations are getting it wrong. Instead of imposing AI from the top down, she argues that companies should empower employees to experiment, and that they should tolerate and even celebrate failure. Importantly, she says, organizations need to establish thoughtful guardrails that allow people to discover how these tools can truly help teams become more effective.
01:56 First things first, the bad news on AI and meeting culture
03:12 The good news on AI and meeting culture
05:29 Why leaders need to think about meetings holistically
07:10 Seven design principles to appy to meeting design
10:16 The “Four-D, CEO” test for meetings
13:41 Where AI can excel
18:02 Thinking differently about human roles
19:18 Why we should worry about “digital twins”
20:45 Keeping human emotions in mind
23:05 What can happen if you deprioritize people
23:30 Psychological safety at work, and with AI at work
26:09 The critical need to have AI policies
28:30 Enabling employees to find the value in AI
30:54 Tolerating, even celebrating failure
33:48 Collaboration with AI: an individual experience
36:36 The future is managing agents
37:38 Hope for a future of unparalleled insights
40:26 Using AI to help the organization, rather than the individual
42:48 Sharing resources and research
📚Resources:
Rebecca Hinds https://www.rebeccahinds.com/
Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu
The Glean Work AI Institute https://www.workai.institute
Rebecca’s book, “Your Best Meeting Ever” https://www.rebeccahinds.com/book
Organizational psychologist Bob Sutton https://bobsutton.net/about-bob/
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmonson
https://amycedmondson.com/about/
Wharton School of Business Professor Ethan Mollick https://x.com/emollick?lang=en
Charter newsletterhttps://www.charterworks.com/
🌟 Where to find Rebecca:
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-hinds/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
44 min
April 28Jen Gennai: Leading in AI’s Human Era
In 2017, before generative AI became a household term, Jen Gennai drafted Google’s original AI Principles. She was part of the effort to define what responsible AI should mean inside one of the most influential technology companies in the world. Now, years later, she is asking a more uncomfortable question. While companies race to deploy AI and governments work toward regulatory frameworks, who is seriously grappling with what this technology is doing to people and how they think, learn, and communicate? Jen argues that we are making progress on global rules and regulations. But we may NOT be moving fast enough on the human consequences. As an AI responsibility expert and consultant, she spends her time training leaders not just to adopt AI, but to build resilient cultures, to capture gains without eroding human capacities that make those gains meaningful.
02:29 How Google’s original AI Principles came about
07:13 Working cross-industry to up-level the market
08:02 History may not repeat, but it rhymes
09:35 Regulation: rules versus principles
13:08 How federal law could solve some problems
18:18 AI’s “harm categories”
24:03 Why we need to think more about human impact
26:49 Skills for the future: Resilience, analytics, communication, creative problem-solving
31:38 Why we need more focus on training programs
38:30 Should you say your business is AI-first? Maybe not.
40:43 Defining what “good” looks like
42:20 Leading means building psychological safety
📚Resources:
T3 https://t3-consultants.com/
Google AI Safety Principles https://ai.google/principles/
NIST AI Risk Management Framework https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework
EU AI Act https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
Latanya Sweeney’s 2016 keynote at the Grace Hopper Celebration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzP0NouiGo
Article describing Latanya Sweeney’s findings on racism in Google ads https://racismandtechnology.center/wp-content/uploads/latanya-sweeney-discrimination-in-online-ad-delivery.pdf
The U.S. Government’s AI Literacy Framework https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20260213
MIT’s Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/
HBR https://hbr.org/
🌟 Where to find Jen:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-gennai-b333933/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
45 min
April 21Practitioners Wanted: AI Ethics with AG Consulting's Angel Evan
What does it actually mean to build ethical, safe, and responsible AI inside a real company with real deadlines, revenue pressure, and competing priorities? In this episode, Shannon Peavey sits down with Angel Evan, AI Ethicist and Practice Lead at AG Consulting Partners. Angel works directly with Fortune 500 companies and major technology organizations to operationalize AI ethics inside product development teams. His focus is not on abstract principles, rather, it’s process, execution and decision-making under pressure.

Together, Shannon and Angel explore:
Why AI ethics cannot live only in policy documents or philosophical debates
How organizations can establish common starting points even when morality is subjective
The role of product managers, engineers, and leaders in translating values into shipping decisions
What it looks like to embed ethical thinking into roadmaps, governance, and release cycles
Why learning together across teams is more powerful than waiting for perfect consensus
Angel brings deep knowledge of philosophy and ethical theory, but his work is grounded in practical application. How do you turn abstract frameworks into something that actually guides a sprint? How do you navigate competing incentives? How do you move from aspiration to implementation? If you are a product leader, technologist, or executive trying to build AI responsibly without slowing innovation to a halt, this conversation offers a candid look at what it takes to move from ideas to impact.
00:00 Introduction
01:59 AI Ethics, Responsibility, Safety: Focusing on the human condition
02:50 Turning baseline principles into real products
04:13 What is fairness?
05:50 The path from data science
06:50 How we calibrate “right” and “wrong” in organizations
09:20 Finding a common starting point
12:14 Find the threshold between risk and productivity
15:42 What is AI literacy?17:05 Building your “ethical reasoning” muscles
22:30 Cautious optimism

📚Resources:
AG Consulting https://agconsultingpartners.com/
The Stanford University Human-centered AI (HAI) Index https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index
Angel Evan’s Machines & Meaning podcast https://angelevan.com/podcast/
The U.S. Government’s AI Literacy Framework https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20260213
University of Edinburgh https://www.ed.ac.uk/
🌟 Where to find Angel:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/angel-evan/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
29 min
April 14Marty Cagan on AI Product Coaching
Marty Cagan joins Carmen Palmer for this episode in our monthly series, In The Lead.
Marty is a renowned product executive and author, and is widely considered a thought leader in the field of Product Management. He is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), where he advises companies on how to create successful products using the practices of world-class tech organizations.
Marty is the author of influential books on the topic of product management and product teams including
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.
Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model
Recently Marty and the team at Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) have been exploring the use of AI LLMs as product coaches. As always Marty has strong views on the adoption of AI technology enabling true product builders, the increasing importance of true empowered product managers, and how AI Models can assist in the transition by coaching PMs and Product Leaders..
In The Lead is a monthly series on Product Rising sharing thought provoking conversations with a wide range of industry leaders hosted by Carmen Palmer, CEO of Women In Product.

Your AI Product Coach
00:00 Reckoning for Product
03:11 GenAI Changes the Stakes
07:11 Feature vs Empowered Teams
09:57 Build to Learn vs Earn
12:18 Prototyping Tools Boom
13:37 New PM Litmus Test
16:05 Why Coaching Fails
20:57 AI Coaching Tipping Point
23:58 Prompting for Product Model
27:30 Load Strategic Context
28:19 Strategic Context Inputs
29:23 Project Model Prompts
30:52 AI Coaching Limits
34:58 Why Humans Still Matter
38:42 What Coaching Looks Like
39:25 Building Product Sense Fast
42:01 Frameworks For Real Work
45:23 Adoption Curve Reality
49:13 Career Advice And Wrap
📚Resources:
SVPG Product Coaching and AI
Configuring Your Model As Product Coach - an example of how to get started using an AI Model to provide product coaching
✨Where to find Marty:
On LinkedIn
Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) Website & Newsletter sign up
💫 Where to find Carmen:
On LinkedIn
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
54 min
April 07AI Safety in Practice with OpenAI's Tonia Osadebe
In this episode of Women in Product, host Shannon Peavey sits down with Tonia Osadebe, AI Safety Lead at OpenAI, for a candid and practical conversation about what it really means to build responsibly in fast moving AI environments. Tonia shares her path into AI Safety, from her early work on AI Agents and machine learning fairness to stepping into a role focused squarely on evaluating and mitigating risk in frontier systems. She reflects on her time at Google, including being part of the team navigating the widely discussed “Glue on Pizza” AI search result moment, and what those high visibility incidents teach teams about iteration, accountability, and resilience. At the heart of this conversation is a simple but powerful idea: safety work is collaborative. Tonia explains how cross functional teams come together to define acceptable risk, make principled tradeoffs, and agree to improve systems over time rather than striving for perfection before launch.
02:29 Where does safety start in a project?
03:50 We’re mitigating - not eliminating - risk
08:14 Trying not to break everything
09:26 Let’s talk about glue on pizza
11:34 What we don’t know YET
14:06 How teams collaborate
19:02 We are not the “fun police”
21:35 Tension is expected
22:15 Measure where you can
24:05 Sharing ownership
25:15 Reflecting the real world
29:00 Access will change the way we dream
32:50 Building safety into roadmap
📚Resources:
OpenAI - https://openai.com/
Google AI Safety Principles - https://ai.google/safety/
Google’s Pizza-Glue Scandal https://www.wired.com/story/google-cut-back-ai-overviews-before-pizza-glue/
The U.S. Government’s AI Literacy Framework https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20260213
🌟 Where to find Tonia:
On LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonia-osadebe-a9b1a014/
Where to find our host:
Shannon Peavey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/spmad/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website - https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community - https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
38 min
March 31AI Ethics in Action: Alaska Airlines’ Shelby Tallent
What does it mean to be the person responsible for AI ethics inside a 30,000-person company? Shelby Tallent lives this every day. As the leader of AI ethics, responsibility, and compliance for Alaska Airlines, Shelby works at the intersection of technology, governance, and human trust. Her career across Amazon, Nordstrom, and TeleSign has shaped a perspective that blends policy rigor with product execution. In conversation with host Shannon Peavey, Shelby shares why AI ethics is not about slowing innovation but about guiding it. She explains how ethical value systems become practical decision frameworks, how individuals can hold their ground when goals conflict, and why keeping humans in the loop is not optional. AI should not be looked at as a way to “get us out of things,” she said, rather, we should let it expand our capacity to do what once felt impossible.
00:00 Introduction
01:49 How Alaska Airlines structures the AI Safety & Compliance role
02:18 The ways responsibilities map to company values
04:45 Where foundational principles for AI implementation originate
05:50 Navigating different AI rules per country
07:32 The “9-to-5” of AI Responsibility
13:02 Types of risk and how we mitigate
16:30 A path of many hats23:00 Keeping humans in the loop
29:30 Why we should be optimistic
33:00 Shelby’s challenge to your thinking and approach
📚Resources:
Alaska Airlines - https://www.alaskaair.com/
International Association of Privacy Professionals https://iapp.org/
Cloud Security Alliance https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/
The EU AI Act - https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
GDPR - https://gdpr-info.eu/
AI.gov - https://www.ai.gov/
Microsoft CoPilot https://copilot.microsoft.com/
FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/
🌟 Where to find Shelby:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shetallent/
Where to find our host:
Shannon Peavey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/spmad/

🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
35 min
March 24The Future Has Arrived: AI Safety, Ethics & Responsibility
If there is one thing we can agree on, AI is everywhere. It promises incredible gains in productivity, creativity, deep analysis, and progress in all kinds of fields from medicine to music. But - AI also brings anxiety, concern, and a great deal of unknowns.
We wanted to find out exactly who is thinking about the future of AI in terms of morality, ethics, psychological and physical safety? (Is anyone working on this? Hello?) We are happy to report that indeed, they are. And we want you to meet them.
In an exclusive new Product Rising podcast series, host Shannon Peavey explores the world of AI Ethics, Safety & Responsibility through conversations with experts working in AI policy, compliance, accountability, research and safety. She gets into the details to illuminate the ways these men and women are working hard to help shape a future we all want to live in.
Whether you’re an individual contributor, leader, founder, or advisor, listen in to learn about this incredibly important field that touches all aspects of tech and quite possibly, will have a profound impact on all of our lives from here.
00:20 What this series illuminates
01:07 The AI truth is, we don’t know it all
02:34 It’s time to come to terms with AI
03:40 Good people out there working on hairy problems
05:07 Time to work on minimizing harm
06:18 Our guests: consumer, LLMs, tech, policy
08:45 Risk mitigation takes all kinds of backgrounds
09:57 Causes for optimism
11:54 The legacy of Google’s AI principles
14:20 First guest Shelby Tallent (Alaska Airlines)
16:04 Our series starts March 24 and continues for 8 weeks: join us!
📚Resources:
Women in Product - http://womenpm.org
Product Rising on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/product-rising/id1584224561
Product Rising on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/7bcyVhpdhw0hbiRr6O4h1U
Product Rising on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLijcNLDj_QE2ge6Wqeh0MLx_qMKwot--9
The U.S. government’s AI Literacy Framework https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20260213
Thank you so much to our guests:
Shelby Tallent, Alaska Airlines https://www.linkedin.com/in/shetallent/
Jen Gennai, T3 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-gennai-b333933/
Tonia Osadebe, OpenAI https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonia-osadebe-a9b1a014/
Rebecca Hinds, PhD https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-hinds/
Angel Evan, AG Consulting https://www.linkedin.com/in/angel-evan/
Tracy Pizzo Frey, Restorative AI https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-frey/
Sara Tangdall, Nike https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-tangdall/
Where to find our hosts:
Shannon Peavey https://www.linkedin.com/in/spmad/
Elizabeth Ames https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethames/
🙋🏻‍♀️Where to find Women in Product:
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-product/posts/
Website https://womenpm.org/
Join the Community https://womenpm.org/wip-community/
17 min

About Product Rising

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Meet product and technology leaders who are shaping what comes next in a world driven by AI, rapid innovation, and global complexity. Every week, we explore the ways bold women and men are navigating…