Product Talk

AI is changing the economics of building software, and that means the way product teams plan, prioritize, and build has to change too.

In this episode of Product Talk, Denise Hemke sits down with Webflow CPO Ben Haefele to explore what happens when AI makes building software faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Ben shares why traditional upfront planning can actually create more risk, how Webflow is using "building backwards" to put working software in front of customers sooner, and why human judgment and customer empathy matter more than ever.

From agentic development and rapid experimentation to the rise of the product "editor," Ben offers a practical look at how leaders can redesign their teams around a faster learning loop, without losing sight of the strategic vision that keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

If you're leading a product organization in the age of AI, this conversation will help you rethink how you build, learn, and decide what deserves to ship.

In this episode, we cover:

(1:25) Why planning made sense when engineering time was expensive, and why that logic no longer holds

(3:53) What roadmaps, prioritization, and product planning look like in a world where what's possible keeps shifting

(6:05) The new bottleneck: it's not time to code, it's time to learn from what you've shipped

(7:55) Building backwards: what changes when you start with working code instead of documents and Figma files

(10:47) Why documentation written before implementation is always wrong, and how agents fix that

(12:15) Why being a great editor is now the most critical skill in the AI era

(14:42) What surprised Webflow when they started running agentic development experiments, and why best practices matter more than ever

(16:30) The CPO's new job: living on the frontier, systematizing what you find, and raising your ambition accordingly

(18:20) How Webflow progressively enabled its entire product org: from design, to product management, to shipping real code to production

(21:38) Why human judgment is not going away, and what the product manager's role looks like in an agentic workflow

(23:53) How agentic development finally unlocks the P3s and P4s that have been sitting in the icebox for years

(25:28) Why Webflow's internal agentic development practice mirrors the product experience they need to deliver to customers

(27:28) The custom in-house harness and organizational second brain that gives agents full business context before they write a line of code

(28:51) The three things Ben would tell any CPO who wants to redesign their product development lifecycle right now

Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]

Jonathan Shottan began his career at the intersection of data and scale, working at Pinterest as the company was expanding internationally, and at Facebook before that, where he learned how data could drive business growth. He is now the Chief Product and Content Officer at Tonal, an intelligent gym that sits on your wall and builds strength through a magnetic resistance motor that collects physiological data 50 times per second across 300 different arm articulations. That data, accumulated across a large and growing user base, is now the world's largest kinetic dataset, the only one with enough fidelity to enable predictive health outcomes at scale. Jonathan was selected as a finalist for the 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of CPO Rising series, host and Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Jay Patel sits down with him to talk about what it actually takes to build a product with sub-1% monthly churn and over $100M in ARR, how he thinks about boulders versus pebbles when deciding what to build, and why he believes saying no is most of his job.

In this episode, we cover:

(0:35) Jonathan's background and career path from ad tech to Facebook to Pinterest to Tonal

(1:03) What Tonal actually does and why the kinetic dataset is the most exciting part of the business

(5:37) How the CPO role has evolved from strategic backstop to speed limiter

(7:01) Tonal's product-led culture and what that means for how decisions get made

(8:04) Why every product leader has to think of themselves as a builder first, even as AI takes on more of the building

(10:46) The 3-year vision, 1-year operating plan, quarterly goals framework for balancing today and tomorrow

(12:58) What first-time CPOs almost always get wrong and what to do instead

(16:47) The CPO alpha effect: what measurable business and cultural outcomes come from having a strong CPO at the table

(18:49) How Tonal uses AI in the product and how Jonathan's team cleared years of orphaned Jira tickets in two days using Claude

(21:07) Boulders versus pebbles: how Tonal decides what to build, what to say no to, and why healthcare is the next big bet

(24:42) How Jonathan hires exceptional PMs and the one interview question he asks every candidate

(28:02) Balancing hardware, software, and content to keep churn below 1%

(31:21) What stints in growth and monetization at Pinterest and Facebook taught him about customer value

Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]

Trey Courtney started his career as a software developer at Accenture and spent 16 years evolving into the role of Global Chief Product and Partnership Officer at Mood Media, the largest provider of audio and visual in-store experiences in the world. If you have heard music playing in a Macy's, seen a menu board at Whole Foods, or walked through a Ferrari showroom, you have experienced what Mood Media builds for roughly 600,000 locations worldwide. Trey was selected as a finalist for Products That Count's 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of Product Talk, host and Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi sits down with him to talk about what it takes to bring a product mindset into a sales-led, private equity-backed company, how he is navigating AI investment when the stakes are high and the tools keep changing, and what he thinks the CPTO org chart looks like in three years.

In this episode, we cover:

(1:23) Trey's path from software developer at Accenture to running product, creative, and partnerships at Mood Media

(3:24) What Mood Media actually does: the brand behind the brand at 600,000 locations worldwide

(5:32) How product decisions get made when the roadmap is largely driven by custom client requests

(7:14) Sales-led, private equity-backed: how that shapes product culture and what Trey has tried to change about it

(9:17) Why Trey now owns creative and partnerships in addition to product, and what breaks when those functions are siloed

(13:23) Where AI is going in the experience economy: real-time personalization and why they started with 11 Labs three years ago

(16:04) The hardest part of AI leadership: which tool to bet on, when to launch, and how to manage compliance in a large company

(20:57) The jagged line: what it actually looks like when AI investments go wrong on the way to going right

(22:55) How AI is landing differently across creative, engineering, and product management teams

(26:01) What happens when salespeople start vibe coding and showing prototypes to clients

(29:47) What the CPTO org chart looks like in three years: QA, DevOps, and the PM-to-engineer ratio

(33:43) The competitive analysis agent that builds battle cards automatically so salespeople stop asking

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing JUUNOO Founder Chris Van de Voorde to discuss building modular and reusable interior walls to eliminate waste in commercial real estate fit-outs, scaling a circular economy startup from Belgium to rapid growth in the U.S., and the product design philosophy of relentlessly minimizing components to build simple, great products.

(1:30) Chris's background: engineer, walls obsessive, and why he named JUUNOO after his kids Jules and Lanor (3:08) The problem JUUNOO is solving: single-use office fitouts in a world of shorter leases (6:11) How a COVID strategic Excel spreadsheet led Chris from Belgium to New York (10:05) Company culture: three rules, crucial conversations, and why sustainability comes before sales (12:36) Why diversity is just good business: the 99.999% of smart people not working for your company (13:31) The revenue model: why gross margins improve 20% the second and third time you sell the same wall (17:49) Go-to-market flywheel: why JUUNOO targets tenants first and uses those wins to unlock architects (20:06) Circular valuable design: how to build products where end-of-life value exceeds reuse cost (22:35) The Circular Value Institute: how Chris is teaching a 70-billion-dollar retailer to profit from resale (25:06) The biggest opportunity in sustainability right now, and why Chris is also worried it might be too late (28:28) What is coming next for JUUNOO: the clickable drywall patent and the plan to roll it out in 20 countries (34:46) What makes a great product manager: a relentless drive for fewer components

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/turning-interior-walls-into-a-circular-economy-business/

Viviano Cantu is the AI Product Lead at WHOOP, but his path there did not start in product. He joined WHOOP in 2021 as a software developer, led the storefront team, and then in March 2023 moved over to start a new team around coaching. That same month, he and a few colleagues started ordering pizza on Friday afternoons and hacking on whether an LLM could actually coach someone throughout their day. Six months later, WHOOP Coach launched as the first generative AI coach in a wearable. He has led AI at WHOOP ever since, and along the way his team built AI Studio, an internal platform that lets anyone at WHOOP go from idea to a working AI agent in under ten minutes. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Viviano to dig into what separates a weekend health chatbot from a coaching product that reasons over one person's physiology consistently for years, how WHOOP thinks about evals, synthetic personas, and the my memory feature, and what his engineering background actually changed when he crossed over into product.

In this episode, we cover:

(1:56) The Boston Rat Czar side project, and what it says about how Viviano approaches problems

(3:20) How WHOOP Coach started: Friday hack sessions, GPT-3, pizza, and a prototype called the WHOOP Bot

(8:33) The GPT-4 pivot mid-build, and why pushing the timeline was the right call

(10:41) The gap between a weekend AI demo and a coaching product that knows one person over years

(11:56) How WHOOP uses synthetic personas to run evals without touching real member data

(13:35) Who decides what a good coaching answer looks like, and how AI Studio made that process faster

(17:25) What building AI Studio did to how the team thinks about prioritization

(20:00) Where WHOOP intentionally put the friction, and why PII never touches the model

(21:39) The new role being developed at WHOOP that sits between engineer and PM

(25:02) What entering the clinical space with EHR sync taught Viviano about precision versus recall

(27:43) Why WHOOP lets members see and edit everything the AI knows about them

(30:34) What Viviano brought from engineering to product, and what did not survive the move

(33:01) The tweet about AI-assisted coding discipline, and what he was watching on his team

(34:56) An AI workflow tip for PMs: one folder, parallel threads, and auto-approve

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/wearable-data-into-an-ai-coach/

Nikita Miller spent 15 years building products before becoming President of Product and Technology at Perk, an AI platform for business travel and spend management. She made the move from the U.S. to Barcelona about a year ago, arriving right in the middle of Perk's transition from a single travel product to a multi-product platform. The timing meant navigating that transformation while also rethinking how product teams work in an era where AI has changed almost everything about how work gets done. In this episode, host Cassio Sampaio sits down with Nikita to talk about the UX renaissance she sees happening in B2B, the concept of shadow work and why removing it is one of the biggest product opportunities right now, why she thinks the most important PM skill in the AI era is discernment rather than taste, and what she tells early-career product managers who are trying to figure out where to invest in themselves when the landscape keeps shifting.

In this episode, we cover:

(1:32) What surprised Nikita most about moving from the U.S. to Barcelona and leading an international team at Perk

(3:27) How AI changed the structure and pace of her product teams: smaller teams, cross-functional flexibility, designers doing front-end coding

(7:55) Travel as a massive wedge: why winning in B2B travel is harder than it looks and how it opens the door to spend, events, and more

(13:26) The UX renaissance in B2B: why B2C expectations have permanently raised the bar for enterprise product

(17:31) Whether AI helps disruptors or actually empowers incumbents more

(19:21) How Perk is actively thinking about disrupting itself

(20:10) Discernment over taste: why the ability to judge which problems to solve and when is more important than ever

(22:44) Shadow work: the framework for identifying what can be automated so customers can focus on what matters

(24:31) Where the interface goes from here: MCP, voice, visual, and why it probably will not collapse to just one thing

(28:27) Advice for early-career PMs: what persists across every wave of technology change

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual menopause and perimenopause care company serving patients in all 50 states, covered by insurance. She spent 15 years as a venture and private equity investor, then founded and sold a digital health company called Kerbo, before her own perimenopause experience made the care gap impossible to ignore. When she finally found a clinician who understood what she was going through, that expert was an hour away and cost a fortune out of pocket. In 2021, she co-founded Midi with Sharon Mears to bring expert menopause and perimenopause care to every woman virtually, in 50 states, covered by insurance. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Joanna to talk about what her investor background gave her as an operator, how Midi thinks about trust as a product decision rather than a brand value, and what it actually looks like to scale care quality to hundreds of thousands of patients without letting it slip.

In this episode, we cover:

(2:22) What 15 years of investing taught Joanna about building product, and what pure operators miss

(3:46) What tells her a product org is healthy, and the CEO/product leader tension she manages every day

(9:29) What trust actually looks like inside a product decision at Midi, and where they fell down early

(13:24) MIDI University: how they scaled expert clinical knowledge to hundreds of nurse practitioners

(16:39) Why AI models are often wrong about women's health, and what that means for Midi's care protocols

(18:13) How Midi uses AI to scan charts and identify which providers have patients who keep coming back

(21:40) What Midi will and will not do, and how they decide where the scope ends

(26:25) Why insurance coverage was non-negotiable from day one when cash pay would have been so much easier

(28:35) How the equity mission holds up inside commercial decisions

(31:02) The AI advisory board: AI John Doerr on OKRs, AI Dan Ariely on text message rewrites

(32:36) How Midi uses AI without recreating the feeling that got women dismissed in the first place

(37:23) Lightning round: prevention over optimization, and what the next generation of women's health founders should build

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

Saee Pansare started her career not in software but in a lab, studying food engineering and imagining a future developing flavors and ingredients. What she discovered instead was that she had the instincts of a product manager all along; she just happened to be building physical products. After stints at Kraft Heinz, Amazon, and Whole Foods, she landed at DoorDash where she now leads the DoorDash for Business charter, building group order and large order systems for corporate clients. In this episode of Products That Count, podcast host and Chief AI Product Officer at Boston New Technology Shweta Agrawal sits down with Saee to unpack what food product development taught her about software PM, why she believes domain expertise beats technical background when switching industries, and how she navigated the trust-building challenge that every career changer eventually faces.

In this episode, we cover:

(2:08) Saee's path from food engineering undergrad to MBA to product management (4:33) What a food engineer actually does, and why it looks a lot like software development (6:05) Managing the P&L for cheese powders and marshmallows at Kraft Heinz (10:28) How Saee ran customer discovery and prototype testing for physical food products (15:21) How pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID eating habits are completely different, and what that means for food businesses (18:05) Why time to commercialization pushed her out of food and into software (23:21) How she applied for PM roles without a technical background, and what strategy worked (27:00) The hardest part of the transition: building trust with software engineers (30:36) Job search advice for career switchers: what a resume alone cannot do (32:07) What the DoorDash for Business charter actually is, and what the day to day looks like (34:54) DoorDash versus Amazon: how company size shapes the speed of everything (37:12) Advice for anyone transitioning from physical products into software PM right now

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

Ghazal Badiozamani is the SVP of Product Management at Cengage, one of the world's largest education companies with roots in publishing that go back over 100 years. Before Cengage, she spent eight years at Elsevier helping legacy businesses understand and adopt emerging technology, starting with machine learning before it was mainstream, eventually building a digital team from scratch and launching a digital authoring system from nothing. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Ghazal to talk about what it takes to lead product inside a company that has existed for over a century, why the squad model may be approaching a fork in the road, and her take on the most pressing question in AI-era product development: what does product even mean now?

In this episode, we cover:

(1:11) Ghazal's path from strategy to product at Elsevier, and what prompted the move to Cengage

(4:32) What it actually feels like to lead product inside a company that's been around for generations

(6:08) Why product problems always end as people problems, and why that's the most interesting part of the job

(7:28) How design principles and core values serve as anchors through both digital transformation and AI adoption

(12:59) AI's progression: from efficiency tool to fundamental question about what product even is

(14:55) Why building for nonlinear human thinking is the new product challenge

(16:58) Team structure today and two very different futures for the squad model

(19:46) Why removing design from the triad is a mistake, and what each personality type actually contributes

(23:23) Development speed: from 3 to 5 months down to 2, and why customer absorption is now the real constraint

(27:14) The CPO alpha effect: the two capabilities that are almost never found in the same person

(30:45) The funnel-based product analytics dashboard Ghazal checks almost every day

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-question-ai-still-cant-answer-about-product-management-cengage-product-svp/

Rob Ferguson is the VP of Technology and Strategy at Fireworks AI, a company that makes frontier AI infrastructure accessible to any organization that wants to own its own models rather than depend on someone else's. He started studying machine learning before it was called AI, worked on Pro Tools and AI systems for a music streaming service, helped design Amazon Go's grab-and-go technology, and built startup programs at AWS and Microsoft. Now he is at what he calls the front row of AI, sitting between applied research and go-to-market and translating what the technology can actually do into things companies can actually buy and build on. In this episode of Product Talk, iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade sits down with Rob to talk about why speed is the AI feature no one asks for but everyone needs once they see it, how AI training went from lab-only to cheap as a cup of coffee, and his hot take that we are at the end of SaaS and entering an era he calls workwear.

In this episode, we cover:

(0:48) Rob's background from music and machine learning to Pro Tools, Artio, Amazon Go, and Fireworks (3:43) What it means to sit at the intersection of applied research and go-to-market (11:41) What Fireworks AI actually does: inference infrastructure and model training in one place (14:11) Who Fireworks serves and how the customer has changed as training costs have dropped (16:52) Speed as a hidden AI feature: why nobody asks for it and everyone needs it once they see it (20:18) The shift from AI as talkers to AI as doers, and what that means for product (21:24) AI independence vs AI dependence: why owning your model changes what you can build (23:27) The most common problem Rob sees: agents that work but cost thousands of dollars to run (26:25) Drawing the line in the sand: why doing less deeply beats promising everything (27:41) Hot take: we're at the end of SaaS and entering the era of workwear (31:55) Why domain experts and liberal arts thinkers become more valuable as surface-level software commoditizes (33:04) What the AI industry gets wrong about itself and the case for openness and independent scrutiny (38:24) The voice tech stack Rob is obsessed with and uses every day

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/why-speed-is-the-ai-feature-no-one-asks-for-but-everyone-needs/