Product Talk

What does it mean for a CPO to truly own outcomes? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, BetterHelp CPO Terre Layton will be speaking on how product leadership is evolving in the age of AI, drawing on a career that started with AI research long before LLMs existed. Terre shares why CPOs are now business operators with product as their primary lever, how she thinks about building teams for the agentic era, and why time to value and retention are the two metrics that tell her everything.

What does it mean to run product like a mini company, and how do you say no to a multi-million dollar deal when it conflicts with your strategy? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, ATOSS Software SE CPTO Vikas Seth will be speaking on outcome-driven product management and what the next evolution of the product leadership role looks like. Drawing on seven years growing ID Now from startup to scale-up at 10x revenue, Vikas shares his framework for closing the gaps between customers, go-to-market, and R&D, and why building enthusiasm for the product is the most underrated leadership skill.

What would it look like if every AI app had a sustainable way to make money without dark patterns or paywalls? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Koah Co-Founder and CPO Mike Choi will be speaking on how he's building the AdSense for the AI app network. Mike shares what he learned from 18 months of rapid consumer app building, why AI users behave completely differently than search users, and why sponsored experiences in AI might actually be a good thing for everyone.

What does it take to build products that work for 150 million people in one of the most regulated industries in the world? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Optum Fmr Chief Consumer Officer Rita Khan will be speaking on how product leadership is transforming healthcare at scale. Rita shares why understanding the full stakeholder ecosystem matters more than quick UX wins, how she frames investment portfolios to earn executive trust quarter by quarter, and why she only hires "shapers" who refuse to accept the industry's constraints as excuses for bad experiences.

What happens to product leadership when anyone can create a product in minutes? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Axiom Law CPO Katrina Benjamin, Perk CPO Nikita Miller will be speaking on why this might be the biggest moment in product leadership history. Nikita shares how roles across product, design, and engineering are converging in exciting ways, why the best AI is invisible to users, and what urgency and conviction really look like in a company that's growing fast.

Why are 95% of AI deployments failing, and what does it take to be in the 5% that succeed? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Invisible Technologies Fmr CPO Apurva Garware will be speaking on how to build AI-native products that actually drive business outcomes. Apurva shares her framework for connecting product metrics to business north stars, why the biggest risk in AI is building something nobody uses, and how the entire product discovery cycle has been compressed from weeks to days.

How do you transform a 45-year-old, $52 billion enterprise into an AI-native platform business and take it public in the process? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Ingram Micro former CPO Ambrish Verma will be speaking on the frameworks he used to navigate tech debt, allocate innovation capacity, and build the moat that repositioned a legacy distributor as a technology platform company. He also shares what happened when he asked Claude to play the role of a board member and challenge every assumption in his strategy.

What does it take to turn a stagnant product org into one that grows a company's stock price by 59% in three years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, former eBay and Sam's Club CPO Eddie Garcia will be speaking on how great product leadership creates outsized business returns. Eddie shares his 343 portfolio framework, the concept of "positionless product development," and the Scan and Go story that went from three grassroots employees to multiple billions in sales.

What does it mean to build care as a product? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Turo CPO Tom Wang, Spotnana CPO Sarosh Waghmar will be speaking on why trust is the foundational design principle in travel tech, how AI can make a stranded traveler feel like someone said "I got you," and why the modern CPO has to be fluent in three languages simultaneously, customer pain, business model, and technology trajectory. He also shares why cleaning the infrastructure gutters is the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible.

What if the PM-to-engineer ratio flipped and there were two product managers for every engineer? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, SignalWire EVP of Product Adam Kalsey will be speaking on why the bottleneck in software has shifted from building to knowing what to build, and why the business model is just as much a part of the product as the technology. He also shares how he built an autonomous product ops intern using Claude and OpenClaw and spent almost $50 an hour on tokens in the process.