Product Talk

What does a former touring DJ who accidentally built one of the internet's first MP3 stores have to say about product leadership? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Intuit SVP of Product Wyatt Jenkins will be speaking on why managing opportunity cost is the heart and soul of product management, why the PM who doesn't make their engineering team twice as good shouldn't be there at all, and why the systems of record layer will survive the so-called SaaS apocalypse. He also shares how he uses Claude to become a deep vertical expert on a dog walk.

What if your SaaS product built itself to fit every user the moment they signed up? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Pipedrive CPTO Joe Futty will be speaking on why customer expectations are about to shift more dramatically than at any point since mobile went mainstream and what that means for how product teams build, hire, and think about personalization. He also shares his three-bucket framework for navigating any new CPO role, and why the lines between product, engineering, and design are dissolving into something new.

What happens to product leadership when anyone in the company can build? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Digitalzone CPO Sonjoy Ganguly, Brainlabs CPO Adam Edwards will be speaking on how AI is eroding the technical moat and elevating judgment and scalability as the new competitive advantages for product leaders. He also shares how his team built a triad governance structure to democratize AI-building across a thousand-person ad agency without losing control of quality or client outcomes.

What does it take to build AI when failure means someone gets hurt? In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Motive CTO Amish Babu will be speaking on the unique engineering and product challenges of building AI for the physical economy fleets, construction sites, and high-stakes environments where milliseconds matter and hallucinations aren't a product flaw, they're a safety crisis. He also shares how Motive's AI dash cam has helped prevent over 170,000 accidents since 2023 and what SaaS product leaders consistently get wrong about building for the physical world.

What does it mean to govern a decision model instead of a roadmap? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Rakuten Rewards CPO Nilesh Khandelwal will be speaking on how AI is shifting the product leader's job from execution management to decision architecture. He also shares his three-bucket prioritization framework, the concept of "glues" as a retention lever, and why saying no to guaranteed revenue is sometimes the most strategic move a CPO can make.

What does it actually take to turn a sales-led organization into a product-led one? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Medbridge CPTO Sarah Singh will be speaking on how AI is reshaping the product engineer role and why the CPO's job is no longer separate from engineering. She also shares how her Big Bet Framework builds organizational trust and how AI tools are compressing the innovation cycle from four bets a year to one every month.

What happens to the entire product development process when creating software becomes as easy as creating a Google Doc? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Cartwheel CPO Sarah Turrin speaks on how the collapse of software costs is reshaping healthcare product leadership, why the era of CPOs as pure strategists is already over, and how she thinks about deploying AI in healthcare environments where a probabilistic model simply cannot be unleashed on patients without deterministic guardrails. Thirty days into her role at one of the nation's largest K-12 mental health platforms, Sarah brings a rare combination of clinical sensitivity, technical fluency, and genuine urgency about what product leaders need to do right now.

What does it mean when a seasoned CPO with experience at Disney, Apple, Airbnb, and Walmart.com walks away from the C-suite to go build products by himself? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, former Remix AI co-founder and CPO Kevin Swint speaks on why this moment in AI demanded that kind of move, what he learned building an agentic application in two weeks that would have taken a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars before, and why the feedback loop between domain expert and builder has collapsed in a way that changes everything. From tourist behavior in AI products to the fundamentals of stickiness that never change, Kevin brings 25 years of hard-won perspective to the most exciting moment in product history.

What happens when the cost of building software trends toward zero? When anyone can ship anything at any time, code stops being the competitive advantage. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke, Vercel CPO Tom Occhino speaks on what the moat actually looks like in an AI native world, why he shifted from roadmap curator to market interpreter and narrative builder, and what it took to build a culture where reliability and innovation do not fight each other but feed each other. From inventing Facebook mentions to creating React to scaling Vercel's self-driving infrastructure, Tom brings a rare engineering-first perspective on what product leadership is becoming.

What happens when the pace of AI makes even the most recent college graduate's knowledge obsolete within six months? In this episode of the CPO Rising series, hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Salesforce EVP and GM of Agentforce Service Kishan Chetan speaks on what it really takes to drive AI adoption at scale, why adoption is fundamentally a social phenomenon, and how he thinks about product success through one simple lens: do customers buy it, use it, and love it? Leading a product line approaching $10 billion in revenue, Kishan brings a grounded, practical perspective on what the best product leaders are doing right now to stay ahead of a world that will not slow down for anyone.