Jamme Alexander, founder of Engineering Women, got licensed to bartend for eighteen dollars because a stranger on Facebook was looking for help. 

Within thirty days she cut out the middleman and that side hustle became Zen Events. Later, Zen Events became the thing that funds her real passion: teaching youth, including her own 16-year-old daughter, to fly certified drones and build with AI.

In this episode, she talks about the FAA pilot course she's building from scratch, the youth unemployment number that keeps her up at night, and why she almost skipped the biggest tech event of her career. 

What does it actually take to build a business that isn't a tech product but still runs on product instincts? Listen here for the breakdown. 

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John Fontenot sent out more than a hundred product applications and heard nothing. Then his title changed, and recruiters started calling within two weeks.

He's the founder of Path2Product and a Principal Product Manager who pivot internally: sales, then UX research, then product. On this episode of The Product Pivot, we dive into the experience paradox nobody in product chats about - you need experience to get the job that gives you experience.

What actually convinces a recruiter to bet on someone with no product title yet? Why does John tell aspiring PMs to go work for a private-equity-backed company instead of the hyped VC startup? Listen to hear it all. 

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Aaron Kesler, co-founder and Head of Product at Rozie Synopsis, has sat across from a lot of candidates in 2026. 

His take: most of them skip the one thing he's actually trying to evaluate. 

In this episode, we break down what a weak interview answer sounds like versus a strong one, why "I vibe coded a solution" isn't a story, and the test Aaron uses to check if a candidate can really think like a product manager. 

We also dig into what makes a case study land with a hiring manager who isn't technical and where he draws a hard line on PMs shipping code to production.

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David Nduka had one week left in Canada when a single mistake on his work permit caught up with him. What he did in the four days that followed became a company.

David is the founder of Navim AI, an immigration tech startup, that has helped several people navigate the difficult path of gaining residency.  He is also a product manager at Kweeve, and a two-time founder who's built most of his products alongside a full-time job. 

In this conversation with Meagan and Santi, he traces the path most people never notice they're on: the user interviews you run without knowing they're user interviews, the prototype you ship in two weeks that used to take six months, the moment traction quietly rewrites your confidence.

What does building your way into product actually look like when you never called it product? Listen to his story here. 

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Everyone has advice about getting hired in product. Andres Tenias has insights from a technical recruiter perspective. 

As a recruiter for close to a decade and now Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at Lantern, Andres got tired of nodding along to engineers and went and earned a software engineering diploma, so when he screens product and technical candidates, he can tell who actually did the work. He joins us to walk through how PM hiring really works, and where the standard playbook quietly fails people.

Some of it stings a little. Andres makes the case that the most beautiful portfolio in the stack is often the weakest, because the candidate can no longer talk through their own decisions. He explains how he tries to surface candidates on LinkedIn, and the one habit that makes you invisible. And he shares a move for the job you didn't get that he describes, as "a little bit stalky."

What does a recruiter actually look for in the first ten seconds of your profile? And why does so much of the job hunt start to feel like a personal attack, when almost none of it is?

Plus: carrying product skills into healthcare and the public sector, the rise of fractional product work, and the interview cues most candidates miss entirely.

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⁠Steve Johnson⁠ asked a training room full of product managers how many had spoken to a customer in the past year. Most hands stayed down. One person admitted they'd been at the company three years without ever meeting one.

Steve is CEO and co-founder of Product Growth Leaders, a former VP at Pragmatic Marketing, and one of the original architects of the ⁠QUARTZ Open Framework⁠. He's written books on customer conversations and on turning ideas into products, and he came back to make an uncomfortable case: most people with "product manager" in their title aren't doing product management at all. They're writing tickets, polishing prototypes, and dabbling in code, while the actual job goes undone.

So what happens to that job when AI can write the tickets and vibe-code the prototype faster than you can?

Steve's answer points at the one thing he says AI cannot replace, and it's the thing most PMs are too busy to do. He also explains why he tells product managers to get to know their customers "even if it requires civil disobedience," when he thinks the AI cost bubble finally bursts, and why private equity firms have quietly flipped to saying "hire a product manager first."

What does product management actually mean in 2026, once the busywork belongs to the machines?

Check out the ⁠QUARTZ framework⁠

Read ⁠Customer Conversations⁠

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What if AI could handle the hard part of being a boss for you like telling someone they're not getting the promotion, weighing empathy against the P&L, or being the bad guy?

⁠Aaron Kesler⁠, VP of Product at RozieAI and author of an upcoming book on breaking into product management, has been sitting in that exact seat for a year. He's also sitting on a $4.5M AI story that nobody knew was due to AI at all.

There's a moment where he names what nobody told him about going from IC to executive - it's lonely at the top. It's something most new leaders learn the hard way.

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Zach O'Neal spent five years running the subscriber experience as a Product Marketing Manager across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. He now leads the same function at a B2B SaaS startup, at a fraction of the headcount.

Most PMs have never worked with a product marketer who sees the role through his lens. Zach gets specific about why, including the four years it took him at Disney to find a real stride with the product team, the hiring filter he uses that has nothing to do with copywriting, and the question he asks instead of running a blame-game post-mortem.

Plus why he describes himself as "the voice of the product to the consumer, and the voice of the consumer to the product," and what breaks when no one fills that role.

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Most PM content is the highlight reel. This episode is what gets said after the camera turns off.

Alyx Priestley is a Product Director who came up running her own creative agency before someone called her "the product person" and she had to go figure out what that meant. She now writes some of the sharper PM essays on Medium and is rebuilding her consultancy alongside an in-stealth sports brand in the golf space.

This is the conversation PMs have on their own, not on LinkedIn. 

A few things this episode gets into: what Alyx actually says to PMs drowning in imposter syndrome, what to do when leadership doesn't respect the function they hired you to lead, and the bluntest one - what not doing the thing is costing you right now.

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He has a spreadsheet. 350+ contacts and still emails 30–40 of them every couple months.

It didn't land him a PM job. What it did was keep him in motion long enough to take the advice that actually worked: stop waiting for the title.

Kartikeya Shah is now Project Manager II at RozieAI, where he's been handed a product to manage about a year into a job he took instead of holding out for a full PM role.

We get into the two questions he asked at the end of every networking call, why he stopped only reaching out to PMs, and what to do when the books and frameworks don't fit your actual reality.

If you're trying to pivot into product right now, don't skip this one. 

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