Podcasts

Dan Shipper

Guest: Dan Shipper - Co-founder and CEO of Every. Dan is at the forefront of AI innovation, leading a company that integrates AI into its operations and products, including a daily newsletter and multiple AI-driven apps. Key Takeaways: AI Operations Lead: Hiring a dedicated AI operations lead can significantly enhance efficiency by automating repetitive tasks across the organization. Compounding Engineering: For every unit of work done, make the next unit easier by creating prompts and automations, thus increasing leverage over time. CEO Engagement: The most successful AI adoption in companies is often driven by CEOs who actively use AI tools themselves, setting a tone for the organization. Generalist Advantage: AI empowers generalists by allowing them to leverage AI for specialized tasks, making them more versatile and valuable in the workforce. AI as a Managerial Skill: The skills required to effectively use AI tools mirror managerial skills, such as task delegation and feedback, indicating a shift towards an "allocation economy." Topics Covered: AI operations, AI-driven product development, AI in business strategy, generalist vs. specialist roles, AI adoption in organizations, future of work with AI, AI tools and productivity.

Andrew Wilkinson

Guest: Andrew Wilkinson - Co-founder and CEO of Tiny. Andrew is a seasoned entrepreneur who has started or been involved with over 75 businesses, and he has a reputation for acquiring and scaling profitable companies. Key Takeaways: Start Small and Niche: Avoid highly competitive markets and instead focus on niches where you have an unfair advantage. This could be based on your unique skills or interests. Fish Where the Fish Are: Choose business opportunities with proven demand and avoid areas where others have repeatedly failed. Automate with AI: Leverage AI tools like Lindy and Replit to automate routine tasks and enhance productivity. Andrew uses AI to manage emails, schedule meetings, and even provide insights from daily interactions. Rethink Success and Happiness: Wealth does not equate to happiness. Andrew emphasizes the importance of mental health and suggests exploring medication for anxiety and ADHD if needed. Hire for Fit, Not Potential: When hiring, especially for leadership roles, ensure candidates align with the business's needs and culture rather than trying to mold them into something they're not. Topics Covered: Starting businesses, niche markets, AI automation, mental health, hiring practices, lifestyle vs. venture-backed businesses, personal happiness.

Peter Deng

In this episode, Peter Deng, a seasoned product leader with experience at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, shares insights on product development, hiring, and the future of education with AI. He emphasizes the importance of understanding humanity in product design and the evolving landscape of technology.

Brandon Chu

Guest: Brandon Chu - VP of Product at Shopify. Brandon is a seasoned product leader known for his influential writing on product management and his extensive experience scaling product teams at Shopify. Key Takeaways: Decision-Making Framework: Prioritize decisions by assessing their importance. Focus on a few critical decisions and make quick, gut-based decisions on less important ones to maintain team velocity. Platform PM Insights: Understand the long cycles and complex stakeholder dynamics in platform product management. Establish clear principles to guide decision-making and balance the needs of different user groups. Remote Work Practices: Shopify emphasizes the importance of in-person interactions through "bursts," where teams gather periodically for high-velocity work and bonding, supported by a custom-built app for seamless logistics. Writing as a Career Accelerator: Writing helps clarify thinking and can significantly enhance career trajectory by building credibility and influence both internally and externally. Career Advice for PMs: Engage in side projects or startups to gain a holistic understanding of product development, including technical aspects, to enhance empathy and effectiveness as a PM. Topics Covered: Decision-making in product management, platform product management, remote work strategies, impact of writing on career, career advice for product managers.

Hilary Gridley

Guest: Hilary Gridley - Head of Core Product at Whoop. Hilary has a rich background in product management, having previously held senior roles at Big Health and Dropbox. She is also known for her influential post on becoming a super manager with AI and is a crossover guest on the sister podcast, How I AI. Key Takeaways: Taking a Punch: Focus on actions that counter negative perceptions rather than litigating past impressions. Ask, "What can I do to demonstrate the opposite of what I fear someone thinks of me?" Building Shared Mental Models: Help your team understand how leaders think, not just what they think, to reduce inefficiencies and improve decision-making. Habit Formation: Encourage consistency, reduce friction, and create powerful, immediate, and emotional reward loops to build effective habits. Creativity and Self-Care: Model and encourage activities that bring joy and creativity, as they are essential for personal and professional growth. AI as a Learning Tool: Leverage AI to accelerate learning and skill development, shrinking feedback loops and enhancing judgment without traditional inefficiencies. Topics Covered: Team resilience, leadership transparency, habit formation, creativity in work, AI in learning, product management insights.

Bob Baxley

Guest: Bob Baxley - Designer, executive, and advisor. Bob has led design teams at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo, and ThoughtSpot, playing pivotal roles in designing products like the Apple online store and the Apple App Store. Key Takeaways: Design should be seen as a mindset rather than a function; it's about imagining the future you want and taking steps to make it real. Effective design involves creating a cohesive whole, where every part of the product aligns with a central vision or tenet. Avoid jumping to high-fidelity prototypes too early; focus on conceptual clarity first to avoid premature fixation on specific designs. Design tenets, as opposed to principles, serve as decision-making tools that help teams navigate design challenges by providing clear, actionable guidelines. Building great products is a moral obligation, as software interactions significantly impact users' lives; strive to enhance user experience and reduce frustration. Topics Covered: Design as a mindset, Design tenets vs. principles, Importance of early engineering involvement, Moral obligation in product design, Effective use of AI in personal development, Lessons from the Apollo program.

Mike Krieger

Guest: Mike Krieger - Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. Mike is the co-founder of Instagram and a renowned product builder, now leading product at Anthropic, a key player in AI development. Key Takeaways: AI-Driven Code Development: At Anthropic, 90% of code is now written by AI, significantly altering the product development process. This shift has highlighted new bottlenecks, such as decision-making alignment and code merging. Product Strategy and AI: Mike emphasizes the importance of embedding product teams with researchers to maximize leverage, suggesting that the most impactful work happens at the intersection of product and AI model development. Future of Product Management: Product teams should focus on strategy, making AI comprehensible, and exploring new user interfaces for AI interaction. These areas remain critical even as AI capabilities expand. MCP's Role: The MCP (Memory, Context, and Processing) protocol is crucial for integrating AI into workflows, allowing models to access and utilize context effectively, which enhances AI's utility in real-world applications. Building in AI: Founders should leverage deep industry knowledge and unique go-to-market strategies to create defensible positions in the AI space, focusing on areas where foundational model companies are less likely to compete directly. Topics Covered: AI-driven code development, product strategy with AI, future of product management, MCP protocol, AI startup strategy, Anthropic's approach to AI ethics and development.

Sanchan Saxena

Guest: Sanchan Saxena - VP of Product at Coinbase. Sanchan has a rich background in product management, having held leadership roles at Airbnb, Instagram, and Microsoft, where he drove significant product innovations and growth. Key Takeaways: Intentionality in Product Development: Start with a clear vision of the ideal product experience and work backwards, rather than relying solely on data and A/B testing. Crisis Management: During crises, like Airbnb's COVID-19 challenges, focus on short planning cycles, unify teams under a single mission, and maintain transparent communication. Hiring for Content Over Process: Prioritize hiring individuals who understand the core content and strategy of the product over those who excel in process management. Decision-Making Frameworks: At Coinbase, the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) model empowers individuals to make informed decisions swiftly, reducing bureaucratic delays. Thriving in Ambiguity: Success in Web 3.0 requires embracing uncertainty and focusing on long-term potential rather than current constraints. Topics Covered: Product development at Airbnb and Coinbase, crisis management during COVID-19, intentionality in product vision, hiring strategies, decision-making processes, thriving in Web 3.0 environments.

Krithika Shankarraman

Guest: Krithika Shankarraman - Executive in Residence at Thrive Capital. Krithika was the first marketing hire and VP of Marketing at OpenAI and Stripe, and has held marketing leadership roles at Retool, Dropbox, and Google. Key Takeaways: Understand Your Customer: Spend time diagnosing the specific problem you want to solve rather than copying other companies' playbooks. Differentiate from Competitors: Analyze competitors to find inspiration and gaps, then intentionally take a different path to stand out. Experiment and Validate: Test different strategies on a small scale to see what works before scaling up. Internal Alignment: Implement processes like 20% and 80% reviews to ensure marketing consistency and alignment across teams. Adaptability in Marketing: Modern marketers should be flexible and adaptable, capable of working across various marketing disciplines. Topics Covered: Marketing at OpenAI and Stripe, Differentiation strategies, Importance of internal reviews, Role of brand consistency, Career advice for marketers, Pricing strategies for AI products, Use of AI in marketing.

Mayur Kamat

Guest: Mayur Kamat - Chief Product Officer at N26. Mayur has extensive experience in product management, having held leadership roles at Binance, Agoda, Google, and Microsoft, making him a seasoned expert in the fintech and tech industries. Key Takeaways: High Growth Environments: Working at rapidly growing companies accelerates learning and career growth due to the compounding effect of experiences and network building. Strengths Alignment: Identify and focus on roles that leverage your strengths rather than trying to improve weaknesses. This leads to greater job satisfaction and career success. Experimentation Culture: Implementing a strong experimentation culture can turn product strategy into a scientific process, allowing for rapid hypothesis testing and data-driven decision-making. Global Product Insights: Experience in different regions (US, Europe, Asia) provides valuable insights into global product development and regulatory challenges, enhancing product management skills. Leverage in Decision-Making: Focus on high-leverage problems that can have a significant positive or negative impact, and be willing to dive into details to solve them effectively. Topics Covered: Product management career advice, strengths-based career development, experimentation culture, global product development, fintech challenges, high-leverage decision-making, regional work experiences.

Aparna Chennapragada

Guest: Aparna Chennapragada - Chief Product Officer at Microsoft. Aparna oversees AI product strategy for Microsoft's productivity tools and agents. She has a rich background in product leadership, having served as CPO at Robinhood and VP at Google, working on projects like Google Lens and AI Assistant. Key Takeaways: Prototyping with AI: Aparna emphasizes the importance of prototyping with AI, stating, "If you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong." NLX is the New UX: Natural Language Interface (NLX) is crucial in designing AI interactions. It's about creating structured, conversational interfaces with elements like prompts and follow-ups. Future of Product Development: The time to first demo is shorter, but scaling takes longer. There's a need for editorial and taste-making roles to avoid creating Frankenstein products. Role of Product Managers: The PM role is evolving but remains crucial. While AI can handle some tasks, the need for taste-making and editorial oversight is more critical than ever. Three Inflection Points for Zero-to-One Products: Successful products often arise from a tech shift, a consumer behavior change, or a new business model. Topics Covered: AI prototyping, Natural Language Interface, product development changes, role of product managers, zero-to-one product framework, Microsoft AI strategy, GitHub Copilot, Excel's enduring success.

Dmitry Zlokazov

Guest: Dmitry Zlokazov - Global Head of Product at Revolut. Dmitry leads the product function at Revolut, a finance super app valued at over $60 billion, known for hiring and developing top-tier product managers. Key Takeaways: Ownership Model: Revolut's product managers, termed "product owners," act as local CEOs with end-to-end responsibility, fostering significant ownership and accountability. Focus on Raw Talent: Revolut prioritizes hiring for raw intellect and hunger over experience, often promoting internally from roles like operations or engineering. Wow Products: A strong emphasis is placed on building products that are not only functional but also deliver a "wow" experience, ensuring high-quality UX and aesthetics. Deep Dive Approach: Leaders, including Dmitry, focus on a few key projects at a time, going deep into details to ensure quality and alignment, which also signals priorities to the rest of the organization. Scalable Solutions: Revolut builds scalable platforms to support rapid product launches across multiple countries, maintaining a lean team structure to drive efficiency. Topics Covered: Revolut's product ownership model, hiring practices, focus on product quality, leadership approach, scalable product development, new product success strategies.