Why AI Agents Are the Future of ERP | Bret Tushaus, VP Product (DelTek) - Repeat

December 30th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 16 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

In this repeat episode of LaunchPod, originally published on Aug 12, 2025, we’re talking with Bret Tushaus, VP of Product at Deltek.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Deltek built Dela — an AI agent framework powering everything from smart summaries to autonomous accounting
• Why AI is rewriting the role of Product Management, and what leaders need to know now
• How Bret’s team leveled up their AI skills fast — with short, high-impact sprints focused on real tools and real problems

Lessons from the Launch that Became a Silicon Valley Punchline | Berni Fisher, VP Product (Appcues)

December 23rd, 2025  |  Season 1  |  25 mins 8 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

This week, we sat down with Berni Fisher, VP of Product at Appcues and a self-described "first principles goddess." Berni goes deep on what it was really like behind the scenes during the notorious 2012 Apple Maps launch, the triple threat problem at ButcherBox where they exist at the intersection of grocery, eCommerce, AND SaaS, and more.

In our conversation, Berni discusses:

• Surviving the "2012 Apple Maps Debacle" and the intense backlash post-launch, as well as how the team used a "triage mindset" to prioritize fixes based on customer usage and risk.
• Her Black Friday Gamble: Why she pushed for a risky site overhaul at ButcherBox right before their busiest season, resulting in double-digit conversion gains
• And Customer-Led AI Innovation: how Appcues used their own product to poll users on AI trust, leading to a roadmap driven by actual customer needs rather than industry hype.

Why Top-of-Funnel Traffic is Dead (& How TED is Replacing It ) | Tricia Maia, Head of Product (TED)

December 17th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  34 mins 1 sec

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED. We all know TED Talks — but behind the scenes, TED is undergoing a massive product transformation to adapt to a post-AI media landscape. In this episode, Tricia Maia, Head of Product at TED, pulls back the curtain on how they’re solving the “discovery” crisis facing digital media today.

Tricia shares:

• Why “views” are dead: Explaining why TED is abandoning top-of-funnel traffic as their North Star metric and shifting focus to “depth,” completion rates, and account signups to combat volatile search algorithms
• AI that actually scales: How TED is using advanced AI auto-dubbing — not just subtitles — to clone speakers’ voices into other languages, driving 2-3x better performance
• The “gap” strategy: The challenge of connecting a decentralized ecosystem of free users and volunteers at TEDx with an ultra-premium live experience that can cost up to $12,500 per ticket

Make the C-Suite Think Like a Startup (Without Getting Fired) | West Stringfellow, VP Product (ex-Target, Blackhawk)

December 9th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  32 mins 25 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by West Stringfellow, currently VP of Product at Blackhawk Network and former VP of Innovation at Target.

In this episode, West shares:

• How he went from stealth startups to leading innovation at a company with over $77 billion in annual sales
• The methods he uses to manage up and influence leadership in order to achieve the outcomes necessary to create successful organizations time and time again
• The bold move that accelerated his Target career, which included hand-delivering over 300 copies of his innovation proposal to every executive at their Minneapolis HQ, even catching the attention of Target’s CEO
• An inside look at how Blackhawk is thinking about AI and digital transformation by cultivating “culture carriers” to champion AI

Why PMs are Leveling up into AI Product Engineers | Sarah Jacob Singh, CPTO (Medbridge)

December 2nd, 2025  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 21 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Sarah Jacob Singh, CPTO at Medbridge, a digital healthcare platform.

In this episode, Sarah shares:

• Why AI means all companies have to act like startups again, with product more tightly integrated from engineering all the way to go-to-market
• How many Product Managers are evolving into Product Engineers - building prototypes, shipping code, and helping developer teams innovate faster
• The ways Medbridge is leveraging AI-enabled Product Engineers to ship big bets weekly instead of quarterly

A Serial Founder’s Guide to Pivots, Exits, and AI | Raj Singh, VP of Product (Mozilla)

November 25th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 37 secs

business, digital experience, mozilla, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by serial entrepreneur Raj Singh. His multiple exits have landed him in product leadership roles at companies like Salesforce.com, and, most currently, as a VP of Product at Mozilla, where he’s leading the team creating new AI products for SMBs.

In this episode, Raj shares:

• How his companies navigated multiple pivots, with innovations from ChatGPT and Zoom leading most recently to an acquisition by Mozilla
• What makes “agentic browsers” the next major interface for the web, and how they could change everything from ad models to API access
• And why Mozilla’s stewardship of Gecko, one of only three major browser engines, is essential to keeping the internet open in the age of AI

When CPO Becomes CMO: The Expanding Role of Product Leaders | Karen Chao (Flowspace)

November 18th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  27 mins 12 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Karen Chao, Chief Product Officer at Flowspace, an ecommerce logistics platform, where she’s also taken on a role as head of marketing. Previously, Karen held product leadership roles at Apple, Replicon, Innit, and more.

In this episode, Karen shares:

• How she ended up running Marketing on top of Product, and how bringing these two functions under one leader has improved go-to-market for Flowspace
  
• The biggest surprises she’s uncovered running marketing as a product leader, from chaotic tool stacks to the next wave of AI-powered go-to-market automation
• And how Flowspace’s product team uses AI tools like Cursor and Claude to accelerate discovery and prototyping, and even ship small bug fixes straight to production without Engineers involved

When AI Makes Engineering Too Fast for Product Teams | Oji Udezue (ex-Typeform & Calendly)

November 13th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  24 mins 8 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

On today’s episode of LaunchPod, we’ve got something special for you. Normally, you’d have to join us in person at one of the dinners we host for product leaders to hear this talk from Oji Udezue. But the response has been so great, we had to bring him onto the show again.

Oji has previously held product leadership roles at Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, and Atlassian. Today, he’s joining us to share a major problem in product delivery that he’s seeing as AI adoption increases across teams.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The “three-speed problem,” as Oji calls it – how AI will bring about a 10x increase in engineering velocity. But where does that leave product management and go-to-market teams if they can’t keep up?
• Why AI is a BS term, as it’s really five new AND distinct capabilities – and how to use those as a framework for smarter product strategy
• And how his “shipyard model” for product teams will ensure you keep up and thrive, even as AI reshapes how we build software

Product Lessons from a $3B Bootstrapped eCom Platform | Trevin Chow, CPO (Big Cartel)

November 4th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  33 mins 46 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Trevin Chow, Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel, an ecommerce platform for independent creators to turn their art into income. Previously, Trevin held product leadership roles at Nike, Microsoft, Axon, and more.

In this episode, Trevin shares:

• How they thread the needle between brand history and innovation — respecting a 20+ year legacy while still driving towards the future
• His process for creating “simple magic” by making features so simple, they delight users — even if that trades less customization for better ease of use
• How AI is transforming product and design workflows by drastically cutting down the time between idea and innovation
• And what product leaders can learn from rethinking simple as a benefit rather than a constraint

How Tinder Swiped Right on Customer Experience | Curtis Stevens (ex-Tinder)

October 28th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  27 mins 46 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re talking with Curtis Stevens, who, until recently, was Tinder’s Director of Product Consumer Insights, and prior to that held product leadership roles at Qualtrics, Amazon, and more.

In this episode, Curtis shares:

• How AI can actually be a tool for human connection
• His process behind Tinder’s transformation into customer-centricity, with real, measurable results
• How to balance short-term user joy with long-term product innovation and future features
• And how AI is driving customer experience changes faster than research can follow, and what you can do to keep up

The Hidden AI Revolution in Construction | Rajitha Chaparala (Procore)

October 23rd, 2025  |  Season 1  |  8 mins 30 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

On today’s episode, we’re talking with Rajitha Chaparala, VP of Product at Procore, a construction management solution and one of the most successful examples of vertical SaaS out there today.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Rajitha and her team are using LLMs to streamline complex processes like requests for information (RFIs), project revisions, and construction site walkthroughs
• Why building trust and showing real, immediate value were key to getting AI buy-in from construction professionals, historically hesitant to adopt new tech
• Why Rajitha believes this is construction’s moment for AI, and how the shift from skepticism to curiosity happened almost overnight

Linear’s Secret to Building Powerful AI Products | Nan Yu, VP of Product (Linear)

October 16th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  29 mins 32 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined again by Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear.

In this episode, Nan shares:

• Why you’re wrong to think of AI as a way to reduce costs -- and why the real value is in enabling new work that was previously impossible
• The 3 must-haves he’s deduced from across the most successful AI products to produce consistently great outcomes for users
• The behind-the-scenes details of Linear’s new Agent Interaction Guidelines

Reinventing SaaS: Zuora's AI Transformation | Karthik Chakkarapani and Shakir Karim (Zuora)

October 9th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  31 mins 30 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Shakir Karim (Senior VP of Product) and Karthik Chakkarapani (CIO & Senior VP of Corporate Operations) from Zuora.

In this episode, Shakir and Karthik discuss:

• Why they believe AI is a bigger inflection point than web, mobile, or cloud
• Their internal AI agent workflow that automatically resolves thousands of service requests instantly, freeing teams to focus on strategy
• How they cut a major feature deployment step from 14 days to 10 minutes using Claude Code
• Why prompt-a-thons and hackathons have been vital for driving not just AI adoption but AI literacy

The Secrets Behind a 30x AI Product Team | Zac Hays, CPO (Luxury Presence)

October 7th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  23 mins 31 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Zac Hays, CPO at Luxury Presence, a fast-growing real estate tech platform that made a huge bet on AI adoption across the company..

In this episode, we discuss:

• Luxury Presence's 30x Value Principle and how they rethought goals and projects to have exponential-level impact
• The AI design sprint process that allowed the company to 20x product velocity
• How their mandatory AI bug triage policy has cut resolution time by 80%

Zapier’s AI Transformation Playbook with Phil Lakin (Zapier)

September 30th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  32 mins 35 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re joined by Phil Lakin, Head of Enterprise Innovation at Zapier.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Phil built No-Code Ops into a thriving community and SaaS product - and what led to its acquisition by Zapier
• Why Phil ended up leading the initiative on Zapier’s first solution-based product, and the decision process behind making it Lead Router
• How Zapier is driving AI transformation across both their org and others with hands-on bootcamps, agent workflows, and a 97% AI literacy rate among employees

Copilot, Claude, & OptiGPT: The AI Stack Driving Optimizely

September 25th, 2025  |  8 mins 36 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

How is Optimizely reshaping experimentation with AI? Cory Liebgott, VP of Product at Optimizely, joins LaunchPod to share how her team is using AI into both customer-facing solutions and their own product workflows.

Cory shares how her team:

• Uses Copilot and Claude for everything from PRD writing and meeting recaps to translating technical language into accessible insights
• Developed OptiGPT, an internal AI assistant that surfaces customer data, product knowledge, and HR policies in seconds
• Built a customer-facing AI query tool that also became a surprise hit internally for measuring customer health and engagement
• Encourages a culture of experimentation where PMs demo and share AI tools, turning emergent use cases into productivity boosts across teams