PM Was Scrumful, Not Agile: Why AI Can Give Product Its Real Job Back | Naomi Lariviere, CPO (ADP)

October 6th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  27 mins 34 secs

business, digital experience, product management, technology

AI has made building faster and cheaper than ever. That leaves product leaders with an uncomfortable question: if engineering isn't the bottleneck anymore, what is? And do we still need product managers?

Our guest today thinks much of the PM job over the past decade was spent more on tickets and stand-ups than on understanding customers and markets. She calls it getting "Scrumful, not Agile," and AI is finally a chance to hand that work off and get back to the real job.

Naomi Lariviere is Chief Product Officer at ADP, where she runs a roughly $4 billion mid-market portfolio for a company that pays one in six Americans.

Her take: AI makes building cheaper, but it doesn't make choosing what to build any easier.

In this episode, Naomi shares:

• What happened when ADP's dev team tried to deliver without a product team, and why they came back
• How ADP studied what its PMs actually do all day to find the busywork AI can take off their plates, and what they want PMs doing with that time instead
• Why she's skeptical of the push to turn every PM into a "product builder" who ships code, and why storytelling, empathy, and judgment matter more than ever
• And how ADP keeps innovating quickly when a single mistake could mean thousands of people don't get paid