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

Your AI Doesn't Have a Feature Problem. It Has an Adoption Problem. | Charanya Kannan (Navan)

September 29th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  29 mins 16 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Every product team is shipping AI. But the dirty secret is that, for many companies, very few users are adopting. The feature launches, the people who try it love it, and adoption stalls anyway.

Our guest today thinks that's because teams obsess over building AI and barely think about adoption. Charanya Kannan is VP and GM of Navan Anywhere, which puts Navan's AI travel and expense tools inside Slack, Teams, and Gemini, where people already work, instead of asking them to open another app.

She joined Navan when the company was still called TripActions and doing under $50 million in revenue... now it's well on its way to a billion.

Her take: if customers have to work harder to use your AI, it isn't actually better.

In this episode, Charanya shares:

• How Navan Anywhere was built distribution-first, bringing booking and expenses into the tools people already use every day
• Why Navan's margins went up in the AI era, while the rest of SaaS braces for compression
• And why she believes PMs who mostly manage process and Jira tickets will fade away, while those who can actually drive user benefit and business outcomes will matter more than ever

Building AI Products for the Other 95% | Brian McMullin, SVP Product (Network Solutions)

September 22nd, 2026  |  Season 2  |  30 mins 4 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Most of the AI products getting hype right now are built for people like us, the tech industry. But your customers don’t care how the AI works — they just want their problem solved in a way that’s easy for them.

Brian McMullin, SVP and Head of Product at Network Solutions, has spent 15 years building for small businesses at companies including HubSpot, ezCater, Wayfair, and SamCart. In that time, he's yet to meet a business owner who wakes up thinking, "I can't wait to use AI today." For many of them, a prompt box might as well be a terminal window.

So his team doesn't ship the box. They ship the finished work artifact, and all the user has to do is claim it.

In this episode, Brian shares:

• Why doing the work for small businesses first, instead of handing them an empty prompt box, is what gets them to try AI
• His warning about baking inference into the core of your product before token pricing settles — and the two models he's testing to find out what small businesses will actually tolerate
• And what SamCart taught him about churn: customers left because basic things were broken, not because features were missing.

What Do You Do When AI Agents Replace Your Human Users? | Brandon Harris, VP of Product (Pantheon)

September 15th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  32 mins 44 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Every day, more of your traffic isn't human. AI agents show up, grab what they need, and leave — and YOU pay to serve every visitor, whether they see your brand or not.

Today’s guest has seen this from both sides. Brandon Harris is VP of Product at Pantheon, the WebOps platform behind a huge slice of the WordPress and Drupal world. But before that, he was sending the bots — at Wiser, where his team scraped millions of pages a day to power retail pricing intelligence.

His take: agents aren't killing the web. They're just the next way information travels — and the companies that adapt are about to pull way ahead of the ones that don't.

In this episode, Brandon shares:

• How AI is turning the whole web into one giant CMS — and quietly rewriting the job of anyone who publishes content
• Plus, why visits are the new impressions, why trying to keep agents out is the modern-day version of blocking Google from indexing your site — and what to do instead

Product Sense: What It Is and Why AI Makes It Vital | Kevin Sung, VP of Product (Life360)

September 8th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  33 mins 15 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

“Product sense” is the thing that nobody can define, but everyone says will keep product managers employed in the age of AI.

Our guest today has a definition, with receipts. But he takes it somewhere that’s less comfortable than you might assume: if all you do is move numbers, you’re obsoleting yourself because AI will eventually do it better than you can.

Kevin Sung is VP of Product at Life360, the family safety app with roughly 100 million monthly active users. Before that, he spent years at Dropbox, Smule, Zynga, and Google, a path that took him from a growth-hacking playbook to a very different conclusion about where product management’s value actually lives.

In this episode, Kevin discusses:

• What the PM job becomes once engineering isn’t a bottleneck, and why the line between lazy product management and good product craft is the strength of your opinion
• How he got Dropbox leadership to fund a year of unglamorous quality work that no financial model could justify, and how it produced $24 million in ARR from churn reduction
• And what this all means now at Life360 — where the question in a product review isn’t “how’s this move the number”, it’s “does this create a moment of worry for a parent?”

When to Add Product Friction & How to Reduce 12 PM AI setups to One Team OS | Kunal Thadani (Houzz)

September 1st, 2026  |  Season 2  |  27 mins 17 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

At dating app The League, Kunal Thadani's team found that when daily matches took longer to load, people stopped skimming profiles and started actually reading. The wait wasn't a cost — it was the product saying these matches are worth your time.

Now he's Senior Director of Product at Houzz, a platform for homeowners to plan renovations, and his take is that the goal was never no friction. It's to create the right kind of friction.

In this episode, Kunal drops his:

• His three-part framework for productive friction, and
• The two ways friction turns toxic, including the one that punishes your most loyal customers

Plus, everyone is building AI workflows for themselves right now. Almost nobody is building them for a team, and Kunal has the clearest answer I've heard in a long time for what that looks like.

Just Say No to "Yes-Man Agents" & "Process Barnacles": How Miro Builds Post-AI | Jeff Chow, CPTO

August 25th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  30 mins 30 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

On a Friday, one of Miro's architects set his agents loose on the company's AI engine. Nobody asked him to. By Monday, he demoed a full refactor. Tuesday, it had a kickoff, and a few months later it was the headline of their user conference.

Here's the twist. Miro has refused to rebuild its process around AI. They've kept the same three milestones they've always had...they just changed what happens around them.

Our guest today is Jeff Chow, Miro’s Chief Product & Technology Officer. He helps lead a company whose entire job is helping cross-functional teams work better together, which makes it an unusually good place to watch what AI is actually doing to how teams build.

Jeff's take: AI hasn't moved the milestones — It's rewritten everything that happens between them.
In this episode, he shares:

• The false confidence trap of building alongside an agent that tells you every idea is brilliant, and why that makes the moments where humans actually align more important than ever
• Why product "process barnacles" accrete on companies as they scale, and how that quietly turns a culture of invention to optimization at just the wrong time
• And why saying no is the next organizational crisis. Now that anyone can build almost anything, it’s become clear that coding was never the hard part

This Product Leader Built Her Own PM OS with Claude Code: LIVE Demo | Parul Goel (ex-Indeed/PayPal)

August 18th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  22 mins 34 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

We’ve got something different today: a live demo and walkthrough of how an actual product leader built a real, PM-focused tool with AI.

Our guest today put her proverbial money where her mouth is when she got sick of the AI hype and anxiety and grew tired of writing the same status update five different ways for five different audiences. So she decided to build her way out of the never-ending loop of draft, then repackage again and again and again.

And today, she’s going to demo it for us and show how she and a team of collaborators built an entire AI PM operating system to help with the myriad of similar, repetitive tasks that product leaders face!

Parul Goel has spent nearly 20 years in product, including almost nine at PayPal building a zero-to-one payments platform for marketplaces, and her recent stint as Senior Director of Product at Indeed.com, leading the payments and billing platform through a major scaling challenge.

In this episode, Parul shows:

• A live demo of the PM operating system she built with 3 fellow product leaders and the four-layered architecture behind it
• Why the "context library" and codifying company identity, stakeholders, and voice is the layer most people skip, BUT the one that matters most
• And how the system handles core PM workflows like exec updates, cross-functional communication, customer interview synthesis, and PRD drafts

Speedrunning $0 to $180M: The Intrapreneur's Playbook | Gaurav Jaiswal, VP Product (ex-Pearson, SAP)

August 11th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  24 mins 8 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Everyone loves to romanticize the founder who starts from zero. But most successful product and digital leaders will likely find themselves using a slightly different flavor of that skill: intrapreneurship — building something new inside an established company...whether it be a business unit, go-to-market approach, product, or other.

Gaurav Jaiswal has done exactly this several times. At SAP, he co-founded SAP Digital, a B2B2C business built to let anyone in the world discover, try, and buy SAP products — taking it from zero to $180 million in just a couple of years. Most recently, as VP of Digital Product at Pearson, he did it again, launching a subscription e-textbook product from idea to market in six months, and scaling to $65 million in just about 2 years.

In this episode, Gaurav shares:

• How he got SAP's board to approve an entirely new business unit in just six months, and the framework he used to get market traction just as quickly
• How he took those lessons to Pearson, a 150-year-old publishing company, and helped turn it into one that runs like a software business
• And why building inside a public company is a trade — you get the brand and customer base built in, but you’re on the hook for the full legacy culture and scrutiny that comes from operating in a larger, established company

How DoorDash Turned Food Delivery into a Local Commerce Platform | Vassili Samolis, VP of Product

August 4th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  19 mins 14 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

To most people, DoorDash is an easy fix when you just need food. Our guest today would argue that's the least interesting thing they do.

Vassili Samolis has been VP of Product at DoorDash for 5 years and counting, leveraging lessons from Instagram & Pinterest to help turn a simple food delivery app into a high-trust local commerce platform for the more than one million merchants who use it to help drive their businesses.

In this episode, Vassili shares:

• How DoorDash built a successful local commerce platform based on extreme alignment - they only get paid when a business gets a customer and a consumer finds the food that they want
• Why he thinks there's never been a better time to be a PM - not in spite of code getting cheaper but because of it
• And how a crowded field of a million restaurants, bodegas, and local shops taught him that the best products often start with a single, very specific customer story