Why You Can’t Ignore AI Moving to the Edge | Joel Polanco, Senior Hardware Product Manager (Intel)

August 28th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  32 mins 54 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

On today’s episode of LaunchPod AI, we’re talking with Joel Polanco, Senior Hardware Product Manager at Intel’s Edge Computing Group. He’s led dozens of enterprise AI edge deployments and knows exactly what it takes to run AI models locally at scale.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why AI at the edge will cause a whole new wave of disruption across multiple industries
• Why moving AI to the edge slashes costs and levels up customer experience
• And real-world examples of edge AI deployments Joel has seen - from IT assistants to agents that restock store shelves from a single photo

The AI Agent Behind 4x Productivity in Collections Teams | Dave Ruda, VP Product (Billtrust)

August 26th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 53 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

How did an AI agent help 4x the productivity of collections teams? Dave Ruda, VP of Product at Billtrust, visits LaunchPod to share how his team built a collections AI that transformed drudgery work into high-impact outcomes.

Dave shares how his team:
*Reduced average email handling time from 8 minutes to just 2.5 minutes
*Built an AI agent that categorizes and prioritizes collector workflows to maximize efficiency
*Designed a “human in the loop” system to ensure trust, personalization, and better customer outcomes
*Developed a learning loop that adapts to each collector’s voice and scales across email and voice channels

The 3 Biggest Barriers to AI Adoption Across Your Team | Derek Pharr, CPO (Sporcle)

August 21st, 2025  |  30 mins 19 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Why is AI adoption so hard inside companies? Derek Pharr, CPO at Sporcle, joins LaunchPod to reveal the 3 biggest barriers to AI adoption and how he helped his team overcome them.

In this episode, you’ll learn how Sporcle:

*The 3 biggest barriers to AI adoption and how Derek addressed them
*How Sporcle built a “content intern” with Claude Projects to augment trivia writers and improve user engagement
*How Derek prototyped, tested, and rejected a doomed product idea in under an hour

The EdTech Graduating 150K by 2X’ing Completion Rates | Zach Heller, VP of Prod. (Penn Foster)

August 19th, 2025  |  38 mins

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re talking with Zach Heller, VP of Product at Penn Foster Group.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Penn Foster plans to literally “fill a stadium” with 150,000 graduates by 2029—doubling completion rates to do it
• Why they shifted focus from acquisition to graduation—and how that’s now driving over 50% of enrollments through word-of-mouth
• How AI-powered learning tools boosted course completions by 25% in just one year, setting a new record for outcomes

Agentic AI for Vertical Software | Bret Tushaus, VP Product (Deltek)

August 12th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 16 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today on LaunchPod, 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
• And how Bret’s team leveled up their AI skills fast — with short, high-impact sprints focused on real tools and real problems

AI Is Killing SaaS Pricing: Lessons From 10k+ Customers | Prittam Bagani, VP of PM (Chargebee)

August 5th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  42 mins 43 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re talking with Prittam Bagani, VP of Product Management at Chargebee, where they have insight into how over 10,000 customers are optimizing their pricing models.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How AI is forcing companies to rethink pricing - and why usage-, outcome-, and agent-based models are the future
• Why OpenAI made over 100 pricing changes in a single year and what you can learn about agile pricing experimentation from it
• And how to build the necessary technical and product infrastructure to test pricing models in real-time across millions of users

How Lattice’s PM team built an AI Slack “Intern” | Neha Monga, CPO (Ex-Lattice)

July 31st, 2025  |  Season 1  |  27 mins 2 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

On today’s episode of LaunchPod AI, we’re talking with Neha Monga, former Head of Product at Lattice and has led product teams at Meta, Amazon, Expedia, and more

In this episode, we discuss:

The AI workflows that are table stakes for PMs now—and how to adopt them so you don’t fall behind

How Neha’s team used Figma Make + Claude to spin up high-fidelity prototypes, gather customer feedback fast, and slash validation time with design and engineering

And the PM “intern” they built inside Slack to instantly surface insights from their massive customer feedback library

How Zuora is Betting on Retention-Led Growth | Ken Houseman, VP of Product (Zuora)

July 29th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  36 mins 58 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today on LaunchPod, we’re talking with Ken Houseman, VP of Product at Zuora.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why even a 0.1% increase in churn can cause huge losses, and how to turn retention into a growth engine
• How Zuora made payments so valuable that customers want to pay more - boosting revenue, margins, and customer retention
• And how Ken used AI to slash prototyping time and unlock faster, smarter product development

Inside Apartment List’s AI-Powered Product Team | Sierra Hahn-Ventrell, Dir. of PM (Apartment List)

July 24th, 2025  |  Season 1  |  31 mins 8 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today on LaunchPod AI, we’re talking with Sierra Hahn-Ventrell, Director of Product Management at Apartment List. In this episode, we discuss how they:

*Analyze customer interviews with ChatGPT, even uncovering a missed insight that led to a full product strategy reset
*Built an AI Slack bot to flag issues in a new customer-facing tool before they become big problems
*And transformed sales enablement and automated documentation using NotebookLM and Claude

Growing to 42 Million Users: Audiomack's Growth Playbook | Charlie Kaplan, VP of Product (Audiomack)

July 22nd, 2025  |  Season 1  |  33 mins 55 secs

Business, digital experience, product management, technology

Today, we’re talking with Charlie Kaplan, VP of Product at Audiomack about Product Market Fit and how to tell if you’ve got it or not

In this episode, we discuss:

• How he drove 50x user growth at Cymbal, and why that still didn’t matter because they lacked strong fit
• The story of how he launched Audiomack’s product org and scaled to 42M MAUs, on the back of strong product market fit
• How he transformed failed features into new revenue streams—helping Audiomack grow into a platform big enough to host Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and more