Product Talk
Products That Count
Produced by Products That Count, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products, this podcast is an award-winning show by and for product minds, with millions of downloads and a 5-star rating on most major platforms. Each of the 300+ episodes features a product leader interviewing another product leader and exploring what it takes to build great products. Recent ones feature the Chief Product Officers of Brex, Glassdoor, Experian and more.
About Us: Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of 30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success. Learn more at ProductsThatCount.com.
About Us: Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of 30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success. Learn more at ProductsThatCount.com.
Episodes
Mentioned books
10 snips
Apr 3, 2026 • 42min
The 4-Step AI Prompt Framework Every Product Manager Should Know
Akriti Dokania, venture partner and former engineer and product manager at Amazon and Microsoft, shares a PM-minded take on prompting AI. She discusses leading with context, using clarifying questions, assigning roles to the AI, naming risks, and starting with one small automation. Conversations cover what makes builders AI-native and the production challenges of reliability and privacy.
Apr 1, 2026 • 31min
Tavant Associate Director of Product on Transitioning from Product to Platform-Centric Strategies and Leveraging AI for Enhanced User Experience and Trust
Sandeep Shivam, Associate Director of Product Management at Tavant with nearly 20 years in lending and financial services, discusses shifting from product-centric to platform-centric strategies. He explores how AI raises customer expectations and accelerates platform adoption. He covers using user research to cut drop-offs, building trust through pilots and disclosure, and keeping humans in the loop for regulation and reliability.
9 snips
Mar 30, 2026 • 46min
AI Is Turning Product Managers Into Builders Again: Laurel CPO
Jiaona Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Laurel and experienced product leader, talks about AI-powered automatic time capture and how it reshapes product work. She explores privacy and user control, AI-native team structures, faster design-to-engineering loops, and how product roles shift when builders become more full-stack. The conversation highlights hiring, outcomes-focused management, and practical AI tools.
Mar 27, 2026 • 42min
Giggso Co-Founder on Responsible AI Governance at Scale
Ravi Venugopal, visionary AI leader and co-founder of Giggso, builds secure, scalable AI for regulated industries. He discusses governance as a necessary guardrail, why generative AI needs human oversight, observability for detecting drift and incidents, and frameworks for when to assist, augment, or automate. He also covers securing AI agents and upskilling teams for an AI-native future.
7 snips
Mar 25, 2026 • 36min
Microsoft Product Lead on Building AI-Powered Customer Service That Actually Works
Madhuri Somara, a Microsoft product leader building AI-powered customer service and case management solutions. She talks about automating routine work while keeping humans for judgment and empathy. She explains designing for resolution speed, surfacing transparent AI reasoning, and handling messy, high-stakes service environments.
Mar 23, 2026 • 43min
Automating Every PM Tasks: What We Learned (Descript CEO Laura Burkhauser)
Can product management be fully automated with AI, and what happens if you try? In this podcast hosted by Hoda Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Up My Mojo and a Board Member at Products That Count, Descript CEO Laura Burkhauser shares how her team experimented with automating nearly 100% of the product management workflow using AI. She discusses the surprising results of that experiment, how AI is changing the role of product managers, and why the future of product work may look very different from the processes teams rely on today.
Mar 18, 2026 • 43min
PolyGone Systems CEO & Co-Founder on Removing Microplastics and Improving Planetary Health with Design Thinking
Can design thinking and partnerships accelerate climate solutions at the pace the world now demands? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing PolyGone Systems CEO & Co-Founder Nathaniel Banks to discuss the use of design thinking and partnerships to remove and recover microplastics across bodies of water, the balance of product iteration and customer testing, and and importance of education of a problem and relevant solutions to facilitate adoption
Mar 16, 2026 • 38min
AI Isn't Breaking Work, We Are
AI isn't breaking work, we are. So what actually needs to change? In this episode of the Product Talk podcast, host Denise Hemke sits down with product leader Sriram Iyer to explore why today's workplace crisis has less to do with AI and more to do with culture, trust, and leadership clarity. Drawing on decades of experience across platforms, AI products, and scaling organizations, Sriram unpacks how product roles are collapsing, why durable careers now require lifelong learning and generalist skills, and how a growing trust deficit is undermining teams. From the "70/70/70" career framework to practical ways leaders can rebuild trust and clarity, this episode is a must-listen for product managers and leaders navigating change without losing their humanity.
4 snips
Mar 9, 2026 • 34min
Walmart Principal Product Lead on AI, Innovation & Outcome-Driven Strategy
Parul Jain, Principal Product Manager in Product Strategy and Innovation at Walmart, blends product, strategy and AI experience across retail and e-commerce. She talks about outcome-focused planning that reshapes team behavior. She explains making innovation repeatable with a stage-gated pipeline. She outlines practical, human-centered uses of generative AI for product operations.
9 snips
Feb 23, 2026 • 56min
How to Avoid Being Another Failed AI Project: AI Architect & Strategy Lead
Greg Nudelman, Product and UX leader with 16+ years in AI and creator of the Snowball Sprint, shares frameworks for reducing AI project risk. He covers why many AI initiatives fail, how to frame the right use cases, build fast thin prototypes with real data, and restructure teams and processes to escape POC purgatory.
