GTM 144: How AI is Rewriting Product and GTM Playbooks | with Oji Udezue (CPO - Typeform, Calendly)

17 snips

Apr 29, 2025

Oji Udezue, Chief Product Officer at Typeform and former CPO at Calendly, dives into the transformative role of AI in product development. He shares insights on the timing for hiring your first product manager and discusses why marketing should be integrated from the start. Udezue also highlights lessons from Microsoft’s failed Longhorn project and outlines a framework for identifying unicorn market opportunities. His upcoming book, Building Rocketships, promises further guidance for high-growth product teams.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ADVICE

Early Marketing Integration Crucial

Integrate marketing into product development from day one to speed up innovation and get better products to customers quickly.
Bring together product, engineering, design, product marketing, user research, and data early to form a powerful cross-functional "shipyard" team.

INSIGHT

AI Changes Product Development Pace

AI is accelerating the entire product development cycle but at uneven speeds across phases.
Leaders must rethink management as coding speeds up and marketing and customer discovery phases remain slower.

ADVICE

Match Passion with Market Demand

Founders must match their personal passion to a clear market opportunity to build successful startups.
Use new tools to build cost-effectively and focus on creating more value at lower cost than competitors.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Oji Udezue was most recently Chief Product Officer at Typeform, where he led product strategy across the company’s growing suite of tools. Previously, he was CPO at Calendly, where he helped scale one of the most beloved PLG tools in the market. Before that, he was Head of Product for Creation and Conversation at Twitter, leading core features like Tweets, DMs, and Spaces. At Atlassian, he led all communication products, including the launch of Atlassian’s first post-IPO product.

Oji also spent years at Microsoft, building foundational experiences across Windows, Outlook, Hotmail, and Internet Explorer.

In addition to his product leadership, Oji is the founder of Kernel Fund, an early-stage fund supporting startups across Africa. He writes about product, growth, and leadership at his newsletter Product Mind and is the author of the upcoming book Building Rocketships—a guide for high-growth product teams.

Discussed in this Episode:

When to hire your first PM (and what to look for).
Why great product teams include marketing from day one.
A framework for picking winning startup ideas.
How AI is changing how we build (not just what we build).
What product leaders can learn from Microsoft’s Longhorn failure.
Why 3x better isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a must.

Highlights:

04:52 – Why marketing is essential to product leadership.

12:02 – How AI is transforming the process of building products.

17:07 – Common product mistakes founders make early on.

24:16 – Building Rocket Ships: Why Oji wrote the book.

31:08 – Framework: Where to fish for unicorns.

33:17 – The “3x better” rule for product value.

37:07 – The challenge of true product differentiation.

39:22 – What Microsoft’s Longhorn failure taught Oji.

44:51 – When (and how) to hire your first PM.

48:31 – The importance of fast, early customer feedback.

54:46 – How AI is changing go-to-market strategy.

57:32 – Why marketers must master signal in a noisy world.

Guest Speaker Links (Oji Udezue):

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ojiudezue/
Kernel Fund: https://www.kernelfund.com/
Product Mind: https://www.productmind.co/
Building Rocketships (Book): https://a.co/d/0HGjf18
SubStack: https://ojiudezue.substack.com/

Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
Newsletter: https://substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

Website: https://gtmnow.com/
LinkedIn: https:

The GTM Podcast
The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.