The Intentional Product Manager Podcast Scaling Product Organizations with an AI-first Approach
Jan 7, 2026
Join Bala Venkatrao, a seasoned product leader and GM at Harness, as he shares insights from his impressive background at Atlassian and his entrepreneurial journey. He discusses building scalable platform products in an AI-driven landscape, emphasizing the importance of data, context, and a founder's mindset. Bala introduces his CATS leadership framework, focused on clarity and trust, and offers tactical advice on leveraging AI as a powerful tool for product managers. Stay curious and approach challenges as opportunities for growth!
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AI-Native Platform Solves Developer Toil
- Harness positions itself as the AI-native SDLC platform to handle the 70% of developer toil after code is written.
- The platform focus is on orchestrating integration, testing, deployment, feature flags, and cost management at scale.
Context + Actions Make Practical Agents
- Agents win when you combine context (data) with actions, not when you hand an LLM blind tasks.
- Building a knowledge graph from SDLC metadata gives agents the context and guardrails to operate safely.
Scaling Atlassian Cloud And Marketplace
- At Atlassian Bala led Atlassian Cloud Enterprise to scale from zero to several hundred million ARR by addressing enterprise scale, security, and compliance.
- He later drove the Atlassian Economy, growing marketplace GMV from about $300M to near $1B ARR by lighting up the ecosystem.