195. Peter Sunna, CPO, Kognic – How We Win: Why Kognic’s CPO Ditched the Roadmap for a Strategy That Actually Aligns Teams

In this episode, we’re joined by Peter Sunna (ex-Contentful, Commercetools), now leading product at Kognic, an annotation platform that helps cars “see” via camera & LiDAR for ADAS and autonomous driving. Peter shares why he downplays traditional roadmaps in favor of a company-wide “How We Win” operating system, aligning teams on target segment, differentiation, and the strategic power to compound.

We dive into the automotive software shift, safety-critical AI, and how to build defensibility when AI keeps redefining what’s feasible, sometimes in months. Peter explains how to keep Sales, Product, Marketing, and CS selling and building the same thing so strategy drives the plan, not a feature laundry list.

Here are some of the key questions we address:

• How do you replace feature roadmaps with a "How We Win" system that aligns every team and still tells customers what matters next?

• What does differentiation look like in practice and which power are you compounding (process, network effects, brand, switching costs, etc.)?

• When you’re early and have no moat, how do you use counter-positioning and when do you evolve to a more durable power?

• Depth vs. breadth: should you go deeper on a few use cases or widen to adjacent ones, and how do you decide?

• How do you sell a new workflow into enterprises (crossing the chasm) when existing org structures resist change?

• With AI rapidly changing what’s feasible, how do you plan, defend your margins, and avoid being automated away?

🎧 Tune in to hear how Peter turns strategy into an everyday operating cadence proving that in B2B, roadmaps don’t win markets; clarity on how you win does.