Product Momentum Podcast

Phil Hornby is an experienced product leader, coach, and technologist whose mission is to help product leaders think clearly, make strong decisions, and take powerful action that drives high-impact outcomes. He’s a regular speaker at product events and is co-host of the “Talking Roadmaps” YouTube channel and podcast. If Phil were asked to distill product management down to its core, he’d tell us, “We’re paid to have an opinion.” Not simply putting a ‘licked finger to the wind,’ but trusting your experience and intuition to make high-quality decisions. Ah, and also to remember: there’s a difference between a high-quality decision and the “right” decision. There’s no way to guarantee that we make the right decision, Phil says, but there’re plenty of ways we can improve our odds. Here’s what we learned: Empowerment Is ‘Making Decisions that Stick’ At its most fundamental level, doing Product is decision making, Phil says. “That that’s like the whole heart of it. When we use the term empowered to describe product teams, we talk about their ability to make decisions that stick. If you can’t make a decision stick, then you’re not empowered. It’s really boiled down to this: empowerment is at the heart of all product work. Trust = Character + Competence Trust is an essential component in any relationship. Perhaps even more so in the often high-stakes world of product management. Phil’s hypothesis is that high-quality decision making cannot occur in its absence. “Trust comes down to two core components,” he says, “character and competence. You want others to look at you and say, ‘That’s someone I can trust.’ That’s the character…. Then there’s competence: ‘Do I think you can make it? Have you got the skills to make that high-quality decision? And those two things combine to provide trust. ‘We’re Paid to Have an Opinion’ – Evidence-informed Decisionmaking Phil talks about being evidence informed versus data driven, because “data can tell you anything. As product managers,” he adds, “I can massage the data to show whatever the heck I want it to do. “We absolutely need to bring data into our decision-making process,” Phil continues. “Data is a form of quantitative evidence, but then we need the anecdotes and other feedback to complete the equation. But we’re humans, we also have intuition. And, dare I say it, we are paid to have an opinion – to understand our markets, to bring that tacit knowledge, which some people call product sense, and apply it to the context of the situation we’re in.” Catch the entire episode with Phil Hornby and learn even more about: His 6-step process for raising the odds of making a high-quality decision. How product roadmaps reflect your team’s decision tree of what to do and when. Why strong opinions are valuable, as long as we’re open to the opinions of others. The post 178 / Phil Hornby: How To Make High-Quality Decisions That Stick appeared first on ITX Corp..

Michelle Parsons is a dynamic product leader who has led high-growth teams at Kayak, Spotify, Netflix, Hinge, and Lex. Her passion for building community and embracing new challenges has recently brought her to a leadership role in a new startup that helps people reconnect to themselves and one another. In this episode of Product Momentum, Michelle joins Sean and Dan to talk about “making bets” – not just the seductive big bets that promise game-changing innovation – but also the smaller bets and quick hits that also play important roles in delivering value, validating assumptions, and mitigating risk. Here’s what we learned: The Balanced Portfolio Framework At the heart of Michelle’s thinking is the notion of the Balanced Portfolio Framework – an idea she developed while leading product for kids’ content at Netflix. Under this framework, your roadmap is divided into three buckets – big bets, smaller bets, and quick hits – that help you pursue transformational innovation while delivering consistent value. As you’ll hear, connecting the dots between them helps to ensure that product work is driven by the value delivered to users and your business. Big bets start with user insights and clear hypotheses Big bets are the bold, strategic moves that are super-impactful, but also come with a great deal of uncertainty. They start with user insights and clear hypotheses that address the following questions: What need are we trying to solve? Why does it matter to our users? What metric will this move – and why does that metric matter for business impact? “These are the things that everyone wants to work on,” Michelle adds. “But they’re never just ‘cool ideas.’ They’re the big innovative features that bring your strategy to life. But they come with a ton of unknowns. Super impactful, but really, really risky.” Small bets preserve resources and de-risk the big bet Think of small bets as the “meat and potatoes” of your roadmap – incremental improvements like polishing UX, refining workflows, or optimizing metrics. Here’s what Michelle says: “The small bets are really about the optimizations and enhancements, the things that consistently create incremental impact for your users. Not only do they touch on macro metrics like retention, engagement, and delight, but they also help to de-risk the big bets.” Quick hits are the targeted work that accelerate learning We’re all familiar with those small, fast, low-cost experiments or enhancements. These are the low-hanging fruit that support rapid learning. “A quick hit is a learning task,” Michelle adds – “not to be confused with a quick win.” Certainly, they can also be quick wins, but “quick hits are really this body of work, discreetly tied a hypothesis or a data point that you want to prove out further.” Use storytelling to align stakeholders around ‘why’ Michelle emphasizes that roadmap planning is not just an exercise in listing features, but a storytelling exercise. Because many stakeholders – executives, founders, investors –don’t live in the product trenches. To get buy-in, you need to clearly articulate: What problem we’re solving, for whom, why it matters, and how this work moves the needle. Be sure to watch/listen to our entire conversation with Michelle, so that you can catch her thoughts about: How her team at Netflix utilized the Balanced Portfolio Framework. The role AI can play in balancing bets that deliver user benefit and business value. Michelle’s new start-up plans for building connections and community. The post 177 / Big Bets Are Back — Why They Need a Balanced Approach, with Michelle Parsons appeared first on ITX Corp..

Our conversation with Atlassian’s Axel Sooriah is the fourth in a series that Product Momentum recorded at INDUSTRY. And it’s interesting to see the common themes that are emerging – serendipitously – most notably that even as AI casts its long shadow over all things product, our recent episodes seem to be bringing us back to product management fundamentals: good process (John Cutler), sound communication (Sahil Jain), data readiness / skills development (Shensi Ding), and making bets (Michelle Parsons) (episode coming soon!). In this episode, Axel touches on another common theme: “Everywhere in product management, wherever you sit, whichever size the organization is, it’s pretty much the same challenges everywhere.” In other words, we all seem to face the same disjointed collaboration among stakeholders, the absence of evidence-based decision making, a lack of clarity around goals, and the looming disconnect between them and organizational objectives. Discovery will help teams move beyond just “finding user problems,” Axel says, to actually delivering the outcomes they’re seeking. Here’s what we learned: Clear Goals and Outcomes Enable Discovery One of the biggest challenges Axel sees is product teams operating without clarity around goals or desired outcomes. This undermines their ability to conduct meaningful discovery, he says. The remedy, Axel offers, is to treat goal‑setting as part of discovery by asking questions like: ‘If we solved this customer problem tomorrow, what does success look like?’ and position our discovery activities around those outcomes. Experimentation and Evidence Create Decision Confidence The lack of structured frameworks for generating evidence leads to shaky decisions rather than confident ones. “A lot of teams today make decisions that are not anchored in evidence,” Axel says. “It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s sometimes because they’re not set up to do it.” His recommended approach is a structured discovery flow: start with qualitative customer interviews to identify the problem, then prototype and experiment before coding for the full build. This exploration helps validate problems and solutions, so delivery is built on a firm base of evidence rather than a host of assumptions. Transparent Stakeholder Engagement Through Discovery Story‑telling Too often, discovery that is performed happens in isolation and doesn’t engage the organization’s leadership. Axel explains: “One of the ways we address this in our product teams, for example, is we use a lot of video reels of our customers – and then share it with stakeholders. There is no arguing with a video of customers explaining the intensity of a problem … it steers the conversation, because … why would an exec not agree with the reality of a customer?” In other words, sharing discovery artifacts helps build alignment and buy‑in. When you bring stakeholders into the process early on, discovery becomes a strategic communication tool rather than just part of a pre‑build checklist. Discovery isn’t optional. Full stop. It’s the foundation for making confident product decisions and delivering real user value. Be sure to catch the entire episode with Axel Sooriah and learn about Atlassian’s “4 Stages of an Idea.” The post 176 / Axel Sooriah: Discovery Done Right To Drive Product Success appeared first on ITX Corp..

Shensi Ding is the CEO and co-founder of Merge, a unified API platform that helps companies connect existing apps and systems with AI. Integrating AI offers many benefits: enhancing performance, automating tasks, and improving decision-making. But as Shensi points out, it’s not without looming challenges. Product leaders often wonder, Are my data and systems compatible with these new tools? Is my product team well-versed in AI technology? Can my organization’s data governance framework mitigate exposure to risk? Shensi joined co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to provide her insights in what Sean referred to as “a firehose of information and an AI integration master class.” Here’s what we learned: What Does High-Quality Data Look Like? High-quality data for AI integrations means ensuring all data is accurately synced, is normalized into consistent models across platforms, and accounts for potential edge cases. This is essential for reliable AI functionality and avoiding errors that stem from inconsistent or outdated information sources. “There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with the AI integration if you haven’t synced all your data,” Shensi explains. “You also want to make sure that it’s normalized properly. When you’re integrating with multiple platforms in a category, you need to have some kind of canonical data model that you end up normalizing it into. And that’s very difficult to do.” Integrating AI: Challenges and Roadblocks Many API providers have limitations, including outdated documentation and lack of real-time update notifications. These situations often require full data synchronization (over and over again), which leads to performance issues. Product managers need to be able to adapt to these limitations, Shensi explains. “Unfortunately,” she adds, “for each platform it becomes a little bit different, and you have to be a but hacky for how you solve it” and come up with creative, manual solutions to maintain data accuracy for AI use cases. Skills Development for Effective AI Integrations The simplest, most effective way to get comfortable with AI is to just dive in, Shensi says. “I just think the best way is just like testing it out and doing it yourself. Dive deep, actually understand how an integration might be built.” She suggests starting with hands-on testing using tools like Postman to authenticate and then explore API endpoints. Teams should experiment, set up sandboxes, add sample data, and perform load testing to build fluency with integrations and account for real-world edge cases as part of their learning process. Trends and Expectations for Widespread AI Adoption We may already be beyond the point of consumer acceptance of AI’s role in building software – these days, they expect it. Products that lack AI integration may be seen as outdated. As AI becomes normalized, both users and businesses anticipate AI-driven insights and automation as standard product features rather than optional add-ons. “I think everyone expects it now. And if it doesn’t, it’s kind of weird.” Catch the entire episode for Shensi’s thoughts on these important topics: The difference between a typical product owner and the technical product owner? Why product leaders should become comfortable with AI tools and how to use them. The new product recently launched by Merge that enables agents to safely make calls to third-party enterprise tools. Our conversation with Shensi Ding is the third of five episodes the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the final two in-person episodes over the next few weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian) and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 175 / Seamless AI Integration: Challenges and Opportunities, with Shensi Ding appeared first on ITX Corp..

With so many tools at our disposal, why do product people continue to struggle with effective communication? Email after email, meeting after meeting, teams replay the same conversations and plow the same ground, re-litigating the decisions they agreed to weeks before — wasting time, money, and energy in the process. The “information asymmetry” that exists within organizations is the problem that Sahil Jain is trying to solve. Sahil is co-founder & CEO of Samepage.ai, where he’s building an AI-powered remedy for product managers — whose job is all about communication and the influence that each message carries with it. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sahil addresses the importance of communication in product management, offering techniques to improve this core skill and explaining why the ability to communicate across roles is essential for product managers. Here’s what we learned: The Essence of Good Communication It isn’t enough for messages to be sent and received to constitute good communication; the message has to be understood. And achieving understanding is not just the task of the receiver; the sender shares this responsibility equally. “Within the learning sciences, there’s a great area to look at with respect to the ingestion, retention, and recall of information,” Sahil says.  “It’s important to remember that there’s only so much that team members can process cognitively. So we need to break things up into reasonable chunks. And team members can help close the communication loop by restating the message they received as a way of acknowledging that they understand what I’m saying.” Communicating Across Functional Roles In Product Momentum episode 28, Rich Mironov described the product manager as “the person nobody works for and who, it often seems, works for everybody else.” That’s why it’s crucial for PdMs to understand others’ context and goals, where influence is key. For example, Sahil adds, when communicating with Sales teams, their primary concerns are around money and deals and increasing deal velocity. “So if you goal is to influence the actions of others in a particular way,” Sahil adds, “it’s important that you understand what the goal of their role is and to speak to them in terms that resonate with them. That’s what drives their receptiveness of your message.” The Power of Storytelling To emphasize the role storytelling plays in product management, Sahil presents research data that says “telling stories is 22 times more memorable than just facts or information alone. “When we hear a good, well-told story, we start relating it to our own experience,” Sahil says.  So when we become the storyteller, we’re getting the listener to almost experience it with us, not just receive the information. It’s very powerful.” Our conversation with Sahil Jain is the second of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian), Shensi Ding (Merge), and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 174 / How Product Managers Can Master the Art of Communication, with Sahil Jain appeared first on ITX Corp..

John Cutler is Head of Product at Dotwork – a startup dedicated to transforming how teams collaborate and manage product development. He is also a prolific writer, including his wildly popular newsletter, The Beautiful Mess. John’s prior roles include supporting product teams at Toast as Senior Director, Product Enablement and Product Evangelist and Coach at Amplitude. In today’s episode of Product Momentum, John joins Sean and Dan for an in-person conversation recorded at INDUSTRY, The Product Conference back in September. We caught up with John in between his day 2 keynote and re-entry into “startup survival mode.” During our chat, John reflects on organizational realities and ways of working, the notion of product people as game designers, and how that mindset highlights the importance of fun and dynamism in the workplace. Here’s what we learned: Organizational Realities and Ways of Working A deep chasm lies between the way organizations communicate their ways of working and their actual practices, John says, highlighting the multiple realities that coexist within companies. “I think in any socio-technical system, you tend to see different frames and perspectives,” he adds. “Companies are not rational places. I’ve been doing a lot of research [in this space], and I’ve learned that pirate ships, despite their reputation, are way more organized than your average company. And actually way more democratic too. “View process and your ways of working as extensions of what you do for your customers,” he continues. It’s a perspective that encourages empathy and a customer-centric approach even in internal ways of working. The Concept of Product People as Game Designers During his keynote, John introduced the notion that product managers and their teams are essentially “game designers” responsible for creating engaging, dynamic experiences. “I like the game design idea because everyone can relate to playing an amazing game and being in the zone with friends,” he offers. “When you experience a great restaurant, that’s service design. Enjoy an amazing vacation? That’s experience design. Ultimately, it’s not super-complex; people can relate.” Applying this mindset to product development and team dynamics can make work more enjoyable and effective. Importance of Fun and Engagement at Work During the conversation, Sean suggests that “roughly 90% of the people you work with – if they could make the same salary doing something else – would actually do that something else.” The statement highlights the critical role of having fun and being engaged in your work that often makes the difference. John goes on to distinguish genuine engagement and dynamic work environments from the many superficial initiatives he often sees. “I’m trying to decouple the sort of ‘corporate engagement industry’ from occasions where people find themselves ‘in the zone,’ a state of flow that goes beyond fun into a sort of dynamism in their environment. Our conversation with John Cutler is the first of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, on September 9-10. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 173 / John Cutler: Product Managers as Game Designers – Shifting the Workplace Mindset appeared first on ITX Corp..

Nesrine Changuel is a product coach, advisor, and speaker with more than a decade of senior-level product experience at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Soon she will add “author” to her long list of accomplishments with the publication of Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection (September 23, 2025). In this episode of Product Momentum, Nesrine guides us through her Product Delight Model. In the process, she reminds us that while strong functionality creates an initial sense of trust and reliability, it is our products’ thoughtful human touches that extend beyond trust to build a strong emotional connection. Here’s what else we learned: Delight Combines Function and Emotion To Nesrine, building delightful product means creating technical solutions that address a user’s functional and emotional needs. Product managers are well accustomed to building products that solve a functional problem, she says. But that’s usually not enough. “What I’m advocating for is making sure that your tech product is of course functioning well,” Nesrine adds, “that it’s solving for functional needs. But we must also try to include users’ emotional needs into your solutions.” This combination of needs fulfillment makes an emotional connection that secures the bond between product and user. The Three Pillars of Delight To achieve product delight, our products must solve existing user challenges, exceed user expectations, and anticipate unspoken needs.   “First,” Nesrine continues, “we need to make sure that whatever we’re building is solving for something that the user is needing. Next, we cannot be content with just meeting user needs; these days, that’s not enough. We need to exceed them. And third, we need to develop the ability to [see around corners], anticipating future needs. Humanizing AI Interactions Understanding a user’s motivations for using a product is essential to providing product delight. Though the study of demographic and behavioral segmentation fills in some of the blanks, motivational segmentation helps us tailor products to users’ emotional drivers. “I think we’re in a much more demanding time for product delight, especially with AI,” Nesrine adds. “AI will certainly improve our product’s functionality. But we should not fall into a world where all products feel like robots. We need to get this human touch, and humanization is extremely important for creating the emotional connection” that drives delight. At INDUSTRY on September 9-10, the Product Momentum team recorded five in-person episodes that we’ll drip out over the next several weeks. Don’t miss upcoming conversations with John Cutler, Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 172 / How Emotional Connections Deepen Product Delight, with Nesrine Changuel appeared first on ITX Corp..

Brian Piper, an expert in digital content strategy and host of the AI4U podcast, delves into how AI transforms content creation and management. He emphasizes that a great strategy is intentional and data-driven, urging teams to align content with business goals. Brian highlights the human aspect of AI adoption, pointing out the importance of change management in integrating new tools. He also explores AI's role in ensuring brand consistency and bolstering audience engagement, offering insights that can reshape organizational approaches to content.

If you could hire an employee who never gets tired, never loses focus, and instantly adapts to your workflow, would you do it? In the latest episode of Product Momentum, Lena Sesardic leans on her experience as a tech product manager and business-savvy entrepreneur to explore this tempting proposition through the lens of custom GPTs – specialized generative AI bots now reshaping how product teams operate. The episode isn’t a technical tutorial on how to build custom GPTs – though Lena does walk us through her 6-step framework. It’s more a conversation – peppered with easy-to-understand examples – that help us think in new ways about the nature of our work. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting creative and strategic bandwidth Lena describes custom GPTs as “little AI employees” that can take loads of work off your plate. By delegating tasks like writing user stories or analyzing estimates, product managers can free themselves to focus on higher-order work: roadmapping, stakeholder management, and creative problem-solving. We can train custom GPTs to be our “collaborative thought partners,” Lena adds, “sort of a second brain that can then free up our bandwidth for more creativity, more user connection, and more talking with your actual users or stakeholders.” Demystifying misconceptions Lena dispels concerns about the level of technical sophistication required to build custom GPTs. “A lot of PMs I know think [custom GPTs] are very technical,” she adds. “I used to think I had to be able to code to create a custom GPT. But the more I worked with them, I realized, ‘oh my gosh, I can totally build these and take a bunch work off my plate.'” Lena’s 6-step framework for building a custom GPT Start a conversation with ChatGPT (Lena recommends a Plus subscription) to help you build your custom GPT. Cast the role. Decide the expertise you need from your custom GPT. Develop the system instructions. Add context; define the input-transformation-output formula to generate the results you want. Map out the workflow. Be clear about your desired outputs. And remember, as with any AI tool, iteration is key. Add intelligence. Upload additional frameworks and other documents to guide your GPT. Install the brain. Copy-paste the system instructions from your ChatGPT conversation into your custom GPT. Put your GPT to work. Feed it real world data. Test it. Return to the conversation and describe what you’re seeing. Find out how to tweak it until you’re satisfied. Lena’s is a message that resonates: by embracing custom GPTs, product managers can amplify not just their operational efficiency, but their capacity for meaningful innovation. The Product Momentum team will be heading to Cleveland for INDUSTRY on Sept. 9-10, recording live, in-person episodes with several conference keynote speakers. Be sure to stop by Product Momentum’s Podcast Zone to say hi! The post 170 / Lena Sesardic: Building and Using Custom GPTs for Product Management appeared first on ITX Corp..

If you were the CEO of the company where you work, would you fund the work your team is doing? In the early pages of Matt LeMay’s latest book, Impact-first Product Teams, readers confront this existential question. And it hits pretty close to home: am I worthy of my company’s investment? As he explains to Dan Sharp and guest co-host Nathan Shapiro, the book is organized not around frameworks, but around the questions and challenges posed by product teams who want to be able to answer ‘Yes.’ In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live before delivering the closing keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, Matt urges product teams and individual contributors to tie their daily efforts to the company’s desired business outcomes. He also encourages product leaders to be clear about their expectations: “It’s okay to demand concise, clear answers about how they’re cutting through irrelevant distractions to focus on what truly matters,” Matt says. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting the business model. Product teams and ICs need to be able to draw a direct line between their work and how the business makes money. “The business is model is intrinsically customer centric,” Matt says. “It’s how we exchange value. To understand the business model, we need to understand our customers. If we don’t understand them, we can’t succeed at implementing our business model.” Avoiding OKR overload. OKRs, like everything else, are best when used in moderation. “The ‘by the books’ optimal number of objectives is five,” Matt explains, “with three to five key results. If you have many more than that. you’re not actually measuring anything. I’m sorry. If you have 25 things that matter, then nothing matters.” Cultural hurdles to impact. Team members who claim their company isn’t doing product “the right way” create unnecessary obstacles to a strong organizational culture. As do product leaders who leave to their teams the task of making sense of every new strategy that’s dropped at their doorstep. “It pains me to hear people say that because I believe each and every one of us has the opportunity to do meaningful work that makes our organizations better,” Matt explains, adding, “and I think we should ban executive off-sites …. If [leaders] can’t figure out what’s needed within the context of the people doing their day-to-day work…and if your instinct is to close yourself off from the people who will apply your strategy, then you probably don’t really know how strategy works. I will never budge on that.” Be sure to catch our entire episode with Matt LeMay, where he discusses: How to ‘manage up’ with clear value. Using data to estimate impact and validate hypotheses. Measuring impact of platform teams. Nathan Shapiro, special guest co-host for this episode, is the Head of Product Management for the combined Paychex and Paycor where he leads a diverse team responsible for shaping industry-leading Human Capital Management platforms. Earlier this year, Nathan was named an HR Executive 2025, Top 100 HR Tech Influencer, and 2025 Forbes Technology Council member. The post 169 / Matt LeMay’s Keys to Delivering Impact That Propels Your Business Forward appeared first on ITX Corp..