Shows
Product Leader's JourneyRitu Bhargava, xPresident & CPO, SAP CX/CRM - Build "OrgIQ", Manage Up and AcrossRitu Bhargava is xPresident and Chief Product Officer of SAP Customer Experience (CX/CRM) & Consumer Industries. Prior to that she was SVP of Software Engineering at Salesforce for Sales Cloud (CRM) and held various engineering leadership roles at Oracle. Ritu is a sought-after advisor, investor and has also served as a Board Member at Qualtrics. In this conversation, Ritu is disarmingly honest and candid as she narrates stories about her experiences rising up in the organization, balancing getting visibility and being a team player, and learning from people six levels down in...2025-02-2039 min
Product Leader's JourneyMichael Margolis, CEO Storied, Author Story 10X - Building Narrative, Influencing at ScaleIn this engaging conversation,Michael Margolis, CEO of Storied and Author of Story 10X, shares his unique journey to storytelling expert, emphasizing the importance of narrative in leadership and product management. Michael is a thought provoking storyteller, who has tranied product, data and Go to Market teams at companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, NASA, SAP, Salesforce, Uber .. the list goes on. He is also the author two books, Story 10X Turning the Impossible into the Inevitable and Believe Me, a storytelling manifesto for innovators and change-makers. In this episode he discusses the distinction b...2025-02-0747 min
Product Leader's JourneyFred Koopmans, Chief Product Officer, Big Panda - From QA engineer to CPO, riding tech waves with a "reverse job description"Fred Koopmans is Chief Product Officer at BigPanda, an AIOps company. He is someone who has managed to ride the tech waves being at the right place at the right time - mobile video optimization on wireless networks, cloud, data platforms, open source, and now AI. Prior to BigPanda, Fred was SVP of Product Management at Cloudera, and Sr. Director Product Management at Citrix, and in engineering roles at Bytemobile.
In this episode, Fred shares his approach of writing a reverse job description that tells recruiters exactly what he is looking for. Here are some key highlights...2025-01-1646 min
Product Leader's JourneyElizabeth Samara-Rubio, Chief Business Officer, SiMa.ai - Building Business Case for Generative AIMy guest in this episode is Elizabeth Samara-Rubio, Chief Business Officer of SiMa.ai, which offers MLSOC and platform for Edge AI, and one of the ten hottest semiconductor startups of 2024.
In our conversation, we dive into how to help customers build business cases for GenAI, use cases and business models. In her previous role, Elizabeth led GTM and business development at Amazon for the worldwide AI specialist organization in AWS. So we talk about how Amazon’s famous Working Backwards methodology applied to go-to-market activities.
Elizabeth started her career at HP as a product manager in the Hardware Se...2024-12-1345 min
Product Leader's JourneyLuke Freiler, CEO Centercode - Creating a market category, value-based pricing, ROI analysisIn this episode, Luke Freiler, CEO of Centercode, which provides user testing solutions to leading tech companies. Luke shares his journey from hardware engineering to founding a company that revolutionizes product testing. He discusses the importance of continuous user testing, the shift from waterfall to agile methodologies, and how Centercode has established itself in a new market category. Luke emphasizes the significance of community building, demonstrating value through metrics, and the evolution of pricing strategies. He also explores the impact of generative AI on product testing and shares valuable leadership lessons learned throughout his entrepreneurial journey.
Luke is a...2024-11-1838 min
Product Leader's JourneyJyotika Athavale, President IEEE Computer Society - Solving future problems, Women in engineeringJyotika Athavale is the 2024 President of the IEEE Computer Society. In this role she oversees the global roadmap for the organization and plays a leading role in international safety standardization. She was honored with the IEEE Women in Technology and Leadership Award for her contributions towards diversity in engineering and STEM.
Jyotika is one of the leading experts in the area of automotive functional safety. In her day job, she is Director of Enterprise Architecture at Synopsys, and has had a successful career as Principal Engineer at Intel, and Lead Technologist at Nvidia. It...2024-10-2530 min
Product Leader's JourneyPurvi Shah, VP Enterprise Data Platforms, American Express - Newton's laws and data platformsPurvi Shah is Vice President of Product Development for Enterprise Data Platforms at American Express. Prior to that she led a team of consultants at Deloitte in the public sector working with many state governments to build solutions for citizens to avail services for food stamps, child care and other interventions. Purvi was recently recognized on the 2024 Global Data Power Women List by CDO Magazine.
In this episode Purvi talks about:
(1:05) Product development in the public sector
(2:23) Looking at the end-to-end journey beyond the u...2024-09-2628 min
Product Leader's JourneyJeff Lash, SVP Global Product Management, Forrester - Benchmarking Product ManagementJeff Lash is SVP of Global Product Management at Forrester. Jeff has been a long time thought leader on all things product. He led the product management practice at SiriusDecisions (acquired by Forrester) where he worked with many companies on assessing and benchmarking their product function competency and maturity. Jeff started his career as an information architect and usability at Elsevier and Mastercard, and then pivoted into product management, so he has some good insights to share from both sides.At Forrester, Jeff leads the core portfolio that generates hundreds of millions of dollars...2024-09-1241 min
Product Leader's JourneyLara Shackelford, xCMO Datastax, Looker - B2B Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, AILara Shackelford is a veteran Chief Marketing Officer many times over, and has led marketing teams to create impact at companies such as Oracle, Intel, Datastax, Looker (both before and after the acquisition by Google), and has also led global demand generation at Microsoft. She is currently senior vice president of marketing at iCapital.In this episode, Lara talks about how the B2B buying experience has changed, what is a good blueprint for sales training, coming up with a good ROI analysis, how to assess the ROI of AI, and what does a...2024-08-2636 min
Product Leader's JourneyNathan Gold, Demo Coach - Memorable Product Demos & High-stakes PresentationsNathan Gold is highly sought after as a coach for presentations at the TED conference, keynote speeches, entrepreneurs pitching on Shark Tank and startups raising funding from investors. He has delivered thousands of hours of professional coaching while working with companies such as Netflix, SanDisk, Kaiser Permanente and IBM.
In this episode Nathan shares some very useful tips on how to do a persuasive and memorable product demo, combined with stories. He shares a simple template for communicating your product’s value proposition. He also talks about the secrets of designing, scripting and delivering hi...2024-08-0740 min
Product Leader's JourneySudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO SolarWinds - Aligning purpose, portfolio, priorities, valueSudhakar Ramakrishna became CEO of SolarWinds at a very pivotal moment in the company's history, just as it became the target of a cyberattack that affected not just SolarWinds but its large base of enterprise and government customers. Since then, Sudhakar and the people at SolarWinds have led a remarkable turnaround. We are going to learn about how they did that. Before coming to SolarWinds, Sudhakar's journey has taken him from engineering and product leadership as well as GM, President and CEO roles at companies such as 3Com, Motorola, Polycom, Citrix, Pulse Secure. We cover many important topics in...2024-07-1641 min
Product Leader's JourneyHimanshu Palsule, CEO Cornerstone - Being self-aware, vulnerable, future-readyHimanshu Palsule is CEO of Cornerstone, which provides a workforce agility platform to identify skill gaps and development opportunities within organizations. Himanshu joined as CEO in Jan 2022, bringing more than 35 years of diverse experience leading global organizations. Prior to joining Cornerstone, he was President of Epicor where he was responsible for managing vertical businesses and overseeing product operations. Palsule was previously CTO and Head of Strategy at Sage Software.
Key highlights:
Learning to live within your own skin and recalibrating yourself
Concentric circles of evaluating ideas - Control, Influence, Interest
...2024-06-1942 min
Product Leader's JourneyAleks Bass, CPO Typeform - First 30-60-90 days, conflict, feedbackJoin host Rahul Abhyankar and Aleks Bass, Chief Product Officer of Typeform on this episode. At Typeform, Aleks leads product strategy, development and execution. Typeform helps brands with thoughtfully-designed tools that turn digital interactions into lasting personal connections, with no-code forms, quizzes, surveys, and asynchronous videos.
Aleks is a product leader with a 18+ year career that includes product management, product marketing, and consumer insights for both B2B SaaS and D2C self-serve products. Prior to Typeform, she led products at Surveymonkey, Qualtrics (acquired by SAP), Workfront (acquired by Adobe).
Aleks' passion lies at the...2024-06-0639 min
Product Leader's JourneyChris Johnson, Artisanal Talent Group - Working with executive recruitersChris Johnson is Co-founder & Managing Partner of Artisanal Talent Group, a highly specialized boutique executive search firm known for building some of tech’s most talented executive teams. Chris leads the Product and Engineering Leaders Practice, and is one of the most highly sought-after search consultants in the field for these critical roles at tier-1, high profile, VC backed and public companies. Over the past few years, Chris has completed Product and Engineering searches for Rippling, Notion, Rubrik, Airtable, ServiceNow, Databricks, Figma, UiPath, Confluent, Mulesoft, Starburst, GitLab, Splunk, Harness, New Relic, Elastic, dbt Labs, MessageBird, Postman, Coalition, Loom, Pendo, Pr...2024-05-2248 min
Product Leader's JourneyAl Zollar, Board Member IBM, NASDAQ, BNY Mellon - CEO of the ProductAl Zollar has had a distinguished 34-year career at IBM where he held several important roles across the entire software stack, including General Manager of IBM Tivoli Software, General Manager IBM iSeries server product line, and President of IBM Lotus Software. He spent the first 9 years in customer facing roles in pre-sales and post-sales engineering, before becoming a product manager for DB2, and later, OS2. Al is currently an Executive Advisor with Siris Capital Group and serves on the Boards of IBM, NASDAQ, BNY Mellon.
In this down to earth, candid and wide ranging conversation, Al shares th...2024-05-0735 min
Product Leader's JourneyDonald Hasson, CPO Dashlane - The future of passwords & Product OpsDonald Hasson, Chief Product Officer of Dashlane, a leading provider of password management to consumers and businesses, joins host Rahul Abhyankar in this episode. With a long and successful career in cybersecurity, Donald is an expert in identity and credential management.
How to build user delight for heightened emotions that are associated with creating, forgetting and protecting passwords.
How to think of user education as a feature of the product.
How to think of competition, direct, indirect, substitutes and alternatives.
How to avoid "the feature request black hole" of product development.
What to learn from customer's roadmaps and ho...2024-04-2534 min
Product Leader's JourneyAmanda Richardson, CEO CoderPad - On a mission to fix hiringAmanda Richardson is CEO of CoderPad, an online talent assessment platform used by companies such as Spotify, LinkedIn, Shopify, Lyft and many others. In just four years as CEO, she has led the company's growth in 160+ countries, over 4000 customers doing over 3 million assessments per year. Amanda started her career as an equities analyst on Wall Street, but she wanted to "be in the room where it happens". This brought her to Silicon Valley starting her journey as a product leader to CEO.
Key Highlights:
Importance of humor in the workplace
Hiring people with sk...2024-04-0935 min
Product Leader's JourneyRich Mironov, Author of The Art of Product Management - What product leaders owe their teamsRich Mironov, author of The Art of Product Management, and a veteran product leader with over three decades of experience tells it like it is in this engaging episode of Product Leader's Journey. We discuss the emotional aspects of product leadership, why prioritization is a political problem, why a product role in the B2B enterprise domain is more challenging, what product leaders owe their teams, and a lot more.
In this episode Rich covers:
What Go-to-Market teams actually don't care about
Prioritization is a political problem
Why the product role in enterprise B2B is...2024-03-2641 min
Product Leader's JourneyRich Fernandez, CEO SIY Global, SIY: Search Inside Yourself - Mindfulness for product leadersRich Fernandez is the CEO of SIY Global. SIY Global comes from the renowned Search Inside Yourself program, mindfulness and emotional intelligence training originally developed at Google, where Rich was director of executive education and people development. He was also one of the first SIY teachers. Rich has also served in senior roles at eBay, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. In this episode Rich shares insights about the importance of mindfulness and meditation for product leaders, as well as the critical ingredients for leadership.2024-03-0538 min
Product Leader's JourneyStuart McClure, CEO Qwiet AI, CEO Wethos AI - AI for high performing teamsStuart McClure is one of the foremost cybersecurity experts in the world and a serial entrepreneur with successful exits. He has built successful products leveraging ML & AI for cybersecurity. Stu is also a student of psychology and his new company, Wethos AI, leverages AI to codify traits of high performing teams.2024-02-2346 min
Product Leader's JourneyNadim Hossain, VP Product Management, Databricks - Building open & closed-loop ML productsWe hear often that careers are nonlinear. So how can we be thoughtful about the zig and deliberate about the zag? My next guest on Product Leader’s Journey, Nadim Hossain, VP Product Management at Databricks, has done exactly that. In this episode, Nadim shares insights about his experience at Uber and Databricks in building open and closed-loop ML products, product-led vs engineering-led product teams, and a lot more.
2024-02-1935 min
Product Leader's JourneyNatalia Baryshnikova, GM Atlassian - How to optimize the resumeNatalia Baryshnikova is GM of Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Prior to that she was Head of Products at SmartRecruiters. In this episode, Natalia shares her highly useful insights from her career journey. We dive into topics such as resume tips, cover letters, career growth, and driving alignment.2024-02-0737 min
SafarnamaEp 7 - The Bus StopIs depicted as mature, romantic, and understanding. The narrative explores a contemporary love story, contrasting the impatience of today's generation with the enduring nature of love stories from the past. Diya, upset with Rahul for not answering her calls or texts since morning, discusses her feelings with her mother. In response, Diya's mother shares the heartwarming Bus Stop Love Story of Dadaji and Dadiji, who meet near the gift shop every day. Their conversations remain the same, happening at the same time and moment, echoing the love they've shared for many years. The episode highlights the contrast between modern...2024-01-3012 min
Product Leader's JourneyDon Weinstein, x-CPTO, ADP - PM to Product LeaderDon Weinstein is ADP’s Global Chief Product and Technology Officer, responsible for all aspects of ADP’s global technology strategy and delivery. Don's career journey started at GE and then at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and ADP. In this episode, Don shares his playbook on how to lead technology transformations inside large organizations, the career graph from product manager to product leader to general manager, the key attributes of leaders that make them role models, and enabling customer intimacy for global product teams.2023-12-1639 min
Product Leader's JourneyInbal Shani, CPO GitHub - Systems thinking, AI, future of SW developmentInbal Shani is Chief Product Officer of GitHub. Having led engineering and product teams at Amazon and Microsoft and serving as a General Manager for most of her career, she specializes in crafting solutions that maximize customers’ most business-critical outcomes. Inbal’s development experience has spanned the entire tech stack. She was among the pioneering technologists who applied AI in the lab during her Master's in mechanical engineering. Immersed in the rapid evolution of LLMs and AI models, she is deeply passionate about optimizing the developer experience in her role as GitHub's Chief Product Officer. In this episode, Inbal shares her t...2023-11-2846 min
Product Leader's JourneyRaj Yavatkar, CTO Juniper Networks - Innovation in large companiesRaj Yavatkar has had a distinguished career being a Fellow at Intel and VMware, leading engineering teams at Google Cloud, and spearheading technology strategy as CTO at Juniper Networks. In this episode, Raj shares insightful stories and practical advice from his career driving innovation inside large companies, building billion dollar businesses, and building an innovative culture in an organization.2023-11-1431 min
Product Leader's JourneyRahul Abhyankar - Welcome to Product Leader's JourneyRahul Abhyankar, a seasoned product executive for over two decades, welcomes you to Product Leader's Journey! Learn about who this podcast is for, and why it was created, and what to expect! Thanks for listening!2023-11-1002 min