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The Product Momentum team first met Oji Udezue following his keynote at INDUSTRY 2025. And we just knew we had to have him on the pod. Oji is a highly skilled product leader whose CV includes companies like Calendly, Atlassian, and Microsoft. In addition, he co-authored (with wife, Ezinne Udezue) Building Rocket Ships, Product Management for High-Growth Companies a manual for product leaders, product managers, and executives who want to build faster, better, and more profitably (raise your hand if that describes you!). In this episode, we begin broadly by discussing the evolving role of product management in the era of AI. We then pivot quickly, drilling into some of the new challenges that require today’s product leaders to: Readjust to the accelerated pace of product development in today’s AI-empowered world (the three-speed problem), Re-emphasize product management’s core principles that remain constant, and Reconsider what counts as essential skills for today’s product manager. AI’s Impact and the Three-Speed Problem Companies do three things to build great technology products, Oji says: customer science, construction/development, and go-to-market. Each step on this cycle moves at its own pace. Before AI, engineering speed was the process bottleneck. But with AI-driven automation, construction has become much faster, creating new challenges in synchronizing these three phases. “We’re all going to spend a lot of time balancing that equation,” Oji adds, “finding the practices, the team structure, the team ratios, the new AI tools that help us keep this thing fast but then speed up customer science and GTM.“ Essential Skills for Today’s ‘Renaissance PM’ The AI transformation calls on product managers to add new arrows to their quiver of skills – e.g., curiosity, humility, agency among them. In the same way we transitioned from a pre-internet to internet environment, Oji adds, AI “requires brand new thinking.” But the old skills still apply: “These are worth bringing up because a lot of PMs don’t have them: communication, creativity, the ability to ship, and leadership – being the kind of person people want to follow – all of that has to do with judgment. The role is evolving into that of a “renaissance PM” who blends traditional skills with new AI-related capabilities. Evolution of the PM Role Has the PM role evolved so much that the skills required to perform it are now preeminent to the role itself? Is that where AI is taking us? “I’ve always thought the skills…the mindset…was way more important,” Oji offers. “The title just gives us a way to put it in a box. The title is nothing without the skills. That’s why I wrote the book. Because I want more people to have the skillsets” required to succeed in this new world order. The post 180 / Oji Udezue: The Renaissance PM – Core Skills for Today’s AI-Driven World appeared first on ITX Corp..

For the past 20 years, Teresa Torres has championed the cause of product discovery. We’ve made progress, she says, but there are plenty of companies and teams out there who don’t know much about their customers – and still think they have all the answers. Is AI exacerbating the problem? In this episode, Teresa returns to Product Momentum taking us on a rollercoaster ride that begins in a pre-ChatGPT world full of hopeful optimism in which product leaders were (slowly, steadily) recognizing the value good Discovery brings – but then spirals through phases of grief as AI-powered Delivery seems to have reclaimed our attention. As you’ll hear, Teresa remains bullish on AI. But she’s also concerned that AI is pulling us in the wrong direction, making it easier and faster to build and, thus, putting even more emphasis on Delivery. Ever the optimist, Teresa believes that product builders can use the same technology that created today’s predicament to help us course-correct, refocusing our attention on high-quality Discovery practices. Here’s a few of our key takeaways: AI Might Be Helping Us Build the Wrong Thing In our earlier episode with Teresa (58 / Innovate with Product Discovery, published shortly before the release her Continuous Discovery Habits, a must read for anyone in the software space), Teresa talked about how the product community under-emphasized Discovery and over-emphasized Delivery. It was a time highlighted by a gnawing anxiety that we were building the wrong stuff. Since then, the trend was moving back toward a focus on Discovery, Teresa says, until AI changed the trajectory again. “AI is making it easier and faster to build software,” Teresa says. “But as we do, we’re once again putting even more emphasis on Delivery and forgetting to ask whether we’re building the right thing?” AI’s Double-Edged Sword: Broad Participation vs. Product Coherence Teams across the organization are now contributing to software development – a positive trend that Teresa calls awesome. “We want to empower product teams and draw people closer to the customer to impact the product in positive ways,” Teresa says. “But it’s equally terrifying: who’s creating product coherence, and how do we make sure [each team] is serving the market and not their own specific needs?” The Opportunity Solution Tree: A Structure Of Discovery That Doesn’t Change With the Opportunity Solution Tree, Teresa provides teams with “a simple underlying structure that gives us a mental representation” of the interaction between what success looks like (outcome), our customers and their needs (opportunity space), and impact on our customers and our business. “Do I think that’s ever gonna change?,” Teresa asks. “I don’t. We’re always gonna have to create value for our business. We’re always going to have to create value for our customers. Hopefully, we are doing one thing to accomplish both – not doing competing things.” As AI enables more people to be makers, teams and organizations will learn new skills and allow everyone who wants, to contribute while still delivering a coherent product that serves their users. “I actually think that’s gonna be net positive in the long run,” Teresa concludes. You can catch even more of Teresa’s insights by checking out her podcast, Just Now Possible, which releases new episodes every Thursday. And, beginning this month (Jan. 2026), Teresa and Product Talk are launching a new course called, Business Fundamentals. The post 179 / Teresa Torres: Is AI Re-Prioritizing Delivery Over Discovery (Again)? appeared first on ITX Corp..

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..

In this episode of Product Momentum, content strategist Brian Piper joins Dan Sharp and guest co-host Tim Snedden to describe the power of AI in content strategy—revealing how these tools act as creative partners, not just digital workhorses. What’s at stake isn’t just automation or efficiency, but a fundamental shift in how product managers, writers, and organizations approach content creation, measurement, and change management. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting intentional, data-driven content Brian opens with a simple but powerful truth: a great content strategy doesn’t depend on luck or volume. Successful teams align their efforts with business goals and audience needs—avoiding wasted cycles and maximizing their return on effort. “No more random acts of content,” he stated. “If every piece of content you create does not have a specific end goal or a specific audience you’re trying to connect with, you’re wasting your time…. Real content strategy is much more intentional, much more data inspired, and much more focused on helping you reach specific goals.” Change management: the human side of AI Adopting AI isn’t just about adding a new tool to your tech stack. Those of us trying to figure out how best to integrate AI into our workflows need to understand that it’s not just another technology adoption project. “This is really change management,” Brian adds, underscoring the need for a thoughtful process – one that brings everyone along for the ride and seeks buy-in from all the right people, including ICs, leadership, IT, and legal. The data behind great decisions Throughout the conversation, Brian returns to the theme of responsible data practice. Safeguarding personal information is paramount, but public and low-risk data – e.g.,  content-related performance metrics – can unlock valuable insights. AI excels at finding hidden gaps and guiding content teams to lead audiences deeper into the brand journey. “Now we can feed that information into AI,” Brian continues. “And it can look through all of those keywords, finding correlations, anomalies, and clusters of content topics where we already have search dominance. AI is great at gap analysis, as well. Humans are great at seeing what’s in front of us, but not so great at seeing what’s missing. The Product Momentum team travels to Cleveland Sept. 9-10, where we will be recording in-person episodes with John Cutler, Michelle Parsons, Shensi Ding, Sahil Jain, and Axel Sooriah. Be sure to stop by the The Podcast Zone to say hi! Special thanks to our friends at Mind the Product and INDUSTRY for their hospitality! Tim Snedden is a content strategist at ITX who’s responsible for delivering crystal-clear information to users right when they need it. He spoke at the 2024 Flower City AI conference on the efficacy of large language models for accelerating content creation and leads AI initiatives at ITX. The post 171 / Harnessing AI to Transform Content Strategy, with Brian Piper appeared first on ITX Corp..

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..

Ioana Teleanu is an AI product design expert and consultant who shaped the experience of Miro AI as their Lead Product Designer. She is currently the creator and instructor of AI for Designers, one of the most successful courses launched on Interaction Design Foundation.  Moments before sitting down for this episode of Product Momentum – recorded live at ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference – Ioana delivered a keynote in which she invited attendees to reflect on the evolving relationship between AI and UX design. Our discussion explores the realities and myths surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, the challenges teams face in adopting AI tools, ethical considerations in deploying AI, and practical advice for integrating AI into design workflows. Here’s what you’ll learn: AI and the Future of Design Roles Ioana puts to rest concerns about AI replacing product managers and designers, rejecting as “clickbait” the many recent headlines that provoke anxiety and stress in the industry. “AI is transforming our roles, but they’re not going away,” she says. Referring to a study by the World Economic Forum, Ioana believes that “AI will end up creating more jobs than it replaces. There’s going to be more jobs thanks to AI, and one of the professions that was marked as growing is UX design.” Addressing Challenges in AI Literacy and Adoption Design teams face loads of challenges these days that postpone adoption and integration of AI into their workflows – many of which are rooted in decisionmaking at the organizational level. As leaders, Ioana advises, we need to give our teams permission to play around with these tools. “Our teams are in a very odd place right now; there’s a great deal of expectation, but not a lot of support.” Company leadership needs to provide the resources – e.g., time, context, and financial support – to create the structured environments their teams need for AI learning and experimentation. “The cost of breaking things by experimenting with AI is far lower than the cost of not experimenting at all,” she concludes. Ethics and AI’s Missing Moral Compass Ioana reflects on society’s gradual relaxation of privacy boundaries, noting that people frequently share intimate information with AI systems that they keep even from their loved ones. “AI doesn’t understand consequences,” she says. “It doesn’t have a moral compass. As designers, that means the responsibility is even higher on our side to protect our users and to keep their data safe.” Final Thoughts Contribute to the public disambiguity. AI technology is infant technology. We’re all trying to find the answers. If you do something interesting, talk about it. Context (in prompt writing) Is Key. Train AI tools on specific design systems or product aesthetics to improve consistency and reliability. Synthetic users. They may never replace real users, but they might help UX researchers get a quick sense of something before we test with real users. The (Blurring) Line between Product + Design. Catch Ioana’s real-life example of a product manager (trained in Design) who initiated company-wide Figma training for product managers. The post 168 / Ioana Teleanu, Designing With AI: Overcoming Barriers and Embracing Change appeared first on ITX Corp..

Usha Iyer is Hivebrite’s Chief Customer and Growth Officer, leading the community engagement platform’s go-to-market customer success and revenue strategy. On June 26, her opening presentation kicked off Keynote Day at ITX’s Product + Design Conference. Right after she exited the stage, Usha joined Sean Murray and Dan Sharp for this episode of Product Momentum, recorded in front of a live conference audience. Our conversation with Usha follows the customer journey, meeting at the intersection of product management, business growth, and customer success. And it covers key themes like connecting product work to business outcomes, the Bow Tie Model for customer journey alignment, and AI’s role in optimizing business processes. At the close of the conversation, Usha offers practical advice for product teams on engagement and roadmap management. Here’s what we learned: Product’s Connection with Business Impact SaaS product teams need to focus on the outcomes of product work that drive real business impact. Even small, seemingly minor changes to your product can significantly affect engagement and business metrics. “Oftentimes, you’ll find as a product person that the smallest, most inconsequential feature that you develop actually has the biggest impact,” Usha says. “The least amount of effort sometimes gives you the biggest satisfaction…. So it’s important to connect the dots and go from what you’re doing day to day, the output to the outcomes.” Aligning with Go-To-Market Stakeholders To deepen (even expand) business acumen, Usha recommends that product teams collaborate with their counterparts in the go-to-market organization. “Learn to align with your marketing team, your sales teams, your customer success teams,” she advises. “Ask to join discovery calls with prospects, or do a ride-along with a sales rep to gain direct market insights.” Engagement fosters empathy, strengthens business alignment, and deepens understanding of customer needs and industry dynamics. The Bow Tie Model Usha introduces the Bow Tie Model as a framework that coordinates product, marketing, sales, and customer success around shared business goals. In addition, she emphasizes leadership alignment on key metrics like GRR, NRR, and ARR to create feedback loops that enhance the customer journey and drive sustainable growth. “It boils down to leadership at the go-to-market level and the product level,” she adds. “We’re all working toward company success, so if we can internalize that and build it into the culture of the organization – including your product and engineering activities – it becomes a flywheel.” Growth Drivers in SaaS Companies As Usha points out, SaaS companies’ main growth drivers are retention, expansion, and new business; but then she introduces a fourth: efficiency. “Investors are getting a lot more stringent about where they put their money,” she continues. “Whereas top line metrics drive revenue metrics, which drive your presence in the market, efficiency drives your residence in the market.” AI-Assisted Organizational Buy-in To gain organizational buy-in for adopting frameworks like the Bow Tie, Usha suggests leveraging AI to connect diverse data sources – such as sales conversations, marketing signals, and product usage – to generate actionable insights. AI tools accelerate the process by automating tasks like generating QBRs and providing sales teams with tailored pitches. “The answer lies in being able to take your product metrics and align it to the company metrics,” Usha says. “That’s really where it starts. That’s how we drive change management. And AI can play a big part: you can take any metric and connect the dots with another metric pretty easily with AI.” Unable to attend ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference? Explore the highlights. The post 167 / How SaaS Teams Drive Impact Through Alignment and Innovation, with Usha Iyer appeared first on ITX Corp..

Sophia Prater is CEO of Rewired UX and the creator of the Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Certification. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sophia joins Sean Murray and guest co-host Jon Daiello to discuss OOUX and the many ways it can help product teams deliver better design, more efficiently than ever. As Sophia explains, “OOUX is like the backbone of the design process that allows all these other disciplines to hang on to.” And the ORCA process – that is, Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes – is the ‘how’ of the OOUX philosophy. Jon, a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, shares Sophia’s enthusiasm for integrating OOUX principles into his team’s design practice. Together, they explored how OOUX is reshaping the design landscape and empowering product teams to deliver exceptional user experiences. Here’s what you’ll learn:Breaking Down Functional Silos with OOUXOOUX provides a structured approach to design that breaks down functional silos by focusing on the objects and relationships that users interact with. OOUX encourages cross-functional collaboration by creating a shared language among the trio of product, engineering, and UX. “Object-oriented UX is gonna help designers communicate with our developers and PMs. And it’s actually going to help us internally as a team. If we don’t understand internally what the objects are, if we don’t have a shared language on what the things are, then how are we gonna make it clear to our users?” ORCA: Boosting Process Efficiency Through UnderstandingOne of the standout benefits of OOUX is its ability to boost process efficiency. Not only does OOUX promote that reusability of shared artifacts, but it helps product teams save time and resources by building only those things that users need and want – and by not buildingthe things users do not need or want. “The ORCA process is a tool for understanding,” Sophia explains. “Understanding the scope and making sure it’s really clear. Understanding the mental model, the data structure, and all the constraints – technical and otherwise. ORCA allows us to truly become systems thinkers,” she adds. “That’s what the world needs. We want to be creating real solutions that solve real problems. Our system lies within a system of systems. So we need people thinking in systems. And that is what the ORCA process gives you.” Slowing Down to Go Fast – with Less WasteWhen product teams dedicate time early in the process to define objects, relationships, and processes, Sophia says, they not only reduce the risk of costly errors later in the cycle. They also quickly discover “all the stuff they don’t need to do. “OOUX helps you get everything on the table, with everyone looking at all the puzzle pieces collaboratively,” Sophia says. “When we do that, we realize we don’t even need half of this stuff — the stuff that’s just gonna drag us down. When we got rid of that, we realize we can go so much faster.” Jon Daiello is a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, leading design teams across Platform, Design Systems, and UX Strategy. He’s passionate about building strong designers, sharing insights on his website and other platforms. ITX’s Product + Design Conference is just around the corner, on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page! The post 166 / Sophia Prater, on Object-Oriented UX: The Backbone of the Design Process appeared first on ITX Corp..