Product Talk

Trey Courtney started his career as a software developer at Accenture and spent 16 years evolving into the role of Global Chief Product and Partnership Officer at Mood Media, the largest provider of audio and visual in-store experiences in the world. If you have heard music playing in a Macy's, seen a menu board at Whole Foods, or walked through a Ferrari showroom, you have experienced what Mood Media builds for roughly 600,000 locations worldwide. Trey was selected as a finalist for Products That Count's 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of Product Talk, host and Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi sits down with him to talk about what it takes to bring a product mindset into a sales-led, private equity-backed company, how he is navigating AI investment when the stakes are high and the tools keep changing, and what he thinks the CPTO org chart looks like in three years.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:23) Trey's path from software developer at Accenture to running product, creative, and partnerships at Mood Media
(3:24) What Mood Media actually does: the brand behind the brand at 600,000 locations worldwide
(5:32) How product decisions get made when the roadmap is largely driven by custom client requests
(7:14) Sales-led, private equity-backed: how that shapes product culture and what Trey has tried to change about it
(9:17) Why Trey now owns creative and partnerships in addition to product, and what breaks when those functions are siloed
(13:23) Where AI is going in the experience economy: real-time personalization and why they started with 11 Labs three years ago
(16:04) The hardest part of AI leadership: which tool to bet on, when to launch, and how to manage compliance in a large company
(20:57) The jagged line: what it actually looks like when AI investments go wrong on the way to going right
(22:55) How AI is landing differently across creative, engineering, and product management teams
(26:01) What happens when salespeople start vibe coding and showing prototypes to clients
(29:47) What the CPTO org chart looks like in three years: QA, DevOps, and the PM-to-engineer ratio
(33:43) The competitive analysis agent that builds battle cards automatically so salespeople stop asking
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing JUUNOO Founder Chris Van de Voorde to discuss building modular and reusable interior walls to eliminate waste in commercial real estate fit-outs, scaling a circular economy startup from Belgium to rapid growth in the U.S., and the product design philosophy of relentlessly minimizing components to build simple, great products.
(1:30) Chris's background: engineer, walls obsessive, and why he named JUUNOO after his kids Jules and Lanor
(3:08) The problem JUUNOO is solving: single-use office fitouts in a world of shorter leases
(6:11) How a COVID strategic Excel spreadsheet led Chris from Belgium to New York
(10:05) Company culture: three rules, crucial conversations, and why sustainability comes before sales
(12:36) Why diversity is just good business: the 99.999% of smart people not working for your company
(13:31) The revenue model: why gross margins improve 20% the second and third time you sell the same wall
(17:49) Go-to-market flywheel: why JUUNOO targets tenants first and uses those wins to unlock architects
(20:06) Circular valuable design: how to build products where end-of-life value exceeds reuse cost
(22:35) The Circular Value Institute: how Chris is teaching a 70-billion-dollar retailer to profit from resale
(25:06) The biggest opportunity in sustainability right now, and why Chris is also worried it might be too late
(28:28) What is coming next for JUUNOO: the clickable drywall patent and the plan to roll it out in 20 countries
(34:46) What makes a great product manager: a relentless drive for fewer components
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/turning-interior-walls-into-a-circular-economy-business/

Viviano Cantu is the AI Product Lead at WHOOP, but his path there did not start in product. He joined WHOOP in 2021 as a software developer, led the storefront team, and then in March 2023 moved over to start a new team around coaching. That same month, he and a few colleagues started ordering pizza on Friday afternoons and hacking on whether an LLM could actually coach someone throughout their day. Six months later, WHOOP Coach launched as the first generative AI coach in a wearable. He has led AI at WHOOP ever since, and along the way his team built AI Studio, an internal platform that lets anyone at WHOOP go from idea to a working AI agent in under ten minutes. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Viviano to dig into what separates a weekend health chatbot from a coaching product that reasons over one person's physiology consistently for years, how WHOOP thinks about evals, synthetic personas, and the my memory feature, and what his engineering background actually changed when he crossed over into product.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:56) The Boston Rat Czar side project, and what it says about how Viviano approaches problems
(3:20) How WHOOP Coach started: Friday hack sessions, GPT-3, pizza, and a prototype called the WHOOP Bot
(8:33) The GPT-4 pivot mid-build, and why pushing the timeline was the right call
(10:41) The gap between a weekend AI demo and a coaching product that knows one person over years
(11:56) How WHOOP uses synthetic personas to run evals without touching real member data
(13:35) Who decides what a good coaching answer looks like, and how AI Studio made that process faster
(17:25) What building AI Studio did to how the team thinks about prioritization
(20:00) Where WHOOP intentionally put the friction, and why PII never touches the model
(21:39) The new role being developed at WHOOP that sits between engineer and PM
(25:02) What entering the clinical space with EHR sync taught Viviano about precision versus recall
(27:43) Why WHOOP lets members see and edit everything the AI knows about them
(30:34) What Viviano brought from engineering to product, and what did not survive the move
(33:01) The tweet about AI-assisted coding discipline, and what he was watching on his team
(34:56) An AI workflow tip for PMs: one folder, parallel threads, and auto-approve
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/wearable-data-into-an-ai-coach/

Nikita Miller spent 15 years building products before becoming President of Product and Technology at Perk, an AI platform for business travel and spend management. She made the move from the U.S. to Barcelona about a year ago, arriving right in the middle of Perk's transition from a single travel product to a multi-product platform. The timing meant navigating that transformation while also rethinking how product teams work in an era where AI has changed almost everything about how work gets done. In this episode, host Cassio Sampaio sits down with Nikita to talk about the UX renaissance she sees happening in B2B, the concept of shadow work and why removing it is one of the biggest product opportunities right now, why she thinks the most important PM skill in the AI era is discernment rather than taste, and what she tells early-career product managers who are trying to figure out where to invest in themselves when the landscape keeps shifting.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:32) What surprised Nikita most about moving from the U.S. to Barcelona and leading an international team at Perk
(3:27) How AI changed the structure and pace of her product teams: smaller teams, cross-functional flexibility, designers doing front-end coding
(7:55) Travel as a massive wedge: why winning in B2B travel is harder than it looks and how it opens the door to spend, events, and more
(13:26) The UX renaissance in B2B: why B2C expectations have permanently raised the bar for enterprise product
(17:31) Whether AI helps disruptors or actually empowers incumbents more
(19:21) How Perk is actively thinking about disrupting itself
(20:10) Discernment over taste: why the ability to judge which problems to solve and when is more important than ever
(22:44) Shadow work: the framework for identifying what can be automated so customers can focus on what matters
(24:31) Where the interface goes from here: MCP, voice, visual, and why it probably will not collapse to just one thing
(28:27) Advice for early-career PMs: what persists across every wave of technology change
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual menopause and perimenopause care company serving patients in all 50 states, covered by insurance. She spent 15 years as a venture and private equity investor, then founded and sold a digital health company called Kerbo, before her own perimenopause experience made the care gap impossible to ignore. When she finally found a clinician who understood what she was going through, that expert was an hour away and cost a fortune out of pocket. In 2021, she co-founded Midi with Sharon Mears to bring expert menopause and perimenopause care to every woman virtually, in 50 states, covered by insurance. In this episode of Product Talk, host and Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Joanna to talk about what her investor background gave her as an operator, how Midi thinks about trust as a product decision rather than a brand value, and what it actually looks like to scale care quality to hundreds of thousands of patients without letting it slip.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:22) What 15 years of investing taught Joanna about building product, and what pure operators miss
(3:46) What tells her a product org is healthy, and the CEO/product leader tension she manages every day
(9:29) What trust actually looks like inside a product decision at Midi, and where they fell down early
(13:24) MIDI University: how they scaled expert clinical knowledge to hundreds of nurse practitioners
(16:39) Why AI models are often wrong about women's health, and what that means for Midi's care protocols
(18:13) How Midi uses AI to scan charts and identify which providers have patients who keep coming back
(21:40) What Midi will and will not do, and how they decide where the scope ends
(26:25) Why insurance coverage was non-negotiable from day one when cash pay would have been so much easier
(28:35) How the equity mission holds up inside commercial decisions
(31:02) The AI advisory board: AI John Doerr on OKRs, AI Dan Ariely on text message rewrites
(32:36) How Midi uses AI without recreating the feeling that got women dismissed in the first place
(37:23) Lightning round: prevention over optimization, and what the next generation of women's health founders should build
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]