Product Talk

Arnab Bose is the Chief Product Officer at Asana and one of the most outcome-oriented product leaders in the industry. Before Asana, he spent nearly six years as CPO of the Okta platform, where he led product strategy across identity and security. He joined Asana in September 2025, stepping into a company mid-transformation: the collaborative work management category must reinvent itself from a tool for organizing human work into an orchestration layer for humans and AI agents working side by side. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Arnab to talk about the one principle that has defined his career, what it actually looks like to build and defend a conviction bet when no customer has asked for it yet, and why the era of being lauded for shipping your roadmap is officially over.
 
What you'll learn:
The secret operating principle Arnab says separates good CPOs from exceptional ones, and why almost everyone claims to follow it but almost no one actually enforces it
How he built the business and technical case for continuous authentication at Okta before any customer asked for it, and what would have gone wrong if he had not
Why the largest product opportunities are almost never customer-requested, and how to build conviction without customer pull
What the CWM industry has to become in the age of AI agents, and why Arnab says the per-seat SaaS model is getting completely upended
How the CPO role is shifting from roadmap ownership to revenue and retention accountability
The two future archetypes for product orgs: head of R&D with engineering, product, and design reporting in, or CPO with general managers owning real revenue numbers
Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana internally, and what still requires a human being
 
In this episode, we cover:
(1:10) Arnab's career from Microsoft to Okta to Asana
(3:10) The one operating principle that separates good CPOs from exceptional ones
(5:37) How to operationalize outcome-driven thinking across a product org
(11:39) The continuous authentication conviction bet at Okta: building the case before customers asked
(13:33) How to build technical truth and a financial business case for a net-new market
(16:37) What gets missed when commercialization, partners, and sales enablement are afterthoughts
(18:38) What AI speeds up and what still requires human judgment
(20:39) Why the entire CWM industry must transform from human collaboration to human-AI orchestration
(24:06) How CPO accountability has shifted toward revenue and retention outcomes
(27:15) The two future archetypes for the product org
(29:42) Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana, and where it isn't yet
(33:59) The headwinds Arnab sees in AI adoption, and why buyer ROI isn't matching the hype
(37:03) How Asana thinks about build vs. buy vs. partner in an AI-native world
 
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-conviction-bet-no-customer-asked-for-and-how-asanas-cpo-builds-the-case-for-one/

Michael Affronti is the Chief Product and Business Officer at DriveCentric, the number one CRM and engagement platform for automotive dealerships, and one of the most hands-on product leaders building and using AI agents today. He spent three and a half months earlier this year back in the code, learning how agents actually work from the bottom up, memory, state management, harnesses, before returning to the executive seat. In this episode of Product Talk, Sonjoy Ganguly sits down with Michael to unpack how he runs a personal fleet of over a dozen agents (named Jarvis at home, Q at work), how his AI Labs team ships two production agents a month, and what product leadership actually looks like when the team is a mix of people and agents.
What you'll learn: 
1. Why Michael says the most important thing AI does for product managers isn't automation, it's shortening the distance to a decision
2. How he built a personal agent fleet for everything from Sunday meal planning to conference talk prep, and what happened when agents went rogue
3. The SDLC next-gen project at Drive Centric: mapping every step from idea to shipped product, then cutting everything that doesn't require human judgment
4. Why product briefs are actually getting longer at Drive Centric while everything else in the process is getting shorter
5. How the AI Labs team operates as single-person full-stack companies, owning the brief, the code, the customer conversation, and the launch
6. Why being too restrictive with AI access is the biggest mistake companies are making right now
7. What the best product leaders will look like in five years, and why portfolio thinking is the skill that won't get automated away
In this episode, we cover:
(0:51) Michael's career arc from Microsoft Outlook to Salesforce Payments to Bumble trust and safety to Drive Centric
(8:44) How the role of product management shifted from tactical launches to business impact ownership
(10:52) How AI changed his leadership style, and what he's deliberately kept the same
(11:02) Shortening the distance to a decision: prototypes, voice notes, and same-day customer feedback
(13:29) Why one-on-ones are becoming less frequent but more meaningful
(14:17) The "back to being builders" thesis and AI's shift toward judgment over artifacts
(16:41) The SDLC next-gen project: mapping every step from idea to shipped product and cutting the rest
(19:41) Why engineers are now joining customer meetings, and what that signals
(20:53) The personal agent fleet: Jarvis at home, Q at work, and what went wrong
(24:41) How Drive Centric built agent-building into company OKRs
(26:01) Where companies are making mistakes with AI, and the AI Labs experiment
(28:26) What the best product leaders will look like in five years
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

How do you make product bets today for a world that will not arrive for another six years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, IBM Z and Linux One Chief Product Officer Tina Tarquinio will be speaking on how she and her team manage hardware, firmware, and software roadmaps across multiple time horizons at once, from quantum-safe encryption to AI inference built directly onto the chip. Tina also shares how IBM's shift to design thinking transformed its product culture from a checkpoint-driven process into a client-obsessed discipline, why usage data matters more than revenue as a product metric, and what it actually took to grow a flagship product line more than 4x over a decade.

What does it take to build health products that truly understand women's bodies? In this podcast, Planned Parenthood Direct CPO Hannah Park sits down with ŌURA VP of Product Inessa Lurye to discuss how she's building science-driven products that turn wearable data into meaningful health insights and better conversations with clinicians. She shares what it takes to adapt algorithms to the complexity of women's health, balance product development with long-term research, and build for diverse populations. The conversation also explores AI, health equity, and how product leaders can make informed bets on where healthcare is headed.

What if the waste product of one industry could become the clean fuel source for another? 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 Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Shearman to discuss producing cost-effective and sustainable natural gas from CO2 waste, the use of artificial intelligence in product development, and the importance of market demand and commercialization strategies when building a product.