Product Talk

What happens when a 50-year-old software company tries to move at the speed of AI, and what does it really take to merge two very different product cultures after an acquisition? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Paychex CPO Ryan Bergstrom will be speaking on reimagining the user experience with AI, how his team learned the hard way that accelerating only engineering just moves bottlenecks around, and why utilization is the only product metric that ultimately matters. He also gets into the HIPAM budget framework he uses to track and shift R&D spend, and why incumbents with deep customer data have a genuine moat in the AI era.

What happens when coding stops being a constraint for product teams, and what should product leaders do right now to get ready? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Tubi Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli will be speaking on why this is a golden era for product management and how the entertainment industry is about to go through its biggest disruption yet. Mike shares how Tubi runs "Tinker Days" to keep the whole org experimenting, why he's investing countercyclically in junior talent, and what it means to build for model capabilities that don't exist yet.

What does product leadership look like when AI makes everyone a builder? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, LiveKit Head of Product Ben Cherry will be speaking on how LiveKit made a high-conviction pivot from video infrastructure to voice AI, why making AI sound human is harder and more important than most people realize, and what he learned moving from software engineer to product leader. His take on the "PM as CEO of the product" framing: it's about accountability for outcomes, not authority over people, and getting that wrong is one of the most common traps in early product careers.

What does it take to stay relevant as a CPO when the very definition of the product manager role is being rewritten in real time? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Carta CPO Vrushali Paunikar will be speaking on how she thinks about product management in an AI-transformed world, why she frames her best PMs as systems architects rather than feature owners, and what eight years at a founder-led company has taught her about trust, speed, and creating excess value. She also gets into how she structures product reviews, why the hardest problems at Carta are the ones you can't measure, and what battle scars really mean in a product leader.

What does it actually take to decarbonize one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, and how do you build, fund, and scale the company that bets on it? 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 Queens Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Daniel Kopp to discuss enabling built environment decarbonization through cement and concrete that requires lower energy and water usage, optimizing various financing structures to scale the company, leveraging AI and diverse team to build a full product system.