Product Talk

Emrecan Dogan is a trained industrial engineer who has spent his career applying systems thinking to product management, and as Chief Product Officer at Glean, he has found the perfect laboratory for it. Glean is an AI assistant and platform for the world's largest enterprises, and the same principles Emrecan uses to think about building AI products, where fixing one bottleneck immediately moves the constraint somewhere else, are the principles he uses to think about how product organizations should be designed and how PM careers should evolve. In this episode of Product Talk host Sonjoy Ganguly sits down with Emrecan to talk about why the correlation between how many features you ship and the value you create may actually be getting weaker in the AI era, why he believes the super IC PM is the defining career opportunity of this moment, and how Glean runs a product org where autonomy is taken, not given, and where the product itself tracks organizational intelligence in real time.
In this episode, we cover:
(2:25) Why AI makes judgment, systems thinking, and customer insight more important, not less
(2:25) The bottleneck framing: why fixing one part of the PM assembly line just moves the constraint somewhere else
(7:58) What stays the same about PM and what is changing, and Emrecan's favorite interview question to test candidates on it
(11:08) The CPO's real job in a founder-led company: unlocking and translating vision, not defining it
(15:47) The skills Emrecan hires for: customer obsession, AI fluency, systems thinking, judgment, and taste
(19:40) Why the correlation between feature shipping volume and actual value creation is weak, and what that means for how PMs should measure themselves
(21:39) How Glean balances enterprise predictability with frontier-speed shipping, and the autonomy model that holds it together
(25:21) Pod design, colocation decisions, and why Emrecan has 28 direct reports and almost no recurring one-on-ones
(29:50) How Glean uses its own product to track organizational progress, prepare for one-on-ones, and replace status reporting
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]

AI is changing the economics of building software, and that means the way product teams plan, prioritize, and build has to change too.
In this episode of Product Talk, Denise Hemke sits down with Webflow CPO Ben Haefele to explore what happens when AI makes building software faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Ben shares why traditional upfront planning can actually create more risk, how Webflow is using "building backwards" to put working software in front of customers sooner, and why human judgment and customer empathy matter more than ever.
From agentic development and rapid experimentation to the rise of the product "editor," Ben offers a practical look at how leaders can redesign their teams around a faster learning loop, without losing sight of the strategic vision that keeps everyone moving in the same direction.
If you're leading a product organization in the age of AI, this conversation will help you rethink how you build, learn, and decide what deserves to ship.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:25) Why planning made sense when engineering time was expensive, and why that logic no longer holds
(3:53) What roadmaps, prioritization, and product planning look like in a world where what's possible keeps shifting
(6:05) The new bottleneck: it's not time to code, it's time to learn from what you've shipped
(7:55) Building backwards: what changes when you start with working code instead of documents and Figma files
(10:47) Why documentation written before implementation is always wrong, and how agents fix that
(12:15) Why being a great editor is now the most critical skill in the AI era
(14:42) What surprised Webflow when they started running agentic development experiments, and why best practices matter more than ever
(16:30) The CPO's new job: living on the frontier, systematizing what you find, and raising your ambition accordingly
(18:20) How Webflow progressively enabled its entire product org: from design, to product management, to shipping real code to production
(21:38) Why human judgment is not going away, and what the product manager's role looks like in an agentic workflow
(23:53) How agentic development finally unlocks the P3s and P4s that have been sitting in the icebox for years
(25:28) Why Webflow's internal agentic development practice mirrors the product experience they need to deliver to customers
(27:28) The custom in-house harness and organizational second brain that gives agents full business context before they write a line of code
(28:51) The three things Ben would tell any CPO who wants to redesign their product development lifecycle right now
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]

Jonathan Shottan began his career at the intersection of data and scale, working at Pinterest as the company was expanding internationally, and at Facebook before that, where he learned how data could drive business growth. He is now the Chief Product and Content Officer at Tonal, an intelligent gym that sits on your wall and builds strength through a magnetic resistance motor that collects physiological data 50 times per second across 300 different arm articulations. That data, accumulated across a large and growing user base, is now the world's largest kinetic dataset, the only one with enough fidelity to enable predictive health outcomes at scale. Jonathan was selected as a finalist for the 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of CPO Rising series, host and Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Jay Patel sits down with him to talk about what it actually takes to build a product with sub-1% monthly churn and over $100M in ARR, how he thinks about boulders versus pebbles when deciding what to build, and why he believes saying no is most of his job.
In this episode, we cover:
(0:35) Jonathan's background and career path from ad tech to Facebook to Pinterest to Tonal
(1:03) What Tonal actually does and why the kinetic dataset is the most exciting part of the business
(5:37) How the CPO role has evolved from strategic backstop to speed limiter
(7:01) Tonal's product-led culture and what that means for how decisions get made
(8:04) Why every product leader has to think of themselves as a builder first, even as AI takes on more of the building
(10:46) The 3-year vision, 1-year operating plan, quarterly goals framework for balancing today and tomorrow
(12:58) What first-time CPOs almost always get wrong and what to do instead
(16:47) The CPO alpha effect: what measurable business and cultural outcomes come from having a strong CPO at the table
(18:49) How Tonal uses AI in the product and how Jonathan's team cleared years of orphaned Jira tickets in two days using Claude
(21:07) Boulders versus pebbles: how Tonal decides what to build, what to say no to, and why healthcare is the next big bet
(24:42) How Jonathan hires exceptional PMs and the one interview question he asks every candidate
(28:02) Balancing hardware, software, and content to keep churn below 1%
(31:21) What stints in growth and monetization at Pinterest and Facebook taught him about customer value
Blog and detailed episode notes: [link]

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/