Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Product Manager Podcast.
We're happy to have you back in 2026.
And this is going to be our much anticipated 2025 retrospective.
And I am so happy to be here again with Becca Banyard, our lovely and talented producer.
Becca, thank you for coming back on the show.
Thanks for having me, Hannah.
It's great to be back.
Yeah, it's always so fun to have you back in front of the microphone and not behind the editing suite.
Let's talk about 2025.
Where should we begin?
Last year's episode was an exciting one.
Our goal in 2024 was to really grow our listenership, and it was exciting to see ourselves achieve that goal.
And then in 2025...
It's been all about digging into what really matters most to product leaders.
And again, we have achieved that goal.
So that's been really exciting.
I was so blown away by how our prediction seemed to really come true for us.
We were endeavoring to talk about what really matters, what's going on at the leadership level, and kind of speak to the audience that's really getting hit hard with some of the volatility that we saw.
And we were just so blown away by the response that we got.
We were able to get in the room with senior executives at really recognizable publicly traded companies that two years ago we would have never thought we'd have audience with.
So not just that, but having such a great variety of people who are at all stages of their company's maturity, of their own career's maturity,
And it's been just like an amazing time to examine this, like ever shifting AI landscape, from the perspective of all these incredible thinkers.
Absolutely.
And for any of our past guests who are tuning into this episode, just a huge thank you from us and our entire team for being a part of our 2025 podcast season.
It.
If we're looking back at last year, it would be too simple to just say that the focus of last year was about AI, because obviously it was right.
Yeah.
So, if we take a deeper look beyond just AI as kind of an overhead topic, what were some of the themes that emerged from the conversations that you had with these experts?
Oh boy, yeah.
So AI obviously dominates the conversation anywhere that you look at anything related to product right now.
But I would say from my point of view, we really dug into an overall theme of managing volatility.
That kind of seemed to be the through line between all of the conversations that we had.
And we explored a lot of different topics.
Much to your point, Becca, you know, we had an amazing roster of guests in 2025.
We're going to call out a few by name today, but I really don't want to discredit anyone who was mentioned today, because everyone I truly thought shared something really valuable and I was able to get overly excited with almost all of you.
Today I do want to kind of talk a little bit about what were some of the general themes that we saw over the course of the year.
And then we'll talk a little bit more specifically about things that stood out to us and mentioned some specific shows to check out.
Okay, yeah.
So, before we jump into sharing specific key takeaways, I'd love to just hear from you what some of the angles or the ways that managing volatility manifested in these conversations that you had with experts.
Oh boy, so many.
For starters, we were able to take a real research lens to better understand AI from a technical and ethical standpoint.
So we were able to talk to researchers and folks who are really close to the technology.
You know, a lot of us are building with partners or APIs et cetera that aren't necessarily in the nuts and bolts of building LLMs from the ground up.
So it was really cool to be able to have conversations with folks who can really speak to some of the limitations of, and the untapped potential in, that space.
We also talked to founders and CPOs and heads of product to really understand how they're changing their leadership approach to respond to the developments in the space.
And this, I feel like this is a huge, huge recurring theme throughout the whole year.
And it's interesting even comparing conversations that we had in early 2025 to ones later on and kind of comparing where people were intellectually around the needs to respond.
How do you change your organizational design?
What kinds of decisions are you making or what kinds of decisions feel more urgent now versus then?
So yeah, really interesting to kind of track how those themes kind of show up in companies just across the space.
We also talked to consultants and experts to uncover some more practical AI skills, to broaden our own skill sets, because this is kind of a unique circumstance where we're not only using the technology to build and using it to, you know, operate our own daily lives, but we're also trying to build products.
So we're trying to create AI products.
We're trying to understand the technology better and understand better use cases for it.
So having that innate broad toolkit is really helpful.
We had a few episodes where we could dig into that specifically.
We also made a point to take a step back from the AI conversation from time to time and get back to some of the basics.
And I thought that was really important, that we were able to kind of not completely forego mentioning AI, but just to kind of give some space for the evergreen essentials of product management and of building products and product strategy that tend to get a little bit overshadowed when we're talking about these times of rapid innovation.
And then finally and I think another thing that's really worth calling out is that we really weren't afraid to talk about uncertainty on the show.
You know, I think there's a lot of pressure, especially in a platform like this, where we're in front of a lot of people, to feel like we have to be the smartest person in the room and we have to have these problems figured out.
But what I was really happy to see and it was really refreshing is that a lot of our guests were also able to admit that they don't have everything figured out.
They don't have all the answers.
And that, I think, is just kind of reassuring to know that we're all sort of co-creating this reality right now.
Absolutely.
I totally resonate with that last one.
But yeah, we really covered a lot of ground this year.
So hats off to you, Hannah.
Congratulations on such an incredible podcasting season.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I can do it without the guests.
All I have to do is sit here and look excited.
You do more than just that.
So today we've broken down some of the key takeaways that we've gathered this year into various categories.
So I want to start and get into the first category.
And this one is specifically takeaways that are for senior product leaders, product executives, people in those like higher up roles.
Like we mentioned before, this is a huge focus for us in 2025 and will continue to be in 2026.
I don't think I've mentioned yet in this episode, but we rebranded to the CPO Club.
Our publication, The Product Manager, is now officially cpoclub.com.
And so our podcast.
Even though we've retained the product manager in title, we are really more focused on what is the big thing right now for folks who are really at the top of their career in product.
So if you are one of those, if you identify as a CPO or a senior product leader or executive, these are the four episodes I would say like add to your queue of things to listen to.
One that I really loved was with Margaret Ann Seeger.
She's a head of product at Statsig.
She was super candid about how they operate at Statsig.
And actually the episode was supposed to focus more on differentiating with go-to-market strategy, which I think was a super useful.
And she was very practical in how she kind of talked through what differentiating looks like in that respect.
But what I thought was a really interesting thing about the episode that I kind of zoomed in on was how much she was telling us about how the StatSig team operates in a way that is really, really smart.
They operate in a way that allows their research kind of component to be supplemented by folks in like the product development department supporting their customer support team.
And so they were able to really understand and talk to customers directly And kind of cut out some of the middleman that can be present between like reporting on customer feedback or customer research and then having to kind of digest that into actionable, useful information for the development team.
So, just like some of these really innovative strategies and how they were running their organization, I thought was just so brilliant.
And then a few months after we had this conversation, I saw that they had been purchased by OpenAI.
My first thought was like, of course, like I feel like a company is that well run and they have such innovative leaders at the helm.
They're going to get attention from a company like that.
So I want to kind of shout out the episode, but also shout out to the Stastic team for their acquisition this year.
Yeah, Hannah, this really was such a great episode.
I always love when guests are super candid and really open about how they do things in practice, because it's easy to talk hypothetically about situations.
It's easy to talk about things in theory.
But when someone comes on the show and they're able to be like, this is exactly how we do it.
And this is why it worked.
This is where it how we implemented it.
That's where we can really extract some like key value for our audience.
So yeah, such a great episode.
Yeah, absolutely.
I find it can be difficult sometimes because, and I understand, you know, people don't want to give away company secrets, et cetera.
But some of these kinds of things, this kind of guidance, I feel it's like a serious rising tide lifts all boats situation.
And another great example of that actually was our episode with Benjamin Berry, which I really want to call out.
So he's a CPO of Evolution IQ.
One of the things that I was just blown away by doing some research into the company before our interview was like this company in the last couple of years has grown like 350 in a space that is kind of notoriously volatile and not a lot of companies managed to grow or even continue in that timeframe.
So I really wanted to talk to him about, how did you pull this off?
And we had an amazing conversation about his approach to leadership.
He, I think, is just such a forward-thinking leader.
He was really able to anticipate a lot of the things that were going to become more complex as the company grew with him.
He'd been with the company for a number of years before things started to really move that quickly.
So I felt like that was just an amazing case study and how the leadership decisions that you make early on in your trajectory can really impact your ability to scale smoothly.
So yeah, that one, like if you're an executive leader, I think that one is just there's.
It's packed with nuggets to learn from.
And then another leader that I found to be so inspiring, and I just thought she was such a vibe.
I just really love talking to Debbie McMahon.
She was the acting CPO of the Financial Times.
So I was very excited to have her here.
But she's since moved on to I Love Holidays.
Looks like she's having a blast over there.
She was such a ball of light.
I found her to be so lovely and candid and was very honest about some of the kind of unseen challenges in executive leadership that I think, especially being in a B2B show, we often focus on just like what are the nuts and bolts of the product and kind of referring back to PR talking points.
I'm not saying that that's all that we have, but there are some things I think folks can divert to just to keep things above board.
I don't feel like Debbie was afraid of that.
And it was very refreshing to hear her talk really openly about some of the other considerations that really weigh on you in that executive role and kind of the different shifts and skill sets and decision-making skills and even like how you have to position yourself in the company.
That I thought were really intriguing.
And I thought were really helpful for people who are especially newer to an executive role or mulling over transition into that kind of a space.
Similar to that though, was a conversation with Matt Wensing.
I would say that he was also someone that I really hit it off with.
He is the head of product at customer.io.
And I really liked digging in with him about just the challenges of scaling.
I think all of us have felt it, whether we've been in the IC role or in a leadership role at a company in that rapid growth stage.
And it is so just rife with challenges.
And I really liked how we kind of talked about it and positioned it as this painful and yet necessary stage where you know those kind of growing pains aren't really positioned as like oh, there's something wrong with the organization.
And it's like no, these are just rites of passage that companies have to go through And that, you know, it's kind of becomes a defining challenge as you figure those things out.
But of course it's like, if I were to kind of summarize the episode, it's like Matt is your big brother in leadership, who's been through it.
And he's like, OK, here's what's coming for you.
You know, we kind of framed it as I think in the intro.
It's framed as kind of like a like an awkward teen phase and like having that big brother to sort of to guide you through into the next stage.
What I've learned is you cannot afford to play the game of telephone with strategy.
And what I mean is you really need to have that the spine of the organization, meaning there needs to be continuity end to end in terms of maybe there's a few gaps or levels between.
So, moving on to our next category of key takeaways, and these are for leaders on the rise.
So essentially, it's for anybody who is either currently in a leadership role and you wanna grow to the next stage of your leadership career, Or it's also for you, if you're an individual contributor and you want to start embracing leadership principles now so that you can work your way up into a leadership position.
So Hannah, what are some of the key takeaways and key episodes for this group of people?
Oh, this is such a great group.
I enjoyed all these conversations so much.
I felt like these really got at the essence of leadership from a few different angles that I all thought were valuable.
So my first pick on this one was Dr. Maryam Ashuri.
She's the VP of Product and Engineering at IBM Watson X. huge honor to talk to her.
I don't know if I've ever talked to a smarter person in my life.
She just seemed like such a warm and just sharp person.
But she was really candid about some of the really innovative ways that the product management process itself has changed at IBM Watson X.
So you're talking about like really the most innovative teams in the space and how they do product.
And she was kind of giving me a look at what are the processes that have changed?
How has AI and vibe coding and all those things affected the way that we prototype and ship faster?
And I felt like you know some of the things that we discussed in the episode.
It's only been a few months really.
And I feel like a lot of those have already been adopted as sort of gold standard practice.
But at the time, like a lot of it was like, wow, this is still so innovative.
And it's just amazing like how quickly these behaviors get adopted.
But I thought it was a really amazing look into the way things are running at like this kind of caliber of an operation.
There are a lot of really useful takeaways for both leaders who are kind of looking to adopt better processes for their product teams, and also for ICs and folks that are just looking to adopt those processes in their own work.
So that one I felt was just there was something for everyone in there.
Another one that I want to call out is with Chris Silvestri.
He's the founder of Conversion Alchemy.
This was such an interesting and different topic for us, because he is not so much a product person as a marketing person, but his real focus is in buyer psychology.
So we really talked about buyer psychology in terms of what are the actual reasons and cues and how do we kind of peek into a user's or a customer's head before we even really talk to them about, like just on a human nature basis, what do we kind of know is going to work or not?
And what are the kinds of things that, from a product standpoint, we make decisions, sometimes about our product messaging or about a user experience or et cetera, like an aspect of the product that makes sense to us from a internal logical perspective?
But his point really throughout the episode was people don't make decisions on that basis.
They're not really looking for information or making buying decisions on the same basis that we're trying to sell all the time.
So this was just like a very interesting episode about understanding deeply what does and doesn't resonate in the buying process and kind of like transpose that into this topic of how do we build products in a way that really emphasizes what people want to buy.
And so that I thought was just like, if you are in a strategy role or you need to make strategic decisions that are going to impact revenue, all of us are in some capacity.
This is like a hugely useful thing to keep in mind.
The last one in this bundle was a great conversation with an amazing guest.
Her name was Yui Zhao.
She had a fantastic conversation with me about what new executives need to know as they're stepping into the executive role for the first time.
Similar to Debbie McMahon.
She was really candid about what to expect and kind of some of the you know myth versus reality about what that role looks like.
But this one I kind of feel like it was very casual conversation, that kind of felt like half tarot card reading for like what's in your future if you step into an executive role, or if you're thinking about it, you think it might be on your career map.
And then the other half was like a playbook with very concrete tips.
And, you know, here's what to expect and here's how you should respond.
And here's how people sometimes respond.
That's not the right way to respond.
So don't do that.
The main difference when you get into the executive levels is your first team becomes the other C-suite leader.
So the other VPs within the organization.
Making a company like your first priority, rather than your team, can be a very counterintuitive shift for a lot of folks.
It's really about figuring out, like what are the top priorities to go solve with the rest of the company, rather than what are the top priorities within product.
Amazing.
Those were such valuable episodes.
I love what you said about UE as well.
It's so useful when you get like a rubric to measure yourself up against and then a playbook for how to get there.
So amazing.
Moving on to our final category of takeaways, and these are actually for anyone.
You can be at any stage of your product career and you're going to find these takeaways valuable.
So Hannah. take it away.
So excited to talk about these again.
All of them really left me buzzing after the conversation.
And these are all episodes that I have thought about repeatedly since we did them.
So the first one I'll talk about was with Dhruv Basra.
He was an incredible guest.
So clear about just capable of framing really, really highly technical concepts in a very easy to digest way.
And the reason that's important is because Dhruv has been working in the AI research space.
Let's say before it was cool.
He has been in the space for a very long time and has been a professor and trained people who now work in companies like OpenAI and some of the big players in the space now.
And what the episode was really about was understanding what he calls the jagged nature of AI and having a much more concrete understanding of how the technology really works.
So not just what you can do with it or what the functions can be, but also just how the mechanisms of AI function, understanding some of the limitations that are kind of inherently problematic for some kinds of goals or use cases that we want to achieve with AI ai and understanding some of the untapped potential, understanding what's easier to accomplish with ai versus more difficult.
And one of the most important things i took away from this is just how opaque all of this is to users.
So you know, for all of us who are kind of on the uh interface side of just typing in prompts et cetera, you don't really understand as a user where those limitations are.
And therefore you kind of go into a product with an AI feature having kind of uniform standards of performance for every prompt that you can give it.
And that's just not a realistic expectation.
But it's very difficult to communicate that to users in a way that is comprehensible.
Anyway, it was a technical episode, but one that I thought was so important for really understanding what our responsibilities are in terms of messaging and just kind of honing in on like where the technology is right now and what we can kind of feasibly expect when we're trying to kind of plan for, like a new feature or even trying to build a new product.
Another one that I really want to call out was with Maxine Anderson, who's the founder of Aarist.
This was a kind of conversation where I was actually a little under the weather when we recorded this episode.
And I felt like I would have liked to, in retrospect, go deeper in this topic.
I kind of regret that we didn't dive in and take a little bit more time, because it was a fascinating exploration of actually how people learn.
And in the context of the conversation, just to kind of give you some background.
Eris is a text-based learning tool that Maxine who is very ahead of her time for where she is at in her career she co-developed with a lot of other teaching professionals.
And it really got at a lot of different challenges in the learning space that in terms of accessibility of learning, how much information is the right amount to present to people at once, getting into kind of like the accessibility challenges and even just the misconceptions that we have about learning.
And I felt like this was so valuable on so many different levels, because this connects to how we think about user experience.
It connects to how we think about product marketing.
It connects to how we think about our own expectations for how we train our own people and learn ourselves in a new environment and take on upskilling courses, etc.
There were so many pieces of this that connected to a lot of different aspects and a lot of different challenges that we see across the spectrum of product roles.
So I felt like if you are going to listen to this episode, you can expect that you are really gonna have a different mindset on all of those things going out of it.
And then the last one that I want to talk about is with Cheryl Kababa, who is the author of Closing the Loop Systems Thinking for Designers.
She's also the founder of Optimistic Design.
A fun fact about this one is that I wasn't actually 100 confident that this one would be a right fit for our show, but I just was so intrigued by this topic that I had to learn more.
And so I got to sit with Cheryl and talk a little bit about systems thinking.
The reason I loved this topic and why it was so eye-opening for me is that, as she was telling me about what systems thinking is, I realized a few things.
First of all, that it connects so intimately with some of the most challenging nuances of product leadership, but also just decision making and operating in the product space, no matter what your role is.
But it also brought to mind that systems thinking is not a default way of thinking, but for some people it is.
And that kind of highlights the fact that, you know, we know that we all think differently, etc.
But Some people are more linear in the way that they think about things, the way they plan, the way they expect outcomes.
And people who adopt a more systems thinking approach by default think about things more as like an outcome map or will think about things in a much more like a way that takes into account a lot of different possible outcomes and dependencies.
And those things can be learned.
Systems thinker can learn to think linearly.
Linear thinkers can learn to think in a more systems approach.
But people kind of have a default and it really causes a lot of issues in terms of communication and understanding each other and being able to communicate why you might see that a product strategy or a decision is going to lead to something catastrophic, but it's so difficult to understand.
Explain why to your peers or your other stakeholders.
So it kind of pinpointed a number of different things a more effective way about thinking through complex decisions and complex challenges, but also a kind of a pointer like oh, we have to be mindful of the way our stakeholders think in order to effectively collaborate with them.
Product leaders are expected to do all of this kind of work on their own volition, which is like that's putting a lot on the shoulders of practitioners who really are oriented around just wanting to make things work.
They're building something is fundamentally kind of like a build type of discipline.
And they just need the thing to work.
And then all of a sudden we're just kind of like oh yeah, you got to be thinking about unintended consequences.
You have to be these different stakeholders.
You have to be thinking about all these different people like beyond just... end users.
So good.
It's such amazing takeaways and really something here for everyone.
So if you want to go back and listen to any of those episodes that Hannah mentioned today, we'll have those listed out in the show notes.
So you can just click on the link and get redirected straight to them.
Okay.
So at the beginning of this episode we mentioned that in 2024, our goal was all about growing our listenership.
Check.
We got that.
2025 was all about digging into really what matters most to product leaders and executives and check again we got that.
So now that we've entered 2026, Hannah, what is this year all about for us?
What is our focus?
Okay, so this might be a bit of a hot take but, on the topic of systems thinking, since we just talked about all these complex systems with all these dependencies, 2025 was a landmark year of volatility, of volatility inconsistency of change, of just rapid pivots.
And I tend to think that those things don't happen in a vacuum.
So I anticipate that in 2026 we are going to see some of the fallout of a lot of that kind of necessary action.
So I think we're going to be seeing a lot more in terms of how do we manage, for example, a workforce that is chronically exhausted.
Like I'll just say it.
You know, there's a lot of things in the world right now and in the space that are very taxing on people's attention and on people's ability to be productive.
How do we anticipate and provide some kind of support for those situations?
How do we design for, knowing that there is going to be the need for flexibility and fluidity within the organization, while still trying to control for the things that we can and reduce the change, fatigue and toll that that kind of agility on an ongoing basis and sometimes to very little positive outcome, can have on a team and on an organization?
I think we're gonna continue to explore themes of AI development appearing in different respects in the development process.
I think the agents will continue to be a big trend as we move on, but I think also we're starting to develop a little bit more of an ethical compass about what decisions we wanna make with AI products.
It kind of reminds me we did an episode also at some point during the year about the AI bubble, kind of comparing it to the dot-com bubble.
And I think we'll see a lot of similar trends in which, now that people are kind of used to the technology that's available, how do we kind of be discerning about what things we say no to first, even though we can, and what things we say yes to even though they're not popular?
So I think it'll be a little bit of a theme of discernment, of trying to be more cognizant of our actions and how they affect our human workforce.
And another topic that I think we'll foray into in 2026 that I think will be a little bit more hot button, is really the image of AI in the public eye and really navigating that conversation about.
Let's be honest, there is a lot of antipathy and a lot of controversy around the development of AI and its effect on some workforces.
I've often compared AI to the internet, in that there are responsible ways and irresponsible ways to use it and that these are learnings that we kind of develop over time as we as a culture kind of acclimate to this technology.
So how do we kind of become the ones on the right side of history when we think about the capacity that the tools are affording us?
How do we make decisions that kind of align with where we want to be as a society, with our own mission and values?
And how do we kind of move the conversation in a positive direction while still being responsible with how we portray the technology and its real risks?
Those are hard conversations sometimes to have, but I think they're ones that we need to be having as a industry, but also ones that people are really eager to hear outside of it.
Yeah, definitely worthwhile conversations.
And I can already tell we have a lot of ground to cover this year.
And I'm just so looking forward to this time next year when we get to do this all over again and look back at all of the insights that we've gleaned, the interesting and smart folks that we have interviewed.
It's going to be So with that, Hannah, thank you so much for having me on.
It's always such a pleasure to hop on here and hit record with you.
And I look forward to this season ahead.
Me too, Becca.
It's always such a pleasure to chat with you on air and not just, you know, slack message you behind the scenes.
And everyone listening.
Thank you so much for joining us today and for all of your attention over the last year.
It has meant the world to us.
We are so happy to be doing what we do.
It's always so exciting for us to hear feedback from you.
So if you haven't, please subscribe and make sure you join us for the next year.
And don't forget to send us a comment.
We love to hear them and we love to send a little love back.
