The Product Manager

Episodes

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  How to Control the Chaos of a Multi-Product Portfolio 03.03.2026 33m

  What happens when a single-product company decides to build a second—or a third—without unraveling the success of the first? The leap from one product to many rarely doubles the complexity; it multiplies it. Product leaders suddenly face sharper trade-offs: when to place bold bets, how to allocate finite resources, and how to distinguish between transformational expansion and slow erosion of a hard-won core. The challenge isn’t just growth—it’s protecting what already works while building wha...
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  How to Use an Operations Mindset to Scale Product Delivery 03.02.2026 31m

  Finding product–market fit isn’t the finish line—it’s base camp. In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Amit Shah, COO of Virta Health, to unpack what really happens after you’ve “made it” and the mountain suddenly gets steeper. Virta is scaling a fully virtual metabolic health clinic in a fast-moving healthcare landscape, and Amit brings a rare perspective shaped by nearly a decade inside the company—and a career that started in operations, not product. Amit shares how Virta navigated ...
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  The 2026 Playbook for Leading AI-Native Products 27.01.2026 27m

  AI has collapsed the gap between idea and execution—but standing out in a flood of generative tools requires more than just speed. Product leaders now face a different kind of challenge: evaluating opportunities with sharper questions, building for users with evolving expectations, and navigating distribution channels that look nothing like they did a year ago. Rachel Wolan, CPO at Webflow, joins Hannah to unpack what it really takes to ship differentiated, production-ready AI products in a c...
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  Best of The Product Manager Podcast in 2025 21.01.2026 31m

  Welcome to 2026! In this special retrospective episode, host Hannah Clark is joined by producer Becca Banyard to unpack the biggest themes, standout insights, and most listened-to moments from the past year. Together, they reflect on what made 2025 such a pivotal year in product—where AI reigned, volatility was the norm, and the role of product leadership was stretched in new directions. This episode is both a reflection and a guide. Hannah and Becca break down what they learned from conversa...
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  Are We Overpromising and Under-delivering on AI? 18.11.2025 41m

  AI can solve Olympic-level math problems... and still fumble basic arithmetic. So what gives? According to Dhruv Batra, the answer lies in the “jaggedness” of intelligence—how AI can excel in some areas while completely breaking down in others. Dhruv, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Yutori, joins Hannah Clark to unpack the cognitive dissonance users feel when a model dazzles one moment and disappoints the next. They explore how user expectations—shaped by decades of intuitive UI patterns an...
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  The Most Misleading Plays in Product, Unmasked 31.10.2025 20m

  There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in product right now—especially when it comes to AI. Shiny tools and slick prototypes are masquerading as production-ready solutions, and teams are feeling the pressure to keep up. But what happens when the hype outpaces the fundamentals? Hannah sits down with Matt Graney, CPO of Celigo, to talk about bad product plays in disguise—from vibe coding and no-code illusions to AI-fueled shortcuts that chip away at real product rigor. With decades in B2B product a...
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  The Product Leader’s Guide to Buyer Psychology 21.10.2025 30m

  Every product team faces the same monster: conversion optimization. But in 2025, the game has changed. With AI agents influencing discovery and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) reshaping how people (and machines) interpret messaging, teams are now marketing to both human and agentic audiences. In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Chris Silvestri, founder of Conversion Alchemy, to unpack how product teams can use psychology and UX insights to craft messaging that drives both adoption a...
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  Why It’s So Hard to Adopt New Skills (with Maxine Anderson, Co-Founder & CPO at Arist) 16.09.2025 28m

  Every product manager obsesses over leadership styles, onboarding flows, and GTM strategies—but what if the biggest differentiator of success comes down to something much simpler? Learning. In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Maxine Anderson, Co-Founder and CPO of Arist, a text-based learning platform that flips traditional corporate education on its head. Maxine started her career in rural Oregon classrooms, where she saw firsthand how inaccessible and ineffective most learning envi...
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  How American Express 4x Its Experimentation Velocity in 1 Year (with Jean Castanon, VP of Digital Product at American Express) 02.09.2025 19m

  Every product leader wrestles with the same tradeoff: move fast and risk breaking things, or move slow and risk irrelevance. But what if the real accelerator wasn’t cutting corners—it was systematizing experimentation? In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Jean Castanon, VP of Digital Product at American Express, to explore how his team quadrupled their testing velocity in a year, redefined what “success” in experiments really means, and built a referral program that became Amex’s seco...
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  How to Navigate “Growing Pains” in Scaling Orgs (with Matthew Wensing, Head of Product and Design at Customer.io) 19.08.2025 45m

  Startups don’t get easier with age—they just get more complex. Much like teenagers, scale-ups are constantly outgrowing their structures, still figuring out their identity, and not always great at setting realistic goals. But this awkward “in-between” stage isn’t a failure—it’s a rite of passage on the path to becoming a mature company. In this episode, Hannah sits down with Matt Wensing, Head of Product and Design at Customer.io, who has seen scaling from nearly every angle: founder, product...
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  How to Balance Speed and Value: The Essential Role of Empathy in the AI Product Era (with Megan O'Rourke, Executive Director of Product at Metalab) 12.08.2025 41m

  The Tin Man’s silk heart in The Wizard of Oz is a perfect metaphor for AI right now—it can convincingly mimic empathy, but it’s not the real thing. In this episode, Hannah Clark sits down with Megan O’Rourke, Executive Director of Product at Metalab, to explore the delicate balance between AI-powered productivity and human-driven resonance. They dive into why empathy and storytelling are irreplaceable in both product development and leadership, and the risks we run if we trade them away for e...
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  How to Adapt to the New Gold Standard in Product Management (with Maryam Ashoori, VP of Product and Engineering at IBM Watsonx) 05.08.2025 29m

  Product management isn’t just evolving—it’s getting completely rewritten. In this episode, Hannah sits down with Dr. Maryam Ashoori, VP of Product and Engineering at IBM Watsonx, to talk about how AI is reshaping not only the tools product managers use, but the very nature of the role itself. Maryam brings two decades of experience in AI across design, research, and engineering, and shares what she's seeing from the front lines of one of the most powerful Gen AI platforms on the planet. They ...
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  How I Survived the Past 3 Years in Product Leadership (with Michael Luchen, Product Transformation Architect) 31.07.2025 29m

  When AI was just a sci-fi footnote and “product transformation” sounded like a buzzword, Michael Luchen was already in the trenches. In this episode, Hannah sits down with the original host of The Product Manager Podcast to unpack three years of change—from his early missteps to building scalable systems and navigating the AI tidal wave with nuance and strategy. Michael, now a self-described "Product Transformation Architect," brings candor and depth as he reflects on what it really takes to ...
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  Vibe Coding 101: A Zero-to-One Hands-On Workshop (with Drew Falkman, Principal at Moves The Needle Studio) 24.07.2025 20m

  If you’ve heard the buzz about Vibe Coding but aren’t quite sure what’s real and what’s hype, this episode is your shortcut to clarity. Recorded live at our hands-on Vibe Coding Workshop, this 30-minute seminar with Drew Falkman (Principal at Moves The Needle) unpacks what Vibe Coding actually is, where it fits in the product lifecycle, and how non-technical folks are already using it to ship tools and prototypes—without writing a line of code. Joined by co-host Katie Sanders, Hannah leads a ...
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  How to Turn Neurodivergent 'Challenges' Into Leadership Superpowers (with Frankie Berkoben) 08.07.2025 48m

  ADHD might be the product trait nobody’s putting on their resume—but maybe they should. In this episode, Hannah sits down with executive coach Frankie Berkoben to unpack the complex intersection of ADHD, executive function, and product leadership. Together, they explore how ADHD traits like systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and comfort with ambiguity make product people exceptional—and why those same strengths often lead to burnout, inconsistency, or shame in traditional work environm...
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  Finding Your Unfair Advantage in Product’s Wild West Era (with Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product at Statsig) 01.07.2025 26m

  Product-market fit isn’t enough anymore. In an age where AI is making it easier for anyone to ship a half-decent product, the real battleground is distribution. Margaret-Ann Seger (Head of Product at Statsig) joins Hannah Clark to talk about how AI is reshaping go-to-market strategy, why speed and feedback loops are becoming product differentiators, and how her team at Statsig is baking collaboration and empathy into every part of their product dev cycle. From lo-fi GTM experiments to the pow...
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  The Systems Thinking Process Used by the Most Adaptable Product Leaders (with Sheryl Cababa, Author of Closing the Loop) 24.06.2025 42m

  What if instead of racing to solve problems, you paused to map the entire system first? In this episode, Hannah sits down with Sheryl Cababa—author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers and founder of Optimistic Design—to talk about what it really means to design for complexity. From AI adoption to organizational policy changes, Sheryl brings a systems lens to the decisions leaders make (often too hastily) in fast-moving environments. They explore how design leaders can avoid sh...
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  What Does Engineering Excellence Look Like in the Age of AI? (with Anish Dhar, Co-founder and CEO of Cortex.io) 17.06.2025 29m

  The “AI is coming for your job” headlines have been exhausting—especially if you're a software engineer. But as Cortex.io founder Anish Dhar explains, engineering isn’t dying; it's evolving. In this episode, Hannah sits down with Anish to unpack what engineering excellence actually means in 2025, why measuring developer productivity is still wildly misunderstood, and where AI coding tools fit into the real world of production-scale systems. Spoiler: you can’t vibe-code your way to a million u...
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  How to Make Passion Your Differentiator in an AI-Driven World (with Norma Løvhaugen, VP Strategy at Neat) 10.06.2025 38m

  What does passion really look like on a product team? In this episode, Hannah sits down with Norma Løvhaugen, VP Strategy at Neat, to unpack how passion fuels team collaboration, customer empathy, and a culture of innovation. They explore the difference between building products with passion versus simply shipping features—and why that distinction matters more than ever in an age of generative AI. Norma shares how Neat channels passion into a uniquely cohesive product experience, from obsessi...
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  Mastercard’s SVP of Global Products on How to Enter New Markets (with Simone Paul Tamussin) 03.06.2025 24m

  Expanding internationally is more complex than ever, with economic uncertainty, shifting regulations, and unpredictable tariffs creating constant challenges. While overseas opportunities can be tempting, businesses must navigate a landscape full of blind spots and evolving risks that demand careful planning and adaptability. Simone Tamussin, SVP of Product Management at Mastercard Gateway, shares valuable insights from his experience working with companies facing these hurdles. He discusses c...