Product Momentum Podcast

Michelle Parsons is a dynamic product leader who has led high-growth teams at Kayak, Spotify, Netflix, Hinge, and Lex. Her passion for building community and embracing new challenges has recently brought her to a leadership role in a new startup that helps people reconnect to themselves and one another. In this episode of Product Momentum, Michelle joins Sean and Dan to talk about “making bets” – not just the seductive big bets that promise game-changing innovation – but also the smaller bets and quick hits that also play important roles in delivering value, validating assumptions, and mitigating risk. Here’s what we learned: The Balanced Portfolio Framework At the heart of Michelle’s thinking is the notion of the Balanced Portfolio Framework – an idea she developed while leading product for kids’ content at Netflix. Under this framework, your roadmap is divided into three buckets – big bets, smaller bets, and quick hits – that help you pursue transformational innovation while delivering consistent value. As you’ll hear, connecting the dots between them helps to ensure that product work is driven by the value delivered to users and your business. Big bets start with user insights and clear hypotheses Big bets are the bold, strategic moves that are super-impactful, but also come with a great deal of uncertainty. They start with user insights and clear hypotheses that address the following questions: What need are we trying to solve? Why does it matter to our users? What metric will this move – and why does that metric matter for business impact? “These are the things that everyone wants to work on,” Michelle adds. “But they’re never just ‘cool ideas.’ They’re the big innovative features that bring your strategy to life. But they come with a ton of unknowns. Super impactful, but really, really risky.” Small bets preserve resources and de-risk the big bet Think of small bets as the “meat and potatoes” of your roadmap – incremental improvements like polishing UX, refining workflows, or optimizing metrics. Here’s what Michelle says: “The small bets are really about the optimizations and enhancements, the things that consistently create incremental impact for your users. Not only do they touch on macro metrics like retention, engagement, and delight, but they also help to de-risk the big bets.” Quick hits are the targeted work that accelerate learning We’re all familiar with those small, fast, low-cost experiments or enhancements. These are the low-hanging fruit that support rapid learning. “A quick hit is a learning task,” Michelle adds – “not to be confused with a quick win.” Certainly, they can also be quick wins, but “quick hits are really this body of work, discreetly tied a hypothesis or a data point that you want to prove out further.” Use storytelling to align stakeholders around ‘why’ Michelle emphasizes that roadmap planning is not just an exercise in listing features, but a storytelling exercise. Because many stakeholders – executives, founders, investors –don’t live in the product trenches. To get buy-in, you need to clearly articulate: What problem we’re solving, for whom, why it matters, and how this work moves the needle. Be sure to watch/listen to our entire conversation with Michelle, so that you can catch her thoughts about: How her team at Netflix utilized the Balanced Portfolio Framework. The role AI can play in balancing bets that deliver user benefit and business value. Michelle’s new start-up plans for building connections and community. The post 177 / Big Bets Are Back — Why They Need a Balanced Approach, with Michelle Parsons appeared first on ITX Corp..

Our conversation with Atlassian’s Axel Sooriah is the fourth in a series that Product Momentum recorded at INDUSTRY. And it’s interesting to see the common themes that are emerging – serendipitously – most notably that even as AI casts its long shadow over all things product, our recent episodes seem to be bringing us back to product management fundamentals: good process (John Cutler), sound communication (Sahil Jain), data readiness / skills development (Shensi Ding), and making bets (Michelle Parsons) (episode coming soon!). In this episode, Axel touches on another common theme: “Everywhere in product management, wherever you sit, whichever size the organization is, it’s pretty much the same challenges everywhere.” In other words, we all seem to face the same disjointed collaboration among stakeholders, the absence of evidence-based decision making, a lack of clarity around goals, and the looming disconnect between them and organizational objectives. Discovery will help teams move beyond just “finding user problems,” Axel says, to actually delivering the outcomes they’re seeking. Here’s what we learned: Clear Goals and Outcomes Enable Discovery One of the biggest challenges Axel sees is product teams operating without clarity around goals or desired outcomes. This undermines their ability to conduct meaningful discovery, he says. The remedy, Axel offers, is to treat goal‑setting as part of discovery by asking questions like: ‘If we solved this customer problem tomorrow, what does success look like?’ and position our discovery activities around those outcomes. Experimentation and Evidence Create Decision Confidence The lack of structured frameworks for generating evidence leads to shaky decisions rather than confident ones. “A lot of teams today make decisions that are not anchored in evidence,” Axel says. “It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s sometimes because they’re not set up to do it.” His recommended approach is a structured discovery flow: start with qualitative customer interviews to identify the problem, then prototype and experiment before coding for the full build. This exploration helps validate problems and solutions, so delivery is built on a firm base of evidence rather than a host of assumptions. Transparent Stakeholder Engagement Through Discovery Story‑telling Too often, discovery that is performed happens in isolation and doesn’t engage the organization’s leadership. Axel explains: “One of the ways we address this in our product teams, for example, is we use a lot of video reels of our customers – and then share it with stakeholders. There is no arguing with a video of customers explaining the intensity of a problem … it steers the conversation, because … why would an exec not agree with the reality of a customer?” In other words, sharing discovery artifacts helps build alignment and buy‑in. When you bring stakeholders into the process early on, discovery becomes a strategic communication tool rather than just part of a pre‑build checklist. Discovery isn’t optional. Full stop. It’s the foundation for making confident product decisions and delivering real user value. Be sure to catch the entire episode with Axel Sooriah and learn about Atlassian’s “4 Stages of an Idea.” The post 176 / Axel Sooriah: Discovery Done Right To Drive Product Success appeared first on ITX Corp..

Shensi Ding is the CEO and co-founder of Merge, a unified API platform that helps companies connect existing apps and systems with AI. Integrating AI offers many benefits: enhancing performance, automating tasks, and improving decision-making. But as Shensi points out, it’s not without looming challenges. Product leaders often wonder, Are my data and systems compatible with these new tools? Is my product team well-versed in AI technology? Can my organization’s data governance framework mitigate exposure to risk? Shensi joined co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to provide her insights in what Sean referred to as “a firehose of information and an AI integration master class.” Here’s what we learned: What Does High-Quality Data Look Like? High-quality data for AI integrations means ensuring all data is accurately synced, is normalized into consistent models across platforms, and accounts for potential edge cases. This is essential for reliable AI functionality and avoiding errors that stem from inconsistent or outdated information sources. “There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with the AI integration if you haven’t synced all your data,” Shensi explains. “You also want to make sure that it’s normalized properly. When you’re integrating with multiple platforms in a category, you need to have some kind of canonical data model that you end up normalizing it into. And that’s very difficult to do.” Integrating AI: Challenges and Roadblocks Many API providers have limitations, including outdated documentation and lack of real-time update notifications. These situations often require full data synchronization (over and over again), which leads to performance issues. Product managers need to be able to adapt to these limitations, Shensi explains. “Unfortunately,” she adds, “for each platform it becomes a little bit different, and you have to be a but hacky for how you solve it” and come up with creative, manual solutions to maintain data accuracy for AI use cases. Skills Development for Effective AI Integrations The simplest, most effective way to get comfortable with AI is to just dive in, Shensi says. “I just think the best way is just like testing it out and doing it yourself. Dive deep, actually understand how an integration might be built.” She suggests starting with hands-on testing using tools like Postman to authenticate and then explore API endpoints. Teams should experiment, set up sandboxes, add sample data, and perform load testing to build fluency with integrations and account for real-world edge cases as part of their learning process. Trends and Expectations for Widespread AI Adoption We may already be beyond the point of consumer acceptance of AI’s role in building software – these days, they expect it. Products that lack AI integration may be seen as outdated. As AI becomes normalized, both users and businesses anticipate AI-driven insights and automation as standard product features rather than optional add-ons. “I think everyone expects it now. And if it doesn’t, it’s kind of weird.” Catch the entire episode for Shensi’s thoughts on these important topics: The difference between a typical product owner and the technical product owner? Why product leaders should become comfortable with AI tools and how to use them. The new product recently launched by Merge that enables agents to safely make calls to third-party enterprise tools. Our conversation with Shensi Ding is the third of five episodes the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the final two in-person episodes over the next few weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian) and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 175 / Seamless AI Integration: Challenges and Opportunities, with Shensi Ding appeared first on ITX Corp..

With so many tools at our disposal, why do product people continue to struggle with effective communication? Email after email, meeting after meeting, teams replay the same conversations and plow the same ground, re-litigating the decisions they agreed to weeks before — wasting time, money, and energy in the process. The “information asymmetry” that exists within organizations is the problem that Sahil Jain is trying to solve. Sahil is co-founder & CEO of Samepage.ai, where he’s building an AI-powered remedy for product managers — whose job is all about communication and the influence that each message carries with it. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sahil addresses the importance of communication in product management, offering techniques to improve this core skill and explaining why the ability to communicate across roles is essential for product managers. Here’s what we learned: The Essence of Good Communication It isn’t enough for messages to be sent and received to constitute good communication; the message has to be understood. And achieving understanding is not just the task of the receiver; the sender shares this responsibility equally. “Within the learning sciences, there’s a great area to look at with respect to the ingestion, retention, and recall of information,” Sahil says.  “It’s important to remember that there’s only so much that team members can process cognitively. So we need to break things up into reasonable chunks. And team members can help close the communication loop by restating the message they received as a way of acknowledging that they understand what I’m saying.” Communicating Across Functional Roles In Product Momentum episode 28, Rich Mironov described the product manager as “the person nobody works for and who, it often seems, works for everybody else.” That’s why it’s crucial for PdMs to understand others’ context and goals, where influence is key. For example, Sahil adds, when communicating with Sales teams, their primary concerns are around money and deals and increasing deal velocity. “So if you goal is to influence the actions of others in a particular way,” Sahil adds, “it’s important that you understand what the goal of their role is and to speak to them in terms that resonate with them. That’s what drives their receptiveness of your message.” The Power of Storytelling To emphasize the role storytelling plays in product management, Sahil presents research data that says “telling stories is 22 times more memorable than just facts or information alone. “When we hear a good, well-told story, we start relating it to our own experience,” Sahil says.  So when we become the storyteller, we’re getting the listener to almost experience it with us, not just receive the information. It’s very powerful.” Our conversation with Sahil Jain is the second of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian), Shensi Ding (Merge), and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 174 / How Product Managers Can Master the Art of Communication, with Sahil Jain appeared first on ITX Corp..

John Cutler is Head of Product at Dotwork – a startup dedicated to transforming how teams collaborate and manage product development. He is also a prolific writer, including his wildly popular newsletter, The Beautiful Mess. John’s prior roles include supporting product teams at Toast as Senior Director, Product Enablement and Product Evangelist and Coach at Amplitude. In today’s episode of Product Momentum, John joins Sean and Dan for an in-person conversation recorded at INDUSTRY, The Product Conference back in September. We caught up with John in between his day 2 keynote and re-entry into “startup survival mode.” During our chat, John reflects on organizational realities and ways of working, the notion of product people as game designers, and how that mindset highlights the importance of fun and dynamism in the workplace. Here’s what we learned: Organizational Realities and Ways of Working A deep chasm lies between the way organizations communicate their ways of working and their actual practices, John says, highlighting the multiple realities that coexist within companies. “I think in any socio-technical system, you tend to see different frames and perspectives,” he adds. “Companies are not rational places. I’ve been doing a lot of research [in this space], and I’ve learned that pirate ships, despite their reputation, are way more organized than your average company. And actually way more democratic too. “View process and your ways of working as extensions of what you do for your customers,” he continues. It’s a perspective that encourages empathy and a customer-centric approach even in internal ways of working. The Concept of Product People as Game Designers During his keynote, John introduced the notion that product managers and their teams are essentially “game designers” responsible for creating engaging, dynamic experiences. “I like the game design idea because everyone can relate to playing an amazing game and being in the zone with friends,” he offers. “When you experience a great restaurant, that’s service design. Enjoy an amazing vacation? That’s experience design. Ultimately, it’s not super-complex; people can relate.” Applying this mindset to product development and team dynamics can make work more enjoyable and effective. Importance of Fun and Engagement at Work During the conversation, Sean suggests that “roughly 90% of the people you work with – if they could make the same salary doing something else – would actually do that something else.” The statement highlights the critical role of having fun and being engaged in your work that often makes the difference. John goes on to distinguish genuine engagement and dynamic work environments from the many superficial initiatives he often sees. “I’m trying to decouple the sort of ‘corporate engagement industry’ from occasions where people find themselves ‘in the zone,’ a state of flow that goes beyond fun into a sort of dynamism in their environment. Our conversation with John Cutler is the first of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, on September 9-10. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 173 / John Cutler: Product Managers as Game Designers – Shifting the Workplace Mindset appeared first on ITX Corp..

Nesrine Changuel is a product coach, advisor, and speaker with more than a decade of senior-level product experience at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Soon she will add “author” to her long list of accomplishments with the publication of Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection (September 23, 2025). In this episode of Product Momentum, Nesrine guides us through her Product Delight Model. In the process, she reminds us that while strong functionality creates an initial sense of trust and reliability, it is our products’ thoughtful human touches that extend beyond trust to build a strong emotional connection. Here’s what else we learned: Delight Combines Function and Emotion To Nesrine, building delightful product means creating technical solutions that address a user’s functional and emotional needs. Product managers are well accustomed to building products that solve a functional problem, she says. But that’s usually not enough. “What I’m advocating for is making sure that your tech product is of course functioning well,” Nesrine adds, “that it’s solving for functional needs. But we must also try to include users’ emotional needs into your solutions.” This combination of needs fulfillment makes an emotional connection that secures the bond between product and user. The Three Pillars of Delight To achieve product delight, our products must solve existing user challenges, exceed user expectations, and anticipate unspoken needs.   “First,” Nesrine continues, “we need to make sure that whatever we’re building is solving for something that the user is needing. Next, we cannot be content with just meeting user needs; these days, that’s not enough. We need to exceed them. And third, we need to develop the ability to [see around corners], anticipating future needs. Humanizing AI Interactions Understanding a user’s motivations for using a product is essential to providing product delight. Though the study of demographic and behavioral segmentation fills in some of the blanks, motivational segmentation helps us tailor products to users’ emotional drivers. “I think we’re in a much more demanding time for product delight, especially with AI,” Nesrine adds. “AI will certainly improve our product’s functionality. But we should not fall into a world where all products feel like robots. We need to get this human touch, and humanization is extremely important for creating the emotional connection” that drives delight. At INDUSTRY on September 9-10, the Product Momentum team recorded five in-person episodes that we’ll drip out over the next several weeks. Don’t miss upcoming conversations with John Cutler, Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders! The post 172 / How Emotional Connections Deepen Product Delight, with Nesrine Changuel appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this episode of Product Momentum, content strategist Brian Piper joins Dan Sharp and guest co-host Tim Snedden to describe the power of AI in content strategy—revealing how these tools act as creative partners, not just digital workhorses. What’s at stake isn’t just automation or efficiency, but a fundamental shift in how product managers, writers, and organizations approach content creation, measurement, and change management. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting intentional, data-driven content Brian opens with a simple but powerful truth: a great content strategy doesn’t depend on luck or volume. Successful teams align their efforts with business goals and audience needs—avoiding wasted cycles and maximizing their return on effort. “No more random acts of content,” he stated. “If every piece of content you create does not have a specific end goal or a specific audience you’re trying to connect with, you’re wasting your time…. Real content strategy is much more intentional, much more data inspired, and much more focused on helping you reach specific goals.” Change management: the human side of AI Adopting AI isn’t just about adding a new tool to your tech stack. Those of us trying to figure out how best to integrate AI into our workflows need to understand that it’s not just another technology adoption project. “This is really change management,” Brian adds, underscoring the need for a thoughtful process – one that brings everyone along for the ride and seeks buy-in from all the right people, including ICs, leadership, IT, and legal. The data behind great decisions Throughout the conversation, Brian returns to the theme of responsible data practice. Safeguarding personal information is paramount, but public and low-risk data – e.g.,  content-related performance metrics – can unlock valuable insights. AI excels at finding hidden gaps and guiding content teams to lead audiences deeper into the brand journey. “Now we can feed that information into AI,” Brian continues. “And it can look through all of those keywords, finding correlations, anomalies, and clusters of content topics where we already have search dominance. AI is great at gap analysis, as well. Humans are great at seeing what’s in front of us, but not so great at seeing what’s missing. The Product Momentum team travels to Cleveland Sept. 9-10, where we will be recording in-person episodes with John Cutler, Michelle Parsons, Shensi Ding, Sahil Jain, and Axel Sooriah. Be sure to stop by the The Podcast Zone to say hi! Special thanks to our friends at Mind the Product and INDUSTRY for their hospitality! Tim Snedden is a content strategist at ITX who’s responsible for delivering crystal-clear information to users right when they need it. He spoke at the 2024 Flower City AI conference on the efficacy of large language models for accelerating content creation and leads AI initiatives at ITX. The post 171 / Harnessing AI to Transform Content Strategy, with Brian Piper appeared first on ITX Corp..

If you could hire an employee who never gets tired, never loses focus, and instantly adapts to your workflow, would you do it? In the latest episode of Product Momentum, Lena Sesardic leans on her experience as a tech product manager and business-savvy entrepreneur to explore this tempting proposition through the lens of custom GPTs – specialized generative AI bots now reshaping how product teams operate. The episode isn’t a technical tutorial on how to build custom GPTs – though Lena does walk us through her 6-step framework. It’s more a conversation – peppered with easy-to-understand examples – that help us think in new ways about the nature of our work. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting creative and strategic bandwidth Lena describes custom GPTs as “little AI employees” that can take loads of work off your plate. By delegating tasks like writing user stories or analyzing estimates, product managers can free themselves to focus on higher-order work: roadmapping, stakeholder management, and creative problem-solving. We can train custom GPTs to be our “collaborative thought partners,” Lena adds, “sort of a second brain that can then free up our bandwidth for more creativity, more user connection, and more talking with your actual users or stakeholders.” Demystifying misconceptions Lena dispels concerns about the level of technical sophistication required to build custom GPTs. “A lot of PMs I know think [custom GPTs] are very technical,” she adds. “I used to think I had to be able to code to create a custom GPT. But the more I worked with them, I realized, ‘oh my gosh, I can totally build these and take a bunch work off my plate.'” Lena’s 6-step framework for building a custom GPT Start a conversation with ChatGPT (Lena recommends a Plus subscription) to help you build your custom GPT. Cast the role. Decide the expertise you need from your custom GPT. Develop the system instructions. Add context; define the input-transformation-output formula to generate the results you want. Map out the workflow. Be clear about your desired outputs. And remember, as with any AI tool, iteration is key. Add intelligence. Upload additional frameworks and other documents to guide your GPT. Install the brain. Copy-paste the system instructions from your ChatGPT conversation into your custom GPT. Put your GPT to work. Feed it real world data. Test it. Return to the conversation and describe what you’re seeing. Find out how to tweak it until you’re satisfied. Lena’s is a message that resonates: by embracing custom GPTs, product managers can amplify not just their operational efficiency, but their capacity for meaningful innovation. The Product Momentum team will be heading to Cleveland for INDUSTRY on Sept. 9-10, recording live, in-person episodes with several conference keynote speakers. Be sure to stop by Product Momentum’s Podcast Zone to say hi! The post 170 / Lena Sesardic: Building and Using Custom GPTs for Product Management appeared first on ITX Corp..

If you were the CEO of the company where you work, would you fund the work your team is doing? In the early pages of Matt LeMay’s latest book, Impact-first Product Teams, readers confront this existential question. And it hits pretty close to home: am I worthy of my company’s investment? As he explains to Dan Sharp and guest co-host Nathan Shapiro, the book is organized not around frameworks, but around the questions and challenges posed by product teams who want to be able to answer ‘Yes.’ In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live before delivering the closing keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, Matt urges product teams and individual contributors to tie their daily efforts to the company’s desired business outcomes. He also encourages product leaders to be clear about their expectations: “It’s okay to demand concise, clear answers about how they’re cutting through irrelevant distractions to focus on what truly matters,” Matt says. Here’s what we talked about: Supporting the business model. Product teams and ICs need to be able to draw a direct line between their work and how the business makes money. “The business is model is intrinsically customer centric,” Matt says. “It’s how we exchange value. To understand the business model, we need to understand our customers. If we don’t understand them, we can’t succeed at implementing our business model.” Avoiding OKR overload. OKRs, like everything else, are best when used in moderation. “The ‘by the books’ optimal number of objectives is five,” Matt explains, “with three to five key results. If you have many more than that. you’re not actually measuring anything. I’m sorry. If you have 25 things that matter, then nothing matters.” Cultural hurdles to impact. Team members who claim their company isn’t doing product “the right way” create unnecessary obstacles to a strong organizational culture. As do product leaders who leave to their teams the task of making sense of every new strategy that’s dropped at their doorstep. “It pains me to hear people say that because I believe each and every one of us has the opportunity to do meaningful work that makes our organizations better,” Matt explains, adding, “and I think we should ban executive off-sites …. If [leaders] can’t figure out what’s needed within the context of the people doing their day-to-day work…and if your instinct is to close yourself off from the people who will apply your strategy, then you probably don’t really know how strategy works. I will never budge on that.” Be sure to catch our entire episode with Matt LeMay, where he discusses: How to ‘manage up’ with clear value. Using data to estimate impact and validate hypotheses. Measuring impact of platform teams. Nathan Shapiro, special guest co-host for this episode, is the Head of Product Management for the combined Paychex and Paycor where he leads a diverse team responsible for shaping industry-leading Human Capital Management platforms. Earlier this year, Nathan was named an HR Executive 2025, Top 100 HR Tech Influencer, and 2025 Forbes Technology Council member. The post 169 / Matt LeMay’s Keys to Delivering Impact That Propels Your Business Forward appeared first on ITX Corp..

Ioana Teleanu is an AI product design expert and consultant who shaped the experience of Miro AI as their Lead Product Designer. She is currently the creator and instructor of AI for Designers, one of the most successful courses launched on Interaction Design Foundation.  Moments before sitting down for this episode of Product Momentum – recorded live at ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference – Ioana delivered a keynote in which she invited attendees to reflect on the evolving relationship between AI and UX design. Our discussion explores the realities and myths surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, the challenges teams face in adopting AI tools, ethical considerations in deploying AI, and practical advice for integrating AI into design workflows. Here’s what you’ll learn: AI and the Future of Design Roles Ioana puts to rest concerns about AI replacing product managers and designers, rejecting as “clickbait” the many recent headlines that provoke anxiety and stress in the industry. “AI is transforming our roles, but they’re not going away,” she says. Referring to a study by the World Economic Forum, Ioana believes that “AI will end up creating more jobs than it replaces. There’s going to be more jobs thanks to AI, and one of the professions that was marked as growing is UX design.” Addressing Challenges in AI Literacy and Adoption Design teams face loads of challenges these days that postpone adoption and integration of AI into their workflows – many of which are rooted in decisionmaking at the organizational level. As leaders, Ioana advises, we need to give our teams permission to play around with these tools. “Our teams are in a very odd place right now; there’s a great deal of expectation, but not a lot of support.” Company leadership needs to provide the resources – e.g., time, context, and financial support – to create the structured environments their teams need for AI learning and experimentation. “The cost of breaking things by experimenting with AI is far lower than the cost of not experimenting at all,” she concludes. Ethics and AI’s Missing Moral Compass Ioana reflects on society’s gradual relaxation of privacy boundaries, noting that people frequently share intimate information with AI systems that they keep even from their loved ones. “AI doesn’t understand consequences,” she says. “It doesn’t have a moral compass. As designers, that means the responsibility is even higher on our side to protect our users and to keep their data safe.” Final Thoughts Contribute to the public disambiguity. AI technology is infant technology. We’re all trying to find the answers. If you do something interesting, talk about it. Context (in prompt writing) Is Key. Train AI tools on specific design systems or product aesthetics to improve consistency and reliability. Synthetic users. They may never replace real users, but they might help UX researchers get a quick sense of something before we test with real users. The (Blurring) Line between Product + Design. Catch Ioana’s real-life example of a product manager (trained in Design) who initiated company-wide Figma training for product managers. The post 168 / Ioana Teleanu, Designing With AI: Overcoming Barriers and Embracing Change appeared first on ITX Corp..

Usha Iyer is Hivebrite’s Chief Customer and Growth Officer, leading the community engagement platform’s go-to-market customer success and revenue strategy. On June 26, her opening presentation kicked off Keynote Day at ITX’s Product + Design Conference. Right after she exited the stage, Usha joined Sean Murray and Dan Sharp for this episode of Product Momentum, recorded in front of a live conference audience. Our conversation with Usha follows the customer journey, meeting at the intersection of product management, business growth, and customer success. And it covers key themes like connecting product work to business outcomes, the Bow Tie Model for customer journey alignment, and AI’s role in optimizing business processes. At the close of the conversation, Usha offers practical advice for product teams on engagement and roadmap management. Here’s what we learned: Product’s Connection with Business Impact SaaS product teams need to focus on the outcomes of product work that drive real business impact. Even small, seemingly minor changes to your product can significantly affect engagement and business metrics. “Oftentimes, you’ll find as a product person that the smallest, most inconsequential feature that you develop actually has the biggest impact,” Usha says. “The least amount of effort sometimes gives you the biggest satisfaction…. So it’s important to connect the dots and go from what you’re doing day to day, the output to the outcomes.” Aligning with Go-To-Market Stakeholders To deepen (even expand) business acumen, Usha recommends that product teams collaborate with their counterparts in the go-to-market organization. “Learn to align with your marketing team, your sales teams, your customer success teams,” she advises. “Ask to join discovery calls with prospects, or do a ride-along with a sales rep to gain direct market insights.” Engagement fosters empathy, strengthens business alignment, and deepens understanding of customer needs and industry dynamics. The Bow Tie Model Usha introduces the Bow Tie Model as a framework that coordinates product, marketing, sales, and customer success around shared business goals. In addition, she emphasizes leadership alignment on key metrics like GRR, NRR, and ARR to create feedback loops that enhance the customer journey and drive sustainable growth. “It boils down to leadership at the go-to-market level and the product level,” she adds. “We’re all working toward company success, so if we can internalize that and build it into the culture of the organization – including your product and engineering activities – it becomes a flywheel.” Growth Drivers in SaaS Companies As Usha points out, SaaS companies’ main growth drivers are retention, expansion, and new business; but then she introduces a fourth: efficiency. “Investors are getting a lot more stringent about where they put their money,” she continues. “Whereas top line metrics drive revenue metrics, which drive your presence in the market, efficiency drives your residence in the market.” AI-Assisted Organizational Buy-in To gain organizational buy-in for adopting frameworks like the Bow Tie, Usha suggests leveraging AI to connect diverse data sources – such as sales conversations, marketing signals, and product usage – to generate actionable insights. AI tools accelerate the process by automating tasks like generating QBRs and providing sales teams with tailored pitches. “The answer lies in being able to take your product metrics and align it to the company metrics,” Usha says. “That’s really where it starts. That’s how we drive change management. And AI can play a big part: you can take any metric and connect the dots with another metric pretty easily with AI.” Unable to attend ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference? Explore the highlights. The post 167 / How SaaS Teams Drive Impact Through Alignment and Innovation, with Usha Iyer appeared first on ITX Corp..

Sophia Prater is CEO of Rewired UX and the creator of the Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Certification. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sophia joins Sean Murray and guest co-host Jon Daiello to discuss OOUX and the many ways it can help product teams deliver better design, more efficiently than ever. As Sophia explains, “OOUX is like the backbone of the design process that allows all these other disciplines to hang on to.” And the ORCA process – that is, Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes – is the ‘how’ of the OOUX philosophy. Jon, a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, shares Sophia’s enthusiasm for integrating OOUX principles into his team’s design practice. Together, they explored how OOUX is reshaping the design landscape and empowering product teams to deliver exceptional user experiences. Here’s what you’ll learn:Breaking Down Functional Silos with OOUXOOUX provides a structured approach to design that breaks down functional silos by focusing on the objects and relationships that users interact with. OOUX encourages cross-functional collaboration by creating a shared language among the trio of product, engineering, and UX. “Object-oriented UX is gonna help designers communicate with our developers and PMs. And it’s actually going to help us internally as a team. If we don’t understand internally what the objects are, if we don’t have a shared language on what the things are, then how are we gonna make it clear to our users?” ORCA: Boosting Process Efficiency Through UnderstandingOne of the standout benefits of OOUX is its ability to boost process efficiency. Not only does OOUX promote that reusability of shared artifacts, but it helps product teams save time and resources by building only those things that users need and want – and by not buildingthe things users do not need or want. “The ORCA process is a tool for understanding,” Sophia explains. “Understanding the scope and making sure it’s really clear. Understanding the mental model, the data structure, and all the constraints – technical and otherwise. ORCA allows us to truly become systems thinkers,” she adds. “That’s what the world needs. We want to be creating real solutions that solve real problems. Our system lies within a system of systems. So we need people thinking in systems. And that is what the ORCA process gives you.” Slowing Down to Go Fast – with Less WasteWhen product teams dedicate time early in the process to define objects, relationships, and processes, Sophia says, they not only reduce the risk of costly errors later in the cycle. They also quickly discover “all the stuff they don’t need to do. “OOUX helps you get everything on the table, with everyone looking at all the puzzle pieces collaboratively,” Sophia says. “When we do that, we realize we don’t even need half of this stuff — the stuff that’s just gonna drag us down. When we got rid of that, we realize we can go so much faster.” Jon Daiello is a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, leading design teams across Platform, Design Systems, and UX Strategy. He’s passionate about building strong designers, sharing insights on his website and other platforms. ITX’s Product + Design Conference is just around the corner, on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page! The post 166 / Sophia Prater, on Object-Oriented UX: The Backbone of the Design Process appeared first on ITX Corp..

If you’ve spent any time navigating the intricate world of product management, you’re likely familiar with the constant balancing act the role requires. Heather Inocencio is the founder and CEO of The Product Consult, a team of product managers helping companies innovate and scale. In this episode of Product Momentum, Heather joins Sean and special guest co-host Sheila Herbert to share her recipe for how fractional product management works – and where it works best. When fractional PMs join a new organization, approach the opportunity with curiosity, Heather advises. Use that curiosity as a conduit for building trust with your new stakeholders. That way – echoing the words of Bruce McCarthy in episode 156 of Product Momentum and in a recent blog post with Sean Flaherty – you can fairly represent each stakeholder’s needs and motivations. Here’s what else you’ll learn: A Balanced Approach: Customer Obsession + Business Value Find the right balance between being customer obsessed (as described by Christian Marek in episode 162) and delivering value to the business. Meeting user needs is paramount, Heather says, but product managers are also responsible for delivering on the broader business strategy. “Product people are constantly being pushed that they must be ‘customer obsessed.’ And I couldn’t agree more,” Heather explains. “But we have to tie that obsession back to the work we’re doing: the features we’re delivering and the platforms we’re expanding. Then we have to explain how those user behaviors are tying back to adding real business value.” Understanding Fractional Product Management By providing organizations with product management expertise – without the commitment of a full-time/long-time hire – the fractional approach helps both startups and small- to mid-sized businesses that need senior-level product leadership but may lack the resources or consistent demand to justify a permanent position. “At The Product Consult, we embed with clients either full-time or fractionally,” Heathers adds. “And we do hands-on product management work, whether it’s me or someone on my team. To the client, it feels like we’re part of their team. It’s a great way for a company to add skills to the team that they don’t have.” Trust: The Key Ingredient in a Recipe for Product Success A thread woven throughout the conversation was Heather’s take on building trust across stakeholder groups. Trust is no longer a “nice-to-have” in product management; it’s fundamental to the success of any relationship. She shared her recipe for success – the key ingredient of which is trust – which starts with product managers building connections that transcend superficial collaboration. “The one difference in product management versus other roles at a company is that we touch every aspect of the business,” Heather points out. “Trust enables teams to navigate tough conversations, align on priorities, and execute with clarity.” Sheila Herbert is VP, Product at Butler / Till, headquartered in Rochester, NY. Sheila’s expertise and passion for people-first product leadership add a dynamic layer to our discussion. ITX’s Product + Design Conference is returning to Rochester, NY on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page! The post 165 / A Recipe for Success: Heather Inocencio, on Fractional Product Management appeared first on ITX Corp..

Luke Stiles is a product advisor and consultant who helps build products and grow companies, focusing on widespread adoption of Generative AI. On June 25, he will facilitate a workshop at ITX’s 2-day Product + Design Conference (June 25-26). In this episode of Product Momentum, Luke joins Sean and Dan to talk about topics ranging from GenAI’s impact on product management and the need for domain expertise to the value of prototyping and NBA superstar Steph Curry. He concludes the conversation with a hopeful declaration regarding the enduring essence of human creativity in collaboration: AI will enhance, rather than replace, the value of humanity. And if you’re looking for some solid book recommendations to fill out your summer reading list, Luke offers some terrific options! Here’s what else you’ll learn: Accelerating time to valueGet up to speed on the current narrative surrounding generative AI and its implications for product management. What Luke sees most often is AI’s ability to take somebody with deep domain expertise and allows them to really optimize. “The product manager is responsible for gluing a lot of things together,” he adds. “And when you get into that T-shape mode, there’s an opportunity to require fewer inputs from people along the way. AI offers a huge opportunity to reduce the number of handoffs so that we can just accelerate what you’re doing as product managers with these tools.” Prototyping with AIAI tools are already helping product teams to bring better and more fully-baked ideas to the design process, no doubt helping us move faster to critical decision points. But at the same time, Luke explains, we run the risk making the same mistakes we’ve always made with prototypes, saying, “well, that looks like we’re done.” And the answer is, ‘probably not.’ Prototypes are not finished products; they still need to be sold, he adds. Stakeholders still need to understand their value. ‘The Value of Humanity Will Go Up’Our chat with Luke concludes with a discussion on the AI’s role in helping us cross functional boundaries, to understand different rules sets, and – perhaps most urgently – to grasp AI’s impact on the future of human creativity and collaboration within the product development process. “Human desire is infinite,” Luke assures us. “And humans desire being with other humans.” AI will not change that. “The value of humanity will go up. And I believe that deeply.” Want to hear more from Luke Stiles? Register now for ITX’s Product + Design Conference, which returns to Rochester, June 25-26. See the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page! The post 164 / Luke Stiles, on GenAI: ‘The Value of Humanity Will Go Up’ appeared first on ITX Corp..

Vitaly Friedman is an author, the UX Lead with the European Parliament, and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. On June 25, he will facilitate a workshop at ITX’s 2-day Product + Design Conference. In this episode of Product Momentum, Vitaly joins Sean and Dan to share his insights about tackling the unique challenges of UX design in enterprise-level environments. Tune in to hear the following: It’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems in enterprise organizations “Legacy is like that ‘magical box’ that we’re afraid to touch,” Vitaly says. “No one really knows how it works, and the people who set it up decades ago are now gone and left with no proper documentation.” But it’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems and the political hierarchies that created them as long as you show the value you can bring and approach your task with a risk management mindset. “Start with smaller projects; ask users and stakeholders to review your unfinished work; and always remember that your ‘disruption’ affects a lot of people who need that tool quite literally to do their work.” Start small, build trust, and focus your vocabulary on the language of your stakeholders. As part of your research, ask stakeholders to show you their product and to walk you through it. Listen carefully to the words they use to describe it – and how frequently those same words are used. Says Vitaly: “You can get a better understanding of what’s important just by listening to how they talk about it and how much the features or workflows or ways of working mean to them as well.” For humans, with humans, by humans. Designing software is a people business, so Vitaly encourages UX professionals to “observe the relationships between stakeholders” so that you can learn about the people inside the organization who believe in and want to support UX initiatives. “There’s a good chance some UX projects benefited them and helped them be successful,” Vitaly adds. When you find the people who deeply believe in UX, tell them the story about the project you’re working on. “Once you make them aware, they will move mountains for you and support your efforts,” he says. Product + Design Workshop: How can UX designers welcome AI into their environment? In his workshop at the ITX Product + Design Conference, Vitaly will introduce to attendees some of his recent experimental work. “We designers expect a lot from AI, and we believe there’s a lot of things AI can do to help us build great products,” Vitaly says. “But the reality is that AI is really weird. We’re accustomed to software being rather predictable and reliable: if you click on a button, you get the result you’re expecting. But sometimes – like 10-15% of the time – AI can be unreliable.” In the workshop, Vitaly will discuss “those little things” that are important to us designers – and make them better with assistance from AI. ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page! Today’s episode was produced by Peter Sullivan. It was edited by Javier Miranda Nieto, with help from Ivan Chaparro. Contains original music by Zach Kane. Special thanks to Megan Lawson. The post 163 / Vitaly Friedman, on UX Design + AI in Enterprise Environments appeared first on ITX Corp..

Christian Marek is Vice President of Product Management at Productboard. He has applied his years of experience in technology and finance while leading product management efforts at Facebook, Google, and Docusign. In this episode, Christian joins co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to explore how AI tools are revolutionizing product management by enhancing customer obsession and meeting user needs effectively. Here’s what we cover: What does it mean to be “customer obsessed”? And how do I know if I am? Customer obsession is more important than ever before, Christian says. He shares three critical questions to help you determine whether your organization can call itself, “customer obsessed.” How AI supports Product Managers Many PMs see AI as a tool that drives efficiency, helps teams go faster, and reduces waste. And it does. But when properly integrated into your workflows, AI tools also enhance decision-making by streamlining your team’s collection of customer insights. Product managers can leverage AI to quickly analyze customer interactions and feedback, allowing them to identify key problems and prioritize features based on data-driven insights. Next-level Product Management The role of product managers is evolving with AI, enabling them to focus more on strategy and vision rather than just feature specifications. “PMs who embrace AI,” Christian says, :will be able to scale themselves significantly and to think more about their organization’s vision, business strategy, and high-level execution.” Product managers are quickly adapting to this growing level of influence and enhancing their contribution to team and organizational success. Obstacles to AI Adoption Companies often face hurdles in adopting AI – sometimes due to internal resistance and the need for cultural shifts regarding data sharing and privacy. Ask yourself: is my company, and my company’s data, prepared to take advantage of AI’s capabilities? ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page! The post 162 / What Does It Mean To Be ‘Customer Obsessed’?, with Christian Marek appeared first on ITX Corp..

Cassidy Fein is currently leading growth for Autopatch within Windows Servicing and Delivery at Microsoft. Based in NYC, she has over 10 years of experience driving product innovation, scaling teams, and delivering customer-centric solutions. Throughout her career, she’s demonstrated a passion for empowering the next generation of product leaders, especially through her teaching with Mind the Product. In this episode, Cassidy sits down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to take a closer look at product strategy – and its execution. Using Nvidia as an example, Cassidy describes how the chip maker applied three core tenets of strategy, as outlined by Richard Rumelt in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. They are: First, declare your hypothesis that gets at the root cause of the problem. Next, apply a guiding policy – your overall approach to solving it. Finally, execute a coherent action that not only makes sense to your team, but also aligns with everything your team is driving toward. Here’s what else you’ll learn from Cassidy: What Good Strategy Looks Like Cassidy explores the characteristics of good and bad strategy, and explains how knowing the difference can empower teams. There’re a couple ways to look at this, she says. “First, a good strategy should be easy to understand,” Cassidy adds. “You shouldn’t have to have a deep, complex understanding of your space and the technology within it to be able to explain it to someone else. A good strategy is also actionable; it includes all the things you and your team are doing to ladder up to fulfill that strategy.” Creating a Local Strategy When the overarching company strategy is unclear, teams should work to create their own local strategy. “I try to empower folks to understand how, by creating a local strategy, they can make their teams understand what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. As long as you’re able to protect your local area, protect your space, and make sure that that it’s cogent,” Cassidy explains, “you’re likely to have better success.”  The Consultant’s Mindset When product managers adopt a consultative mindset – i.e., understanding their market, competition, and how their products generate revenue – it helps in making strategic decisions that align with business objectives. “Thinking like a consultant, especially for product managers in a junior position, means being up to date on the competitive analysis of similar products in the market, of your pricing and packaging, and how your sales team is incentivized.” Usability vs. Business Value Cassidy addresses the tension between usability and business needs, making clear it’s not an either-or question. A successful product, she says, should meet customer needs while also driving revenue for the business. “The question of which is more important is a bit of a fallacy,” Cassidy explains. “I don’t think we get to choose between the two. If we’re going after a successful product, we need to find the right balance between the two.” Continuous Learning and Improvement Our conversation concludes with Cassidy’s recommendation for resources that product managers can utilize that will enhance their strategic thinking and storytelling skills. ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest updates on Keynote Day agenda and speakers. Learn more here! The post 161 / 3 Core Tenets of Product Strategy and Execution, with Cassidy Fein appeared first on ITX Corp..

Sarah Doody, CEO of Career Strategy Lab, sat down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to offer advice to UX designers out there who are frustrated by the volatility in today’s job market. Treat your career like a product you’re designing, Sarah says, and focus on the essential skills you need in a turbulent job market. This is what you’ll learn: Job Searchers. Think of your career as a Product. Sarah offers 3 pro tips:Think about how you’re designing your career? Marketing your career? Selling your career? Cut out the noise. Maintain a balance between collecting information and acting on it. Vet the people who offer career advice. Ask for evidence that shows their advice actually works. Expand your search beyond big tech. These days, every company is a “tech company,” so look to industries like Finance, Healthcare, Education, and Travel for opportunities. Focus on the timeless skills that will remain useful for years to come – e.g., communication skills, business acumen, relationship-building vs. software-specific skills that will continue to change. Hiring managers. Refine job descriptions to focus less on “kitchen sink” responsibilities and more on the day-to-day. Consider applicants who may have gaps, but whom you can train to fill that skill set. Product managers. Include your UX Researcher in the conversation, starting on Day 1. There’s a growing recognition that UX research enhances the user experience and reduces rework. Engage with Users. Maintain a consistent pulse on user feedback through community engagement and research cadences to inform product development. ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Our first 3 keynote speakers have been announced! Learn more here! The post 160 / Designing Your Career: Pro Tips for Navigating Today’s Job Market, with Sarah Doody appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this episode, AgilityInsights’ Trisha Hall joins Paul Gebel for a first-ever joint podcast for Product Momentum — here, with Trisha’s Illuminating Insights. Trisha leads the enterprise solutions and government contracting team at AgilityInsights, and Paul is a VP of Delivery at ITX as well as long-time host of Product Momentum. In this inspiring conversation between friends and colleagues, Paul and Trisha explore the deep connection between organizational agility and the delivery of business value. They also discuss the role AI can play to generate user insights that help product teams convert strategy to desired outcomes. AgilityInsights’ Rebrand + Platform EvolutionAs Trisha explains, AgilityInsights (formerly known as AgilityHealth) recently went through a rebrand that included an extensive evolution of their platform and managed services AgilityInsights is better positioned to help business leaders gain insights into the value their teams are delivering. “We can’t continue to create these spinning tornadoes of work inside of our information technology organizations,” Trisha adds. “We’re focused on how we can use the data we gather to deliver value to our client organizations.” Not surprisingly, AI has found a role to play here. Leveraging Data to Facilitate ConversationArmed with more than 12 million data points in their team health radar alone, AgilityInsights is working with AI tools – embedded directly into their platform – harvesting this customer feedback to help business leaders understand where they need to lean in and which obstacles need to be removed so that their teams can continue to excel. Importantly, a human remains in the decisionmaking loop. “It’s really about having that conversation with leaders about what is most valuable – not whose project is most important. Those are two very different things.” ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Interested in learning who will be keynoting? Find out here! The post 159 / How Agility Connects Organizational Strategy to Value Delivered, with Trisha Hall appeared first on ITX Corp..

Tami Reiss, also known as The Product Leader Coach, brings together the strategy, process, and mindset tools we need to perform our roles as product leaders with the ability to think and communicate like an executive. A coach is able to see the whole field, and they’re watching us, their player, from an outsider’s perspective. “Beyond that,” Tami says, “a coach is a great sounding board; the higher we go in our careers, the less we can turn to our bosses for advice. They’ve either never done our specific job, or we don’t want them to think we don’t know how to do it.” A coach can also help product leaders avoid these critical mistakes: Lacking a Clear Vision. “One of the biggest mistakes made by product leaders is failing to ensure there is a clearly defined vision,” Tami explains. Vision – that “story of the future” we’re trying to create in the world – helps people internalize what the world will look like because of the things we are building.” Insufficient Understanding of Finance. “The biggest jump product leaders have to make is understanding how to translate customer value into business value,” Tami says. Product leaders who lack financial acumen may face challenges in managing budgets, justifying investments, and driving profitable growth. Overlooking Inorganic Growth. “Product people spend their entire careers finding problems, building solutions, and launching products that solve those problems,” Tami offers. But they overlook the fact that sometimes you’re not going to be the person to build the solution.” Inorganic growth means you might have to find a partner; you might have to acquire the solution; or you might be acquired. Inorganic growth is about business growth, Tami concludes. It’s not about  product growth. Prefer the video experience? Check out the Product Momentum YouTube channel to catch our conversation with Tami Reiss and all our recent guests! Save the date! ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Find out more! The post 158 / Top 3 Mistakes Product Leaders Make – And How To Avoid Them, with Tami Reiss appeared first on ITX Corp..