LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

Every day, more of your traffic isn't human. AI agents show up, grab what they need, and leave — and YOU pay to serve every visitor, whether they see your brand or not. Today’s guest has seen this from both sides. Brandon Harris is VP of Product at Pantheon, the WebOps platform behind a huge slice of the WordPress and Drupal world. But before that, he was sending the bots — at Wiser, where his team scraped millions of pages a day to power retail pricing intelligence. His take: agents aren't killing the web. They're just the next way information travels — and the companies that adapt are about to pull way ahead of the ones that don't. In this episode, Brandon shares: How AI is turning the whole web into one giant CMS — and quietly rewriting the job of anyone who publishes content Plus, why visits are the new impressions, why trying to keep agents out is the modern-day version of blocking Google from indexing your site — and what to do instead Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cxoplus/ Pantheon: https://pantheon.io/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction 01:02 Brandon's product journey: From film school to Wiser and Pantheon 02:24 The dead web debate: Agents are just the next mode of transport 05:51 Why traffic-based pricing can break when the majority of your visitors are agents 08:15 Site visits are becoming the new impressions 10:46 Grading traffic and the identity arms race it will start 14:11 When the whole web becomes your CMS 16:40 Putting your brand's fingerprints in content that AI will pull without accessing your site 21:23 How people decide to trust a site 26:17 Watching sessions to catch user drift before customers quietly leave 31:09 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Brandon Harris.

“Product sense” is the thing that nobody can define, but everyone says will keep product managers employed in the age of AI. Our guest today has a definition, with receipts. But he takes it somewhere that’s less comfortable than you might assume: if all you do is move numbers, you’re obsoleting yourself because AI will eventually do it better than you can. Kevin Sung is VP of Product at Life360, the family safety app with roughly 100 million monthly active users. Before that, he spent years at Dropbox, Smule, Zynga, and Google, a path that took him from a growth-hacking playbook to a very different conclusion about where product management’s value actually lives. In this episode, Kevin discusses: What the PM job becomes once engineering isn’t a bottleneck, and why the line between lazy product management and good product craft is the strength of your opinion How he got Dropbox leadership to fund a year of unglamorous quality work that no financial model could justify, and how it produced $24 million in ARR from churn reduction And what this all means now at Life360 — where the question in a product review isn’t “how’s this move the number”, it’s “does this create a moment of worry for a parent?” Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsung/ Life360: https://www.life360.com/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction 04:06 Defining "product sense" 07:45 How the PM role is evolving 10:20 Kevin's growth lessons from Smule 14:22 The $24M retention bet 18:29 Resentment builds until users snap 22:38 Selling a bet you can't model 24:36 Enshittification and paper cuts 27:51 Life360, where trust is the product 32:23 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Kevin Sung.

At dating app The League, Kunal Thadani's team found that when daily matches took longer to load, people stopped skimming profiles and started actually reading. The wait wasn't a cost — it was the product saying these matches are worth your time. Now he's Senior Director of Product at Houzz, a platform for homeowners to plan renovations, and his take is that the goal was never no friction. It's to create the right kind of friction. In this episode, Kunal drops his: His three-part framework for productive friction, and The two ways friction turns toxic, including the one that punishes your most loyal customers Plus, everyone is building AI workflows for themselves right now. Almost nobody is building them for a team, and Kunal has the clearest answer I've heard in a long time for what that looks like. Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunal-thadani-72a13722/ Insider Growth Group: https://www.insidergrowthhq.com/ Houzz: https://www.houzz.com/ 0:00 Introduction 0:28 From The League to Houzz: Finding the DIY Decorating Gap 2:03 Not All Friction Is Bad 4:39 Trust Signals, Progress Arcs, Commitment Moments 6:41 The Signup Test That 10X'd Email Conversions 10:25 Two Ways Friction Fails: Fake Protection and Endless Re-Verification 15:16 Why Personal AI Setups Break Down at Team Scale 16:47 Inside the Team OS: One Repo and a Shared Product Context Layer 20:38 Claude Code in the Terminal: Mining Gong Calls and Killing Handoff Tax 24:41 Feedback Loops: Why a Team OS Improves Faster Than a Personal One 25:58 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Kunal Thadani.

On a Friday, one of Miro's architects set his agents loose on the company's AI engine. Nobody asked him to. By Monday, he demoed a full refactor. Tuesday, it had a kickoff, and a few months later it was the headline of their user conference. Here's the twist. Miro has refused to rebuild its process around AI. They've kept the same three milestones they've always had...they just changed what happens around them. Our guest today is Jeff Chow, Miro’s Chief Product & Technology Officer. He helps lead a company whose entire job is helping cross-functional teams work better together, which makes it an unusually good place to watch what AI is actually doing to how teams build. Jeff's take: AI hasn't moved the milestones — It's rewritten everything that happens between them. In this episode, he shares: The false confidence trap of building alongside an agent that tells you every idea is brilliant, and why that makes the moments where humans actually align more important than ever Why product "process barnacles" accrete on companies as they scale, and how that quietly turns a culture of invention to optimization at just the wrong time And why saying no is the next organizational crisis. Now that anyone can build almost anything, it’s become clear that coding was never the hard part Links Jeff's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjchow/ Miro: https://miro.com/ Chapters 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Why Miro refused to rebuild its process around AI 5:20 What shows up at kickoffs and solutions reviews now 12:15 The false confidence trap: Say no to "yes-man" agents 14:30 From optimization culture to invention culture 18:20 How one IC's side project reshaped Miro's AI engine 22:30 Process barnacles and why saying no is the next crisis 27:30 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Jeff Chow.

We’ve got something different today: a live demo and walkthrough of how an actual product leader built a real, PM-focused tool with AI. Our guest today put her proverbial money where her mouth is when she got sick of the AI hype and anxiety and grew tired of writing the same status update five different ways for five different audiences. So she decided to build her way out of the never-ending loop of draft, then repackage again and again and again. And today, she’s going to demo it for us and show how she and a team of collaborators built an entire AI PM operating system to help with the myriad of similar, repetitive tasks that product leaders face! Parul Goel has spent nearly 20 years in product, including almost nine at PayPal building a zero-to-one payments platform for marketplaces, and her recent stint as Senior Director of Product at Indeed.com, leading the payments and billing platform through a major scaling challenge. In this episode, Parul shows: A live demo of the PM operating system she built with 3 fellow product leaders and the four-layered architecture behind it Why the "context library" and codifying company identity, stakeholders, and voice is the layer most people skip, BUT the one that matters most And how the system handles core PM workflows like exec updates, cross-functional communication, customer interview synthesis, and PRD drafts Links Parul's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pg2121/ PM OS GitHub project: https://github.com/goelparul-cyber/AI-PM-OS Parul's collaborators: Vidya Sarangapan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsara/ Priyank C.: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyankachaturvedimit/ Bhagyashree Prabhakar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhagya-prabhakar/ Chapters 00:00 Introcution 02:58 The inspiration behind Parul's PM OS tool 07:26 Live Demo: Exec update (Video version on YouTube!) 12:54 Other PM OS skills 13:55 Why building the context library is the most important part of the process 20:48 The future of PM with AI 21:57 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Parul Goel.