The Product Pivot: Real conversations with product people.

TheProductPivot
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The Product Pivot is a podcast by Prodfolio that goes beyond the surface of product management.Through candid conversations with PMs, leaders, and hiring managers, we explore what it actually takes to grow, lead, and navigate the product world — from breaking in to shaping what comes next.Each episode brings honest stories, practical insights, and perspectives you won't find in a textbook. Whether you're early in your PM journey or deep in the craft, there's something here for you.Follow for new episodes, guest announcements, and insights to support your growth in product.https://prodfolio.io/podcast

  1. 3 Sept ·  Video

    Two Years In: A Deliberate Ending

    Two years, 32 episodes, and two projects that both end here. Santi and Meagan pull the real Buzzsprout and Prodfolio numbers up live and make the case that a project you close on purpose is a finished one,  not a failed one. The Product Pivot started as a LinkedIn DM between two people who were both quietly mentoring product managers on the side and figured the advice deserved a wider audience. Two years, 32 episodes, and more than fifteen senior product leaders later - they scheduled around full-time jobs, fractional work, a startup, and a pregnancy, and they kept making it work. This finale is the behind-the-scenes episode where Santi pulls the Buzzsprout dashboard up live and Meagan walks through the changes that moved the needle - rebranding the show as a sub-brand of Prodfolio in early 2026. Then they do the same for Prodfolio, which is closing too. Seventy-plus beta signups against a goal of fifteen, cleared in the first two hours. A November 2025 launch, a thousand-plus portfolio views driven, over a thousand dollars in ARR, eleven public releases with a real changelog. And a straight answer about why they are stopping anyway: monetization was never the point, both of them are prioritizing different things in this season, and the call was mutual, because every project they started together they intended to end together. The archive stays up. The DMs stay open.  Full episode page: https://prodfolio.io/podcast/episodes/two-years-in-a-deliberate-ending Santiana Brace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiana-brace/ Meagan Glenn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meagan-glenn/ Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    Two Years In: A Deliberate Ending

  2. 18 Aug ·  Video

    Inside the YC Team Shipping 5 Features a Week with Brendan Doyle, Product Lead at Campfire

    Brendan Doyle would rather hire a great accountant with zero product experience than a great PM with no domain experience. He's not joking, and he defends it. Brendan is Product Lead at Campfire, the AI-native ERP, where his team ships four to five features a week. Before that he bootstrapped a lease accounting company with one engineer, sold it in 2025, and took two months off. He found the Campfire job by scrolling the Y Combinator site. Now his team ships four to five features a week. His roadmap goes six months out and no further, on purpose. Also covered: why he sometimes builds without talking to customers first, what breaks when product outruns the rest of the org, what an LLM still can't do in technical accounting, and what he gave up going from founder to PM. Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    Inside the YC Team Shipping 5 Features a Week with Brendan Doyle, Product Lead at Campfire

  3. 11 Aug ·  Video

    How a Side Hustle Can Fund Your Passion with Jamme Alexander, Founder of Engineering Women

    Jamme Alexander, founder of Engineering Women, got licensed to bartend for eighteen dollars because a stranger on Facebook was looking for help.  Within thirty days she cut out the middleman and that side hustle became Zen Events. Later, Zen Events became the thing that funds her real passion: teaching youth, including her own 16-year-old daughter, to fly certified drones and build with AI. In this episode, she talks about the FAA pilot course she's building from scratch, the youth unemployment number that keeps her up at night, and why she almost skipped the biggest tech event of her career.  What does it actually take to build a business that isn't a tech product but still runs on product instincts? Listen here for the breakdown.  Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    How a Side Hustle Can Fund Your Passion with Jamme Alexander, Founder of Engineering Women

  4. 4 Aug ·  Video

    The Title Did What Skills Couldn't with John Fontenot, Founder of Path2Product

    John Fontenot sent out more than a hundred product applications and heard nothing. Then his title changed, and recruiters started calling within two weeks. He's the founder of Path2Product and a Principal Product Manager who pivot internally: sales, then UX research, then product. On this episode of The Product Pivot, we dive into the experience paradox nobody in product chats about - you need experience to get the job that gives you experience. What actually convinces a recruiter to bet on someone with no product title yet? Why does John tell aspiring PMs to go work for a private-equity-backed company instead of the hyped VC startup? Listen to hear it all.  Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    The Title Did What Skills Couldn't with John Fontenot, Founder of Path2Product

  5. 21 Jul ·  Video

    Vibe Coding Won't Get You Hired as a PM with Aaron Kesler

    Aaron Kesler, co-founder and Head of Product at Rozie Synopsis, has sat across from a lot of candidates in 2026.  His take: most of them skip the one thing he's actually trying to evaluate.  In this episode, we break down what a weak interview answer sounds like versus a strong one, why "I vibe coded a solution" isn't a story, and the test Aaron uses to check if a candidate can really think like a product manager.  We also dig into what makes a case study land with a hiring manager who isn't technical and where he draws a hard line on PMs shipping code to production. Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    Vibe Coding Won't Get You Hired as a PM with Aaron Kesler

  6. 7 Jul ·  Video

    Building Your Way Into Product with David Nduka, Founder of Navim AI

    David Nduka had one week left in Canada when a single mistake on his work permit caught up with him. What he did in the four days that followed became a company. David is the founder of Navim AI, an immigration tech startup, that has helped several people navigate the difficult path of gaining residency.  He is also a product manager at Kweeve, and a two-time founder who's built most of his products alongside a full-time job.  In this conversation with Meagan and Santi, he traces the path most people never notice they're on: the user interviews you run without knowing they're user interviews, the prototype you ship in two weeks that used to take six months, the moment traction quietly rewrites your confidence. What does building your way into product actually look like when you never called it product? Listen to his story here.  Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    Building Your Way Into Product with David Nduka, Founder of Navim AI

  7. 23 Jun ·  Video

    How Product Managers Actually Get Hired with Andres Tenias, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at Lantern

    Everyone has advice about getting hired in product. Andres Tenias has insights from a technical recruiter perspective.  As a recruiter for close to a decade and now Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at Lantern, Andres got tired of nodding along to engineers and went and earned a software engineering diploma, so when he screens product and technical candidates, he can tell who actually did the work. He joins us to walk through how PM hiring really works, and where the standard playbook quietly fails people. Some of it stings a little. Andres makes the case that the most beautiful portfolio in the stack is often the weakest, because the candidate can no longer talk through their own decisions. He explains how he tries to surface candidates on LinkedIn, and the one habit that makes you invisible. And he shares a move for the job you didn't get that he describes, as "a little bit stalky." What does a recruiter actually look for in the first ten seconds of your profile? And why does so much of the job hunt start to feel like a personal attack, when almost none of it is? Plus: carrying product skills into healthcare and the public sector, the rise of fractional product work, and the interview cues most candidates miss entirely. Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    How Product Managers Actually Get Hired with Andres Tenias, Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at Lantern

  8. 9 Jun ·  Video

    The PM Skill AI Can't Replace, with Steve Johnson, CEO of Product Growth Leaders

    ⁠Steve Johnson⁠ asked a training room full of product managers how many had spoken to a customer in the past year. Most hands stayed down. One person admitted they'd been at the company three years without ever meeting one. Steve is CEO and co-founder of Product Growth Leaders, a former VP at Pragmatic Marketing, and one of the original architects of the ⁠QUARTZ Open Framework⁠. He's written books on customer conversations and on turning ideas into products, and he came back to make an uncomfortable case: most people with "product manager" in their title aren't doing product management at all. They're writing tickets, polishing prototypes, and dabbling in code, while the actual job goes undone. So what happens to that job when AI can write the tickets and vibe-code the prototype faster than you can? Steve's answer points at the one thing he says AI cannot replace, and it's the thing most PMs are too busy to do. He also explains why he tells product managers to get to know their customers "even if it requires civil disobedience," when he thinks the AI cost bubble finally bursts, and why private equity firms have quietly flipped to saying "hire a product manager first." What does product management actually mean in 2026, once the busywork belongs to the machines? Check out the ⁠QUARTZ framework⁠ Read ⁠Customer Conversations⁠ Support the show Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

    The PM Skill AI Can't Replace, with Steve Johnson, CEO of Product Growth Leaders
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The Product Pivot is a podcast by Prodfolio that goes beyond the surface of product management.Through candid conversations with PMs, leaders, and hiring managers, we explore what it actually takes to grow, lead, and navigate the product world — from breaking in to shaping what comes next.Each episode brings honest stories, practical insights, and perspectives you won't find in a textbook. Whether you're early in your PM journey or deep in the craft, there's something here for you.Follow for new episodes, guest announcements, and insights to support your growth in product.https://prodfolio.io/podcast

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