The Product Podcast

Product School

Hosted by Product School CEO Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, The Product Podcast drills deep into the minds of Chief Product Officers from Cisco, Lovable, Perplexity, Shopify and many more.  We move beyond high-level theory to reveal how top executives actually lead in the age of AI. We dig deep into their real-world decision-making, strategic frameworks, and the operational playbooks used to build intelligent products. If you are a VP, Director, or CPO looking to drive innovation at scale, this is your essential listen.

  1. 2d ago

    How Skydio Ships Flying Robots With Just 20 Product Managers

    Most people think of drones as toys. Alden Jones thinks of them as infrastructure. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) visits Skydio's California office to sit down with Alden Jones, VP of Product at Skydio, the autonomous drone company building "flying robots" for public safety, defense, and infrastructure inspection. With a history degree and a military background (he was a truck-driving officer running supply convoys in Iraq) rather than an engineering one, Alden explains how a vertically integrated company of nearly 1,000 people builds everything in house, from chip-level design to hardware, embedded software, and cloud, and why autonomy, not just flight, is the real product. He breaks down Skydio's "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) program, where a drone often reaches the scene before human officers, and the outcomes dashboard cities use to track response times. He compares the economics against police helicopters (roughly $3,000 an hour to operate and $10-25M to buy), walks through the defense and tactical ISR use cases shaped by the war in Ukraine, and explains how thousands of cheaper camera drones could democratize air support while saving lives. He covers physical security (where 90-95% of alarms turn out to be false), the work of earning FAA trust to unlock groundbreaking waivers, and why Skydio's $3.5B, five-year investment in US and allied supply chains is funded by revenue instead of debt. He also opens up the product org itself: roughly 20 product managers across the entire stack, "strike teams" that work like forward-deployed engineers, and a customer-first culture where PMs are expected to go watch the robot fly in the real world. What you'll learn: Why Skydio calls its products "flying robots," and the "toys to tools to infrastructure" thesisWhat full vertical integration looks like: chip-down design to cloud, all in houseHow "Drone as First Responder" changes 911 response, tracked in a live outcomes dashboardThe real economics of drones vs. police helicoptersHow the war in Ukraine reshaped Skydio's thinking on tactical ISR and democratizing air supportWhy 90-95% of physical security alarms are false, and how autonomous drones clear them at near-zero marginal costHow Skydio earns FAA trust to fly beyond visual line of sight and win first-mover waiversWhy a $3.5B, five-year US manufacturing commitment is funded by revenue, not debtHow one pilot flying multiple drones becomes possible only through real autonomyHow Skydio runs product with ~20 PMs, "strike teams," and a customer-first org designWhy shipping hardware plus software (the Tesla comparison) shapes a roughly two-year program cycleConnect with Alden Jones, VP of Product, Skydio: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aldenljones/ Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/ About Skydio: Skydio is a US-based manufacturer of autonomous drones ("flying robots") for public safety, defense, security, and infrastructure inspection. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in California, the company is vertically integrated across hardware, autonomy software, and cloud. About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech. Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    How Skydio Ships Flying Robots With Just 20 Product Managers

  2. Jul 29

    How to Know Your AI Feature Actually Works (n8n's Founder's Metric) | Jan Oberhauser, CEO n8n

    n8n's founder puts the company's GitHub repo, nearly 200,000 stars, right next to the paid signup button, and he's genuinely fine if you never pay. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Jan Oberhauser, CEO of n8n, the open-source automation platform that's crossed $100 million in ARR at a $5.2 billion valuation. Jan breaks down the "fair-code" license bet that let him give the product away and still build a business, how that free version became the on-ramp into enterprises like Meta, Nvidia, Dell, Accenture, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Mercedes, and why he believes the people with the problem should build the automation themselves, not a centralized team or an outside agency. He also walks through a live build of a personal AI agent (email and calendar), shows how n8n falls back from Claude to GPT via OpenRouter when a model isn't available, and explains how enterprises get automations into production faster because each agent can only do exactly what it's been permitted to do. What you'll learn: Why n8n rejected traditional open source for a "fair-code" license, and how it avoided the community backlash that burned other companiesWhy trust and consistency, not features, are the real center of a communityHow the free, self-hosted version drives bottom-up adoption inside major enterprisesWhy "sprinkling AI on top" kills products, and what to build insteadHow to chain agents so one agent's output becomes the next agent's inputWhy n8n is the "connective tissue" between models, tools, and business systemsHow guardrails (an agent can only do what it's explicitly allowed) speed up enterprise procurement and productionWhy the people with the problem should own the building, not a centralized AI teamHow 10,000+ community templates and 500+ integrations expand what non-technical builders can shipHow one company routes 75% of support through an n8n agent, with customers happier than with humansConnect with Guest (Jan Oberhauser): LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janoberhauser X: https://x.com/JanOberhauser Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/ About Jan Oberholzer: Jan is the CEO of n8n, an open-source (fair-code) workflow automation and orchestration platform for building AI agents. He started the company over seven years ago, before LLMs went mainstream, and has grown it past $100M ARR at a $5.2B valuation. About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech. Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    How to Know Your AI Feature Actually Works (n8n's Founder's Metric) | Jan Oberhauser, CEO n8n

  3. Jul 22

    ServiceNow President & CPO on Why the Market Can't Tell AI Winners From Losers, and How to Transform Before It Kills You | Amit Zavery | E305

    In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Amit Zavery, President and Chief Product Officer at ServiceNow. The platform runs more than 75 billion workflows a year with around $15 billion in annual revenue growing over 20%. Its market cap is above $100 billion, yet the stock is down more than 30% this past year, while its AI business is on track for $1.5 billion, ahead of a $1 billion plan.  Amit previously ran product and platform at Oracle for over two decades and was a VP and General Manager at Google Cloud. What you'll learn: Why the market can't yet tell AI winners from losers, and why companies that don't transform will get killedWhy the idea of one company becoming the single end-to-end enterprise orchestrator is a fallacyThe spare part approach that makes most enterprise AI projects fail, and what pacesetters do insteadWhy access is shifting from user interfaces to agents, and what taking action actually requiresHow to hold long-term conviction on platform bets while the market judges you on short-term sentimentKey takeaways: Transform or die: the market will separate AI-native platforms from legacy vendorsInteroperability beats domination in the agentic eraGovernance only wins when it accelerates innovation, not when it blocks itCredits: Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Guest: Amit Zavery Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    ServiceNow President & CPO on Why the Market Can't Tell AI Winners From Losers, and How to Transform Before It Kills You | Amit Zavery | E305

  4. Jul 15

    Snapchat SVP of Engineering on How a Billion-User App Lets Everyone Ship Code Without Breaking Quality | Saral Jain | E304

    In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Saral Jain, SVP of Engineering at Snapchat, the last independent social platform operating at global scale, with 956 million monthly active users closing in on the one billion mark and a community that opens the app more than 30 times a day. Saral joined Snap nine years ago, right around the IPO, after nearly a decade leading engineering teams at Amazon Web Services, and today leads all engineering for Snapchat, spanning product experiences, multi-cloud infrastructure, and the company's machine learning and generative AI platforms. What you'll learn: How Snap lets designers and product managers ship production code, with an AI agent running the first review pass on 90% of code within 5 minutesWhat Casper is: the AI teammate any team at Snap can invoke from Slack or Jira to build a working prototype from a conversationHow Snap turned company-wide AI adoption into business impact after early prototypes were being built and thrown awayHow lean startup squads mix engineers, designers, and data scientists to launch zero-to-one bets inside a mature platform Key takeaways: Quality control does not have to slow down who gets to ship, it has to change what reviews the work firstWidespread AI adoption is not the same as business impact, and the gap between the two is where most AI investment is being wasted right nowSmall, cross-functional teams with blurred roles can move faster than traditional org structures, even inside a billion-user companyCredits: Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Guest: Saral Jain Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    Snapchat SVP of Engineering on How a Billion-User App Lets Everyone Ship Code Without Breaking Quality | Saral Jain | E304

  5. Jul 8

    Axon CPTO on Building AI for Law Enforcement, Selling to Governments, and Using the Body Cam and Taser to Save Lives at Scale | Jeff Kunins | E303

    In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Jeff Kunins, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Axon, the company that created the Taser and the body cameras federal agencies wear.  Axon ingests more video per year than YouTube, and with a market cap of approximately $32.9 billion and $2.78 billion in revenue, growing 33% year over year, it is one of the highest-growth companies in the S&P 500. What you'll learn: How law enforcement agencies are using AI inside body cameras and Tasers to save lives, not just hit metrics.Why Axon declared a public moratorium on facial recognition AI for six years and what finally changed.How Axon embeds external activists and researchers directly into product manager squads as a design input, not a compliance process.Building first-party AI models for real-time license plate detection while using foundation LLMs for everything else.Key takeaways: Axon created the Taser and the body cam, and now ingests more video per year than YouTube. Most people have never heard of them.Build only what you must to be differentiated. Everything else, license from the best available source.Ethics review is not a compliance burden. When embedded in the product lifecycle, external critics help you see around corners and design better products.Credits: Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Guest: Jeff Kunins Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    Axon CPTO on Building AI for Law Enforcement, Selling to Governments, and Using the Body Cam and Taser to Save Lives at Scale | Jeff Kunins | E303

  6. Jul 1

    Asana CPO on Why Every Employee Is Now an AI Eval and What That Means for How Enterprises Actually Capture AI ROI | Arnab Bose | E302

    In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer at Asana. Asana is the work management platform built for human and AI collaboration, trusted by over 170,000 customers including Accenture, Amazon, and Anthropic. The platform's Work Graph maps goals to portfolios to projects to tasks and serves as the foundation for Asana's AI Teammates: collaborative agents that operate inside the graph, learn from human decisions, and compound their intelligence with every cycle. What you'll learn: Why enterprise AI spend keeps returning zero productivity gains, and what is structurally breaking the loopWhy every employee approval, correction, or rejection of AI output is training data that makes the system smarter over timeHow Asana wires its own processes through the Work Graph so that AI decisions write back automatically and compound rather than resetHow PLG, forward-deployed engineers, and AI agents all report to the CPO, each under a GM who owns a revenue numberWhy the future of AI at work belongs to whoever has the richest shared context, not whoever has the best model Key takeaways: Individual AI productivity gains compound into zero enterprise ROI when decisions never write back into a shared systemEvery human approval or correction is training data. The companies that capture it structurally will pull ahead of those that don'tPLG is an acquisition funnel, not a sales motion. Giving it a GM with a revenue number inside product changes the incentives entirelyCredits: Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Guest: Arnab Bose Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    Asana CPO on Why Every Employee Is Now an AI Eval and What That Means for How Enterprises Actually Capture AI ROI | Arnab Bose | E302

  7. Jun 24

    Typeform CEO on Why Breadth Beats Depth as an AI Moat and How to Build a Defensive and Offensive AI Strategy | Jay Choi | E301

    In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Jay Choi, Chief Executive Officer at Typeform. Typeform is the AI engagement platform trusted by more than 150,000 customers, including 95% of the Fortune 500. Before Typeform, Jay spent seven years as Chief Product Officer and General Manager at Qualtrics, where the company scaled from $100M to over $1B in ARR. What you'll learn: Breadth of surface area as a stronger AI moat than depth of use case, and why going broad is the right strategic bet right nowThe dual posture Typeform built: a defensive strategy to make their core product impossible to replicate, and an offensive strategy to expand into full customer workflowsResearch Flow, their new product that compresses 50 customer interviews from weeks into hours using AI-moderated researchBeing model-agnostic from day one, and what they learned when switching models without an observability platform in placeThe pricing experiment framework Jay uses: 30 simulations before a single market goes liveKey takeaways: When AI threatens to commoditize your core product, expanding surface area is a stronger defense than adding AI features to what you already havePositioning AI capabilities in plain language, not technical terminology, is the difference between adoption and abandonmentHappy churners are a product problem, not a marketing problem: the fix is finding structurally always-on use cases.Credits: Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia Guest: Jay Choi Social Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    Typeform CEO on Why Breadth Beats Depth as an AI Moat and How to Build a Defensive and Offensive AI Strategy | Jay Choi | E301

  8. Jun 17

    Mozilla Head of Firefox on The Future of Agentic Browsers and Fighting for the Open Internet Against Google Chrome, Apple Safari & Microsoft Edge | Ajit Varma | E300

    For episode 300 of The Product Podcast, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia sits down with Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox at Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the original challenger browser that pioneered browser tabs, pop-up blockers, and browser extensions. With 210 million active users and $826 million in annual revenue, Firefox is the only major independent, open-source browser still standing against Google Chrome's 68% share, Apple Safari's 17%, and a new wave of agentic browsers.  Before Mozilla, Ajit spent six years at Meta leading monetization of WhatsApp and overseeing its business messaging platform. He has also held product roles at Google, Uber, and Square. What you'll learn: Why LLMs are making browsers more strategically important, and what that means for product teams building in an agentic worldWhy "trust us" is no longer enough, and how open source changes the standard for privacy in AI products- How to compete against trillion-dollar incumbents without abandoning your mission Key takeaways: Privacy claims without open-source inspectability are unverifiable, "trust us" is no longer a sufficient product strategy in the AI eraCompeting against trillion-dollar companies is possible when mission clarity defines what you refuse to optimize forThe agent-driven internet will either democratize access or concentrate it, product choices made today will determine whichSocial Links: Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here

    Mozilla Head of Firefox on The Future of Agentic Browsers and Fighting for the Open Internet Against Google Chrome, Apple Safari & Microsoft Edge | Ajit Varma | E300
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4.3
out of 5
168 Ratings

About

Hosted by Product School CEO Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, The Product Podcast drills deep into the minds of Chief Product Officers from Cisco, Lovable, Perplexity, Shopify and many more.  We move beyond high-level theory to reveal how top executives actually lead in the age of AI. We dig deep into their real-world decision-making, strategic frameworks, and the operational playbooks used to build intelligent products. If you are a VP, Director, or CPO looking to drive innovation at scale, this is your essential listen.

Information

  • Creator
    Product School
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    847
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 640108
  • Show Website
    The Product Podcast

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