In this episode, Luke Freiler, CEO of Centercode, which provides user testing solutions to leading tech companies. Luke shares his journey from hardware engineering to founding a company that revolutionizes product testing. He discusses the importance of continuous user testing, the shift from waterfall to agile methodologies, and how Centercode has established itself in a new market category. Luke emphasizes the significance of community building, demonstrating value through metrics, and the...

Jyotika Athavale is the 2024 President of the IEEE Computer Society. In this role she oversees the global roadmap for the organization and plays a leading role in international safety standardization. She was honored with the IEEE Women in Technology and Leadership Award for her contributions towards diversity in engineering and STEM. Jyotika is one of the leading experts in the area of automotive functional safety. In her day job, she is Director of Enterprise Architecture at Synopsys,...

Purvi Shah is Vice President of Product Development for Enterprise Data Platforms at American Express. Prior to that she led a team of consultants at Deloitte in the public sector working with many state governments to build solutions for citizens to avail services for food stamps, child care and other interventions. Purvi was recently recognized on the 2024 Global Data Power Women List by CDO Magazine.  In this episode Purvi talks about: (1:05) Product development in the public...

Jeff Lash is SVP of Global Product Management at Forrester. Jeff has been a long time thought leader on all things product. He led the product management practice at SiriusDecisions (acquired by Forrester) where he worked with many companies on assessing and benchmarking their product function competency and maturity. Jeff started his career as an information architect and usability at Elsevier and Mastercard, and then pivoted into product management, so he has some good insights to share...

Hello listeners, I am Rahul Abhyankar, your host. Welcome to Product Leader’s Journey. In today’s episode we talk about B2B Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, and AI with Lara Shackelford. Lara is a veteran Chief Marketing Officer many times over, and has led marketing teams to create impact at companies such as Oracle, Intel, Datastax, Looker (both before and after the acquisition by Google), and has also led global demand generation at Microsoft. She is currently senior vice president...

Nathan Gold is highly sought after as a coach for presentations at the TED conference, keynote speeches, entrepreneurs pitching on Shark Tank and startups raising funding from investors. He has delivered thousands of hours of professional coaching while working with companies such as Netflix, SanDisk, Kaiser Permanente and IBM. In this episode Nathan shares some very useful tips on how to do a persuasive and memorable product demo, combined with stories. He shares a simple template for...

Sudhakar Ramakrishna became CEO of SolarWinds at a very pivotal moment in the company's history, just as it became the target of a cyberattack that affected not just SolarWinds but its large base of enterprise and government customers. Since then, Sudhakar and the people at SolarWinds have led a remarkable turnaround. We are going to learn about how they did that. Before coming to SolarWinds, Sudhakar's journey has taken him from engineering and product leadership as well as GM, President and...

Himanshu Palsule is CEO of Cornerstone, which provides a workforce agility platform to identify skill gaps and development opportunities within organizations. Himanshu joined as CEO in Jan 2022, bringing more than 35 years of diverse experience leading global organizations. Prior to joining Cornerstone, he was President of Epicor where he was responsible for managing vertical businesses and overseeing product operations. Palsule was previously CTO and Head of Strategy at Sage...

Join host Rahul Abhyankar and Aleks Bass, Chief Product Officer of Typeform on this episode. At Typeform, Aleks leads product strategy, development and execution. Typeform helps brands with thoughtfully-designed tools that turn digital interactions into lasting personal connections, with no-code forms, quizzes, surveys, and asynchronous videos. Aleks is a product leader with a 18+ year career that includes product management, product marketing, and consumer insights for both B2B SaaS and D2C...

Chris Johnson is Co-founder & Managing Partner of Artisanal Talent Group, a highly specialized boutique executive search firm known for building some of tech’s most talented executive teams. Chris leads the Product and Engineering Leaders Practice, and is one of the most highly sought-after search consultants in the field for these critical roles at tier-1, high profile, VC backed and public companies. Over the past few years, Chris has completed Product and Engineering searches for...

Al Zollar has had a distinguished 34-year career at IBM where he held several important roles across the entire software stack, including General Manager of IBM Tivoli Software, General Manager IBM iSeries server product line, and President of IBM Lotus Software. He spent the first 9 years in customer facing roles in pre-sales and post-sales engineering, before becoming a product manager for DB2, and later, OS2.  Al is currently an Executive Advisor with Siris Capital Group and serves on the...

Donald Hasson, Chief Product Officer of Dashlane, a leading provider of password management to consumers and businesses, joins host Rahul Abhyankar in this episode. With a long and successful career in cybersecurity, Donald is an expert in identity and credential management.  How to build user delight for heightened emotions that are associated with creating, forgetting and protecting passwords. How to think of user education as a feature of the product. How to think of competition,...

Amanda Richardson is CEO of CoderPad, an online talent assessment platform used by companies such as Spotify, LinkedIn, Shopify, Lyft and many others. In just four years as CEO, she has led the company's growth in 160+ countries, over 4000 customers doing over 3 million assessments per year. Amanda started her career as an equities analyst on Wall Street, but she wanted to "be in the room where it happens". This brought her to Silicon Valley starting her journey as a product leader to...

Rich Mironov, author of The Art of Product Management, and a veteran product leader with over three decades of experience tells it like it is in this engaging episode of Product Leader's Journey. We discuss the emotional aspects of product leadership, why prioritization is a political problem, why a product role in the B2B enterprise domain more challenging, and what product leaders owe their teams.

Rich Fernandez is the CEO of SIY Global. SIY Global comes from the renowned Search Inside Yourself program, mindfulness and emotional intelligence training originally developed at Google, where Rich was director of executive education and people development. He was also one of the first SIY teachers. Rich has also served in senior roles at eBay, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. In this episode Rich shares insights about the importance of mindfulness and meditation for product leaders,...

Stuart McClure is one of the foremost cybersecurity experts in the world and a serial entrepreneur with successful exits. He has built successful products leveraging ML & AI for cybersecurity. Stu is also a student of psychology and his new company, Wethos AI, leverages AI to codify traits of high performing teams.

We hear often that careers are nonlinear. So how can we be thoughtful about the zig and deliberate about the zag? My next guest on Product Leader’s Journey, Nadim Hossain, VP Product Management at Databricks, has done exactly that. In this episode, Nadim shares insights about his experience at Uber and Databricks in building open and closed-loop ML products, product-led vs engineering-led product teams, and a lot more.

Natalia Baryshnikova is GM of Enterprise Agility at Atlassian. Prior to that she was Head of Products at SmartRecruiters. In this episode, Natalia shares her highly useful insights from her career journey. We dive into topics such as resume tips, cover letters, career growth, and driving alignment.

Don Weinstein is ADP’s Global Chief Product and Technology Officer, responsible for all aspects of ADP’s global technology strategy and delivery. Don's career journey started at GE and then at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and ADP. In this episode, Don shares his playbook on how to lead technology transformations inside large organizations, the career graph from product manager to product leader to general manager, the key attributes of leaders that make them role models, and enabling customer...

Inbal Shani is Chief Product Officer of GitHub. Having led engineering and product teams at Amazon and Microsoft and serving as a General Manager for most of her career, she specializes in crafting solutions that maximize customers’ most business-critical outcomes. Inbal’s development experience has spanned the entire tech stack. She was among the pioneering technologists who applied AI in the lab during her Master's in mechanical engineering. Immersed in the rapid evolution of LLMs and AI...

Raj Yavatkar has had a distinguished career being a Fellow at Intel and VMware, leading engineering teams at Google Cloud, and spearheading technology strategy as CTO at Juniper Networks. In this episode, Raj shares insightful stories and practical advice from his career driving innovation inside large companies, building billion dollar businesses, and building an innovative culture in an organization.

Rahul Abhyankar, a seasoned product executive for over two decades, welcomes you to Product Leader's Journey! Learn about who this podcast is for, and why it was created, and what to expect! Thanks for listening!