Avsnitt
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Guest Bio: Molly Ruland
Molly Ruland is the CEO and Founder of Heartcast Media, a full-service podcast production studio she established in Washington, D.C. in 2018. Rising to prominence in the late 2010s as the demand for branded B2B podcasting accelerated, she became known for repositioning podcast production as a direct business development tool — not a media vanity project — for brands, NGOs, and founders seeking high-trust relationships with ideal clients. Under her leadership, Heartcast Media has produced more than 1,000 podcast episodes, including 7 programs that rank in the top 10% globally, with clients spanning the U.S. Department of Health, DC Government, NATO, and a range of entrepreneurs.
Previously, Ruland spent approximately 20 years running One Love Massive, a multi-sensory creative platform she built in Washington, D.C. that supported community through art, music, and culture. At its peak the operation employed 19 staff, managed 160 artists, and operated out of a three-story building — an experience that sharpened her understanding of brand clarity and the operational cost of an undefined offer. She credits One Love Massive with the hard lessons behind Heartcast Media’s singular positioning: podcast production as a business development and lead generation engine, period.
In 2026, Ruland co-authored Speak Your Way to Sales alongside nine other women entrepreneurs, a book focused on generating revenue through speaking, podcasting, and guesting. The title debuted at number one in Amazon’s small business category. She also hosts her own content marketing podcast and maintains a separate political interview series as a passion project.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Guest Bio: Drew Bridewell
Drew Bridewell is a Chief Design Operator and fractional product design leader, helping founders across industries build custom digital products at a fraction of traditional costs. Rising to prominence in the 2010s as a design educator and systems architect, he became known for bridging the gap between UX craft, business operations, and high-performance team design — a practice built over two decades at companies including LinkedIn, InVision, and GrowthDay. He holds a Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC) credential and is the founder of Next Level UX, an operating system for designers and operators combining 20 years of design practice with research-backed high-performance habits.
Previously, as Head of Product Design at GrowthDay — a personal development platform built around Brendon Burchard’s six high-performance habits framework — Bridewell spent five years leading product experiments, testing hundreds of onboarding funnel variations using Claude Code and Bolt.new, and shipping code directly to production. He rebuilt GrowthDay’s entire Figma design library inside Claude Code, enabling the CEO to self-serve product iteration without a dedicated engineering headcount. Over three years of the engagement, he taught weekly live design and performance frameworks on the platform, reaching the company’s subscriber community of coaches, executives, and high-performance practitioners.
His career highlights include serving on the Design Transformation team at InVision, where he mapped the design systems and organizational maturity of hundreds of enterprise clients. Earlier, at Lynda.com prior to its acquisition by LinkedIn, Bridewell hosted Practical UX Weekly on LinkedIn Learning — a widely-followed series on interaction design principles that introduced a generation of early-career designers to the foundations of UX. He earned his degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
As founder of Next Level UX, Bridewell coaches designers, operators, and founders through systems built at the intersection of design thinking and financial literacy — teaching the operator skills that enable practitioners to price design decisions, understand P&L, and deliver at the level of a full product team as a single fractional contributor.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There’s a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you’d share it with someone who’d get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to listen to. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newsletter (Taste Maker) to distill the principles and reflect on the narrative — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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For years Brian Donohue thought the six-week cycle was the sweet spot — they’d arrived at it independently, the same place Basecamp landed. Then Intercom rebuilt its support product around large language models, and the cycle, the triad, and the stable teams all went out the window.
Brian Donohue is the VP of Product at Intercom, where he leads product development for Fin, the company’s AI agent for customer support. Rising to prominence through more than a decade at Intercom, he became one of the defining figures behind the company’s transformation from a traditional SaaS helpdesk into an AI-first customer service platform. Under his leadership, Fin grew from a June 2023 launch with a 25% resolution rate to a sustained average of 65% resolution across all paying customers — widely regarded as one of the most measurable success records in enterprise AI product development.
Previously, as Director of Product Management at Intercom, Donohue oversaw multiple product areas during the company’s rapid growth years, building deep expertise in outcomes-driven development, user onboarding, and messenger interface design. Before Intercom, he served as Director of Design at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where he accumulated more than twenty years of combined design and product leadership experience across enterprise and consumer contexts.
Donohue has been a vocal advocate for technical rigor in AI product development, having championed the adoption of consumer-grade A/B testing methodologies within Intercom’s R&D organization and the firm’s transition to outcome-based pricing — charging per resolved customer conversation rather than per seat.
Key Conversation Topics
* Continuous reassessment as strategy — Intercom questioned “are we going bold enough?” every three months rather than making one big bet. Incremental big swings added up to a massive shift.
* Inherited product blindness — Even though Fin was “built from scratch,” Intercom was still anchored to old UX decisions (button-based resolution confirmation) that took two years to recognize and fix. The fix actually significantly improved resolution rates.
* Outcome-based pricing aligning incentives — Charging per resolution ($0.99/resolution) aligned what customers want, what the product team optimizes for, and what finance cares about in a way seat-based pricing never could. Resolution rate climbed from ~25% at launch to ~65%.
* The AI operating model shift — Throwing out the six-week cycle, the triad, and traditional team topology. “Follow the work” rather than organizing around stable teams. Destabilizing but effective for speed.
* Technical uplift required for AI product managers — Natural language as the programming interface doesn’t lower the bar — it raises it. Engineers think in rule sets and constraints; PMs now need that same rigor.
* R&D Services as a critical new muscle — Forward-deployed R&D folks (like Palantir’s model) are essential for getting customers to value. AI transformation requires hands-on implementation support. PLG counterintuitively did NOT get amplified by AI.
* Build to think / prototyping value for PMs — The real opportunity for PMs isn’t doing final design — it’s using AI tools to prototype fast enough to validate ideas before bringing in designers.
Themes
* AI agent product development at scale
* Outcome-based pricing in SaaS
* Organizational transformation under AI pressure
* The paradox of technical uplift under “democratized” technology
* A/B testing rigor borrowed from consumer product applied to AI
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay in my premium newslettter I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Vance Morris is the Founder of Deliver Service Now!, a consulting and coaching firm that teaches small and midsize businesses how to implement Disney-caliber customer experience systems combined with direct response marketing. Rising to prominence through a decade of leadership at Walt Disney World, he became the creative lead behind Chef Mickey’s — Disney’s flagship character dining experience at the Contemporary Resort — a concept whose systems have remained largely unchanged for more than 25 years. He also built and systematized three home service businesses in Maryland (a carpet cleaning company, a mold remediation company, and an Oriental rug washing facility) to operate on 90 minutes of his attention per week.
Previously, as a manager and trainer at Walt Disney World through the 1990s expansion era, Morris served on the opening teams of the Yacht & Beach Club Resorts and Animal Kingdom, and acted as All-Island Duty Manager at Pleasure Island. He was recognized for generating $125,000 in business from a single marketing campaign, earning the Marketer of the Year award at a GKIC competition in 2015 and an International Marketing Award in a Dan Kennedy competition.
His consulting client roster has included NASA, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Legal Seafoods, Tyson, Rainforest Café, and Compass Group. He has shared stages with Daymond John, Dan Kennedy, Joe Polish, and Jack Canfield across more than 40 years of speaking experience.
Morris is also the creator of 52 Ways to WOW Your Customer, a free resource delivering one customer experience tactic per week of the year.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Khurram Mir is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Kualitatem, a specialized software quality engineering and information systems auditing firm operating across the United States, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Kingdom, the Nordics, and Asia, and the Co-Founder of Kualitee, an AI-powered test management platform that grew out of Kualitatem’s internal tooling. Rising to prominence after beginning his career in software testing in 2001, Mir has spent more than two decades building the methodology and infrastructure that define enterprise QA at scale, accumulating over 500,000 hours of testing delivery and working with more than 200 client organizations across more than 350 applications.
Mir co-founded Kualitatem in 2009 on the conviction that independent quality assurance should be a non-negotiable phase of every software development lifecycle, not an afterthought appended at the end of a release cycle. The firm achieved TMMi Level 5 certification — the highest maturity designation in the Testing Maturity Model integration framework — and has maintained ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certification for six consecutive years. Kualitatem also developed an internal training institute to build consistent QA discipline across its geographically distributed team. A banking engagement that became a defining case study demonstrated that involving QA teams at the requirements stage — a shift-left approach — eliminated 33 percent of defects before formal testing even began.
In 2016, Kualitatem productized the internal consistency tooling it had built to maintain uniform service quality across multiple countries, launching Kualitee as a standalone test management platform. The platform’s generative AI engine produces test cases directly from user stories and test scenarios, with Kualitatem’s own teams reporting a 23 to 27 percent reduction in testing time as a result. Kualitee now serves more than 2,000 engineering teams worldwide, including clients such as Emirates, T-Mobile, and Cox Enterprises, and has been recognized by G2 as a leading test management solution across multiple regional and segment reports. Mir serves as product manager for Kualitee in addition to his operational role at Kualitatem — a dual function that reflects the firm’s broader thesis: that the services mindset and the product mindset must be learned separately, even when one organization spawns the other.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
John Long is the CEO and Co-Founder of Thynk AI, a Utah-based company building AI communication agents that handle the full pre-sales motion — cold outreach, lead qualification, scheduling, and beyond — without a human ever touching the conversation. Rising to prominence in enterprise technology sales over a 15-year career, Long built his reputation not as a manager of sales teams but as the kind of operator who embeds so deeply with product that the line between salesperson and builder disappears entirely. He was once the lone sales representative tasked with opening a brand-new market segment, and over the course of more than 100 trips with his product team, he helped construct what became a multimillion-dollar recurring revenue line from scratch. The product partner he worked alongside on that run is now his co-founder at Thynk AI.
Founded in mid-2024, Thynk AI entered the market with a thesis that most AI SDR tools are window dressing — capable of sending a templated email but unable to hold a real conversation, respond to replies, or carry a prospect from cold contact through to a qualified meeting without human intervention. Long and his co-founder built Eric, Thynk AI’s AI sales agent, to close that gap end-to-end. Eric makes and receives calls, sends texts and emails, conducts live phone meetings, qualifies and disqualifies prospects, and books follow-ups autonomously. The company’s own website reflects the conviction: there is no human contact available until Eric has qualified you. In its first 90 days of operation, the platform generated $13,440,000 in pipeline for its users with no human SDRs and no ad spend.
Long sees AI communication agents as a platform, not a point solution. Thynk AI has already extended Eric beyond outbound sales into customer service, HR, and accounting functions — any workflow where a business currently deploys a human to conduct a structured, repeatable conversation. The company operates from Lehi, Utah, and Long continues to serve as an advisor and speaker on practical AI deployment for growth-stage companies.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Michael Ferranti is the VP of Marketing at Unleash, the world’s largest open-source feature management platform, where he leads go-to-market strategy for a company that has more than 500 enterprise customers, 13,500+ GitHub stars, and 35 million downloads. Rising to prominence in the 2010s through a series of infrastructure and developer-tools companies, Ferranti built a reputation as a marketer who can translate technically dense products — container storage, zero-trust access, feature flags — into category-defining narratives for engineering and platform buyers.
Previously, as Chief Marketing Officer at Teleport, the open-source infrastructure access platform, Ferranti joined in late 2021 and led the company’s marketing organization through a period of rapid enterprise expansion. Before Teleport, he spent nearly four years at Portworx as VP of Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing, where he helped build the category around Kubernetes-native persistent storage before Portworx was acquired by Pure Storage in 2020 in a deal valued at $370 million.
Earlier in his career, Ferranti held marketing and product roles at ClusterHQ and at Rackspace, where he worked in the early days of OpenStack and most recently served as head of marketing for Mailgun by Rackspace, the developer email API. A Virginia Commonwealth University undergraduate, he relocated from Richmond, Virginia to the Paris metropolitan area in 2023. At Unleash, he has been part of the team that tripled ARR over three consecutive years, closed the $35 million Series B in March 2026 led by One Peak with participation from Spark Capital, Frontline Ventures, and Firstminute Capital, and expanded the customer roster to include Lloyds Banking Group, Wayfair, Prudential, and Lenovo.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Issac Hicks is the Founder and CEO at Autonomi, an AI and automation consulting firm that helps mid-market and enterprise companies make critical work reliably repeatable. Rising to prominence in the applied AI space in the early 2020s, Hicks built Autonomi into a recognized force in business process automation — earning a seat on the Forbes Technology Council — by focusing on a thesis most consulting firms won’t touch: that the biggest source of wasted enterprise spend isn’t bad strategy, it’s the avalanche of tedious, repetitive operational work that consumes employees’ days. His firm has driven over $50 million in wasted spend back to the bottom line across deployments spanning custom applications, AI-enabled workflows, and end-to-end process automation.
Hicks arrived at entrepreneurship through an unlikely path. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology (class of 2016), then spent roughly a year working as an aerospace engineer for the government before pivoting into Big Four business consulting. In that role he specialized in technology implementation for companies undergoing software migrations and acquisitions — work that put him inside some of the most operationally chaotic moments a company can experience. He watched acquired employees dread every transition, buried under work that existed solely because no one had built a system to handle it. In February 2021, he left consulting to found Autonomi with the conviction that the gap between a business problem and a scalable AI solution was bridgeable — and that bridging it was more valuable than any single consulting engagement.
Autonomi operates across the full spectrum of automation maturity: from $5,000 pilot deployments to full-scale engagements starting at $25,000, with a primary focus on companies generating $2 million or more in annual revenue. The firm’s product portfolio includes Autonomy Books, an automated bookkeeping solution built specifically for CPA firms — a vertical where reconciliation and data entry remain stubbornly manual despite being near-perfectly suited to automation. Rather than pursue venture capital and the growth-at-any-cost model that comes with it, Hicks chose to build Autonomi as a profitable, self-sustaining business, retaining the operational control he now helps his clients achieve.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Paul Glover is the No BS Executive Workplace Coach at Paul Glover Coaching, where he works with C-suite leaders and high-performing executives across the United States on performance, accountability, and organizational resilience. Rising to prominence over more than two decades of coaching work following a complete professional reinvention, he became known for a performance coaching model built around blind spots, outcome-contingent fees, and a refusal to allow clients the comfort of self-deception. His largest active client is a billion-dollar distribution organization.
Previously, Glover spent 30 years as a labor employment trial attorney in Chicago, earning a reputation as an aggressive courtroom litigator. His legal career ended in 1995 when he was indicted on 33 counts of white-collar crimes — including kickbacks, bribery, and tampering with government witnesses — and subsequently sentenced to federal prison. He refused to cooperate with prosecutors to reduce his sentence, and served approximately five years before beginning what would become a second career launched from scratch in his fifties.
Released in 2001 with his law license revoked and ineligible for reinstatement for 13 years, Glover rebuilt entirely as a coach, eventually building a national practice. He structures his engagements as one-year contracts with 50 percent of his fee contingent on clients achieving mutually defined goals — a model designed to give him skin in the game and eliminate the incentive to let clients off the hook. His coaching approach draws directly from his own reckoning with ego, echo chambers, and the moment accountability finally broke through.
Glover is the author of WorkQuake™, a book on surviving and thriving in the Knowledge Economy, praised by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith as agitating “the business status quo.”
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Joshua Altman is the Founder and Managing Director of Beltway Media, a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm that provides fractional chief communications officer services to technology companies and startups. Rising to prominence over more than two decades in strategic communications, he became known for his Story-Narrative-Brand framework and Four Languages model, which help organizations align what people read, see, hear, and experience into a coherent communications strategy. His client roster spans scrappy startups to federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Commerce.
Previously, Joshua served as a multimedia journalist at The Hill, where he covered federal policy across energy, healthcare, immigration, defense, and criminal justice, and reported from the front lines of multiple high-stakes election cycles. His background as a news producer — shooting, editing, and cutting four to five videos per day — gave him the operational reps and editorial instinct that now underpin his consulting work.
Joshua holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications from The George Washington University. He is a member of The Telly Awards Judging Council and publishes The Comms Chief on Substack.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Adam Spector is the Founder and CEO of Chore, a back-office operations company that handles HR, finance, compliance, and equity for venture-backed startups. Rising to prominence as a 4x founder and investor in more than 200 startups since 2011, he became known for his conviction that founders should spend zero time on undifferentiated operational work. Under his leadership, Chore has grown from 7 to more than 40 team members, serving hundreds of venture-backed companies across the United States.
Previously, Adam co-founded AbstractOps, which raised approximately $10 million from tier-one venture capital firms before pivoting in 2022, with its operations arm spinning off to become Chore. Across his earlier three venture-backed companies, he raised a combined $30 to $40 million in funding, with one company acquired for $400 million. He also served as a Product Manager at Twitter before turning full-time to founding and investing.
Adam holds a JD/MBA and a degree from Vanderbilt University. He co-founded the Autopilot Fund, an investment vehicle focused on AI-related data sets, and hosts the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast, where he interviews founders on the operational realities of building companies.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
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Solo episode! This is a recording of my lightening lesson on Maven, titled “After the Idea, There’s Plenty of Time to Learn AI,” where I talk about my way of operating using AI-native workflows.
Caden Damiano is a software designer and product manager who has spent his career untangling problems in industries most people overlook — tertiary finance, real estate technology, working capital for agriculture, and financial operations for small and mid-size businesses. He hosts Way of Product, a podcast and Substack newsletter where, over eight years and 180+ episodes, he has interviewed designers, PMs, and engineers about how good work actually gets done.
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Adam Callinan is the founder and CEO of Pentane, a profitability operating system for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands. Pentane emerged directly from the decade Callinan spent building BottleKeeper — a beverage insulator he co-founded with his cousin in 2013 — from zero revenue to $60 million in total sales and a private equity exit, running customer service, paid advertising, creative, and the website almost entirely himself. The core insight behind Pentane: most e-commerce operators are drowning in dashboards but can’t answer the one question that matters — are we profitable, and why — because no one has codified the right equations for them.
BottleKeeper’s growth was neither gradual nor accidental. In August 2014, when Facebook launched its video ad platform, Callinan shot a clip of the product in motion and watched monthly revenue spike from $2,000 to $40,000 to $60,000 to $80,000 to $150,000 in a matter of months. He spent the next several years doing it almost entirely himself — handling customer service, paid advertising, creative, and the website — while his cousin managed finance and fulfillment. The company appeared on Shark Tank before eventually selling to a private equity buyer.
Callinan lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he pursues hard physical experiences outdoors as deliberate mental conditioning — a framework he traces directly to resilience under business adversity. He actively mentors founders and business owners.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup (2011), The Startup Way (2017), and Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great (May 26, 2026). The Lean Startup — which introduced the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and the concept of the Minimum Viable Product — has been translated into nearly 30 languages, became required reading at Y Combinator, and established the dominant framework for product development and entrepreneurship for the better part of fifteen years. Ries co-founded IMVU, the social avatar platform, in 2004 with Will Harvey, where he first developed and applied the customer development practices that would later become the methodology.
In 2011, Ries outlined the idea for a fundamentally different kind of stock exchange inside The Lean Startup. He spent the better part of a decade making it real: the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) received SEC approval as a national exchange in 2019 and launched trading in September 2020, designed expressly for companies committed to long-term value creation over short-term shareholder extraction. He has since co-founded Answer.ai with Jeremy Howard of fast.ai — an AI research lab focused on practical applications — and founded Virgil, a startup law firm designed around founder needs rather than billable hours.
Incorruptible draws on more than 200 years of case studies — from Johnson & Johnson and Costco to Novo Nordisk and Ikea — to argue that the governance structures most companies adopt by default are engineered to destroy the values that made them worth building. Ries’s thesis: companies that last aren’t those with better culture decks, but those whose founders protected the organizational structure before they lost control of it.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Tyler Wells is the Co-founder and CTO of BrainGrid AI, a planning-layer platform that acts as an AI product manager and tech lead before a coding agent writes a single line of code. Founded in 2025 alongside co-founder Nico Acosta, BrainGrid takes a plain-language idea and converts it into structured product specifications, task breakdowns, and implementation blueprints ready for tools like Cursor and Claude Code — targeting the domain experts, operators, and non-developers who have ideas they’ve never had the capital or technical background to build. The company emerged from the collapse of Wells’ prior startup, which he and Acosta wound down in late 2024 when they realized that the planning layer they were building for themselves was the product.
Previously, Wells spent seven and a half years at Twilio, ascending from individual contributor to Senior Director of Engineering before departing in 2021. At Twilio, he oversaw large engineering organizations and was responsible for cloud infrastructure operations — the environment where he first watched runaway AWS and Snowflake costs become six-figure surprises and developed the discipline around inference limits and cost management that now shapes BrainGrid’s architecture. Earlier in his career, he held engineering roles at Skype and Microsoft, accumulating more than 25 years of professional software engineering experience across the stack.
Wells is also the host of the Data Chaos Podcast and previously co-founded Propel Data, a prior analytics venture. He returned to individual-contributor engineering work when he co-founded BrainGrid — a deliberate choice to get back to building after years in senior management — and now operates a three-person team shipping product with parallel agent fleets across isolated Git worktrees.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Artem Koren is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Sembly AI, a meeting intelligence platform that transcribes, analyzes, and synthesizes professional service meetings into structured work products. Rising to prominence in the early 2020s, he became widely known for building enterprise-grade AI transcription and natural language processing systems before large language models made such capabilities broadly accessible — engineering custom models from scratch for a category that had no clear precedent. The company, which he co-founded in 2019 alongside Gil Makleff, operates across 35 languages, holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification, has raised $4.64 million in total funding, and was named in the 2025 Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies.
Previously, as Senior Manager and Director in the IT Capital Markets Services practice at EY, Koren spent more than a decade advising Fortune 500 clients across financial services, auto insurance, energy, and professional services sectors in North America and Europe. He was recognized as a top 1 percent performer and became known for deploying enterprise-scale work management applications — hands-on experience in the client service delivery cycle that would later define Sembly’s product thesis.
Earlier in his career, Koren served as CEO and CTO of Visual Trading Systems, where he built and distributed technology solutions for the capital and commodity markets, and co-founded Neusana, applying deep learning to digital biopsy image analysis. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Columbia University and an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Chris Pearcey is the Founder and CEO of Decisio.media, the company behind Decisio, a free, ad-free entertainment recommendation app built around a patent-pending four-way swipe system that captures positive and negative viewing intent across movies, television shows, and books. Rising to prominence in the mid-2010s as a data engineering and analytics leader in enterprise product organizations, he became known for applying machine learning to forecast accuracy problems at scale inside some of the world’s largest consumer brands. Since launching Decisio on January 1, 2026, the app has grown to more than 5,000 users on minimal marketing spend, acquiring customers exclusively through Google Ads.
Previously, as Advanced Analytics Product Manager at Nike, he supported planning tools for the Asia and Latin America regions and drove forecast accuracy from 65% to 93% over six seasons by introducing consumer profile modeling — one of the more precisely measured single-initiative improvements in Nike’s planning systems during that period. He also held product and engineering roles at Amazon Web Services before founding Deci Media, building the enterprise-scale data infrastructure background that informs Decisio’s deterministic recommendation architecture.
His career highlights span 20 years split evenly between two disciplines: 10 years as a database engineer specializing in machine learning and advanced analytics, followed by 10 years in product management across enterprise software organizations. Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Deci Media is built on the conviction that streaming platforms’ 33% abandonment rate and 50% viewer dissatisfaction rate are not failures of recommendation algorithms — they are the predictable result of platforms optimized for engagement metrics rather than viewer satisfaction.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Gal Ko is the founder of Bold PMM and Podstar, podcast guesting practices that match B2B technology founders with established shows for trust-building and pipeline generation at scale. Rising to prominence in the early 2020s following the intersection of COVID-era layoffs and the Israel-Hamas war, he became known for productizing more than two decades of product marketing experience — across FinTech and cybersecurity — into a subscription-based distribution service built on the thesis that founders, not products, are the last remaining differentiator in an AI-commoditized market. He currently teaches marketing fundamentals, branding, storytelling, and Google Ads at Google and Reichman University, where he has lectured for more than three years.
Previously, he built a product marketing career spanning over 20 years, beginning his first marketing work at age 14 and later advancing through digital marketing roles during a year spent in Australia and six months in China studying Mandarin. His pivot into podcast strategy in the early 2020s was grounded in a specific observation about buyer behavior: following the Google 7-11-4 rule — which holds that B2B buyers require 7 hours of content engagement across 11 touchpoints on 4 different platforms before converting — a single repurposed podcast episode is the most efficient vehicle for hitting those numbers at founder scale.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Tim Beattie is the Co-founder and CEO of Stellafai, an outcomes-focused consulting platform founded in August 2022 to replace time-billed engagements with an enablement model that leaves client teams permanently more capable. Rising to prominence in the 2010s as a consulting culture leader, he became widely regarded as one of the clearest practitioners working on the gap between what professional services firms promise and what their incentive structures actually deliver. At Stellafai, which reached its first paid customer by October 2022, reached general availability in January 2023, and has reported 10x growth since launch, he leads the effort to make organizational change a measurable, auditable outcome rather than a billable activity.
Previously, as DevOps Culture Enablement lead at Red Hat across Europe and the Middle East, he helped enterprises adopt agile and DevOps as genuine operating philosophies rather than compliance exercises. He became known for identifying and naming what he called “dishonest agile” — the practice of assembling project teams that disbanded immediately after delivery, contradicting the continuity and learning loops that agile methods require. His regional scope encompassed enterprises across two continents during a period of significant enterprise digital transformation.
His career highlights include 25 years across major consulting firms, including IBM and several boutique professional services organizations, where he observed firsthand how time-and-materials billing structurally rewards complexity and delay over outcomes — a dynamic he documented in DevOps Culture and Practice with OpenShift, a practitioner guide integrating lean, agile, and design thinking with hands-on technical enablement. That book, and the framework behind Stellafai, reflect a consistent career mission: making consulting less wasteful, more accountable, and more genuinely enabling.
Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe -
Marlena Sarunac is the Fractional CMO and co-founder at The Company Advice, a women-owned marketing firm serving early-stage tech startups across health tech, insurtech, and AI. Rising to prominence in the 2020s as a growth-focused operator at the intersection of complex B2B value propositions and go-to-market strategy, she became known for turning technically dense products into compelling market narratives that drive measurable revenue outcomes. She holds a Master of Engineering in Technical Entrepreneurship from Lehigh University, where she won the Joan F. & John M. Thalheimer ‘55 EUREKA! Grand Prize in 2018.
Previously, as Vice President of Marketing at Particle Health, Sarunac led the company’s marketing function from Series A through Series B over 3.5 years, building a data-driven, analytics-first growth strategy centered on revenue outcomes, cross-channel experimentation, and A/B testing across market segments. Her work established Particle Health as a trusted, humanized brand within the health data interoperability space, spanning web design, conference presence, and content programs.
Earlier in her career, as Director of Marketing at Ideon — formerly Vericred, an API platform simplifying health insurance and employee benefits data exchange — Sarunac ran full-spectrum marketing operations including content strategy, PR, SEO, and trade show execution. She directly attributed 40% of all inbound website traffic to marketing initiatives, with an additional 40% driven by an SEO program she built and managed over two years.
At The Company Advice, she created The Healthies, the first awards program recognizing excellence in marketing, branding, and product design in digital health, expanding the firm’s footprint as a thought leadership platform for the sector.
Thanks for reading this far. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.
So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.
I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.
Subscribe to The Way of Product
PS — If you want to pitch coming on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe - Visa fler
