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The Product Podcast

The Product Podcast

By: Product School
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Summary

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.


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Episodes
  • GoFundMe CPTO on Building Marketplaces Across StubHub, TheRealReal & GoFundMe | Arnie Katz | E294
    Apr 29 2026

    GoFundMe has facilitated over $40 billion in help since 2010, powering a community of more than 200 million people across 20 countries. Arnie Katz is the Chief Product and Technology Officer there — and a three-time CPTO, having previously led product and engineering at StubHub and TheRealReal. In this episode, he brings the rare perspective of someone who has built and scaled marketplaces at every stage, across multiple industries.

    What you'll learn:

    • The three failure modes every marketplace must solve — cold start, imbalance failure, and false positive growth — and how to fix each one
    • How GoFundMe is using AI agents to reduce friction for fundraisers, resulting in an expected $125 million in additional funds raised
    • Why AI is driving revenue growth at GoFundMe, not just developer productivity — and how they sequenced that deliberately
    • The real trade-offs of the CPTO model: what you gain in speed, and what you have to mitigate through hiring
    • How GoFundMe is building demand-side and matching mechanisms to grow donation volume beyond viral sharing

    Key takeaways:

    • Marketplace liquidity isn't just about having enough supply — it's about designing the right matching and demand mechanisms at every stage of scale
    • AI unlocks revenue opportunities that were previously uneconomical to pursue, especially when the customer is already in a vulnerable, high-friction state
    • The CPTO structure enables faster decision-making, but requires consciously strong functional leaders underneath to offset the natural lean toward one side

    Credits:
    Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
    Guest: Arnie Katz

    Social Links:

    • Find out more about Product School here
    • Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
    • Follow Product School on LinkedIn here



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    41 mins
  • Robinhood VP of Product on Prediction Markets, AI-Native Investing Tools, and Social Trading for the Next Generation | Abhishek Fatehpuria | E293
    Apr 22 2026

    Robinhood posted $4.5 billion in revenue in 2025, up 52% year-over-year, while growing its Gold subscriber base 58% to 4.2 million paid members. Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of Product at Robinhood, joined the platform as an intern in 2016 and has built the brokerage business from a single-product equities app into a multi-product financial platform. This episode is a detailed look at how Robinhood structures product thinking at scale — without sacrificing the UX moat that made it win in the first place.

    What you'll learn:

    • How Robinhood uses two leading indicators, net deposits and Gold subscriptions, to measure long-term customer commitment before revenue shows up
    • Why treating legal and compliance partners as product owners, not blockers, is the unlock for shipping fast in a regulated market
    • The "barbell strategy" for UX: design for the newest user and the most advanced user simultaneously, and let the middle take care of itself
    • How the early-stage ideation sprint has compressed from 4–5 weeks to 2–3 days with AI tools
    • Why Robinhood Social is built on verified identity and real trades — and what that unlocks for the future of retail investor relations


    Key takeaways:

    • Paid subscriptions aren't just a revenue line — they're the connective tissue that drives multi-product adoption across a platform
    • Pride is a scalable quality standard: when teams enforce it themselves, quality and speed stop being in conflict
    • AI embedded into workflows moves faster than AI bolted on as a standalone feature

    Credits:
    Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
    Guest: Abhishek Fatehpuria

    Social Links:

    • Find out more about Product School here
    • Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
    • Follow Product School on LinkedIn here



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    38 mins
  • Zoom CPO on Rebuilding the Future of Work Collaboration with Agentic AI — From Meeting Transcripts and Recordings to a System of Action | Jeff Smith | E292
    Apr 15 2026

    Zoom generates $4.87B in annual revenue and powers modern work for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. In this episode, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, sits down with Jeff Smith, Chief Product Officer at Zoom.
    Jeff joined Zoom in 2019 and has led product through three distinct eras — COVID hypergrowth, multi-product expansion, and the current agentic AI shift. In this conversation, he breaks down what actually changes when AI becomes core infrastructure for how teams work.

    What you'll learn:

    • How Zoom tripled headcount in under a year during COVID and what breaks at that scale
    • Why expanding into mail, calendar, and documents was never about copying Google or Microsoft — it was about owning the full work lifecycle around meetings
    • How AI Companion 3.0 performs agentic retrieval across first- and third-party tools to surface insights and produce work product from a single prompt
    • Why MCP and open integrations are non-negotiable when you can't afford to be siloed
    • How to move from personal AI productivity gains to real, measurable business outcomes


    Key takeaways:

    • When engineering velocity is abundant, strategic direction becomes the scarce resource
    • The right engagement metric isn't more meetings — it's whether users produced something valuable as a result
    • Agentic AI is the first real opportunity to disrupt entrenched productivity tools that switching costs have protected for decades

    Credits:
    Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
    Guest: Jeff Smith


    Social Links:

    • Find out more about Product School here
    • Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
    • Follow Product School on LinkedIn here



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    36 mins
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