Products That Count

How Brightline Brought Mental Health Care to 400,000 Kids Who Had Never Had It, and Why AI Is Not the One Delivering It

SC Moatti — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:33:40 GMT

Mahssa Mostajabi is the Head of Product at Brightline Health, a pediatric behavioral health company delivering therapy, psychiatry, and coaching to kids, teens, and families across both virtual and in-person settings. She joined Brightline in April 2025, on the exact day the company’s first Brooklyn clinic opened, stepping into an organization mid-pivot from virtual-first to hybrid care. Before Brightline, her path wound through women’s health, maternal care, insurance, and fintech, with a consistent through line: building for people in overlooked moments in highly regulated environments. In this episode of Product Talk, Planned Parenthood Direct Chief Product Officer Hannah Park sits down with Mahssa to talk about what it means to build a product when your user is an entire family, how Brightline brought free behavioral health coaching to over 400,000 kids in California (77% of whom had never received mental health care before), and why the calculus around AI is fundamentally different when your users are children.

In this episode, we cover:

(1:37) Mahssa’s path from Girls Inc. and nonprofits through women’s health to pediatric behavioral health

(3:50) Why she keeps choosing highly regulated industries, and what that means for how she builds

(5:51) Building for the whole family: navigating kids, parents, clinicians, and payers

(10:30) How Brightline designs explicitly for teen privacy without losing parental trust

(12:31) Joining Brightline on day one of the hybrid pivot and how she oriented herself fast

(15:11) On-site clinic visits as a new joiner: what user interviews with clinic staff revealed

(16:20) What in-person care surfaced that virtual data could not

(21:43) Building Bright Life Kids with California’s DHCS: what a true state partnership looks like

(23:27) What a first mental health session owes a child who has never received care before

(24:38) Why standard outcome measures often fail pediatric populations, and what Brightline built instead

(29:16) Where AI belongs in pediatric behavioral health, and where Brightline says it should not go

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/how-brightline-brought-mental-health-care-to-400000-kids-who-had-never-had-it-and-why-ai-is-not-the-one-delivering-it/

Why the AI ROI frustration is completely predictable

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:25:38 GMT

I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter right now about the lack of ROI from AI. I want to reframe that conversation, because what we’re experiencing is exactly what happens with every major technology wave.

Every technology develops in three phases. Phase one is the intellectual problem. This is the R&D phase, where the technology solves something that couldn’t be solved before. For AI, that was IBM Watson about 15 years ago. This phase always ends the same way: the technology works, but the infrastructure can’t support it at scale.

Phase two is the beauty and user experience moment. This is where we are right now. For AI, it started three years ago with ChatGPT. Suddenly anyone could access something that felt like magic. This phase always crashes too, and we’re already seeing the early innings of it with AI.

Phase three is the scale phase. This is where real monetization happens and the technology becomes essential infrastructure. For AI, our prediction is that it’s still about seven years away. That’s a long time, and it’s also an enormous opportunity.

The companies that win phase three are almost never the ones that dominated phase two. So if you’re frustrated by the lack of ROI right now, you’re in good company, but you’re also exactly where you should be. The question isn’t whether the ROI is coming, it’s whether you’ll be positioned to capture it when it does.

Join the conversation about this on my Linkedin, I'm tracking this closely and would love to compare notes.

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The Conviction Bet No Customer Asked For and How Asana's CPO Builds the Case for One

SC Moatti — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:38:32 GMT

Arnab Bose is the Chief Product Officer at Asana and one of the most outcome-oriented product leaders in the industry. Before Asana, he spent nearly six years as CPO of the Okta platform, where he led product strategy across identity and security. He joined Asana in September 2025, stepping into a company mid-transformation: the collaborative work management category must reinvent itself from a tool for organizing human work into an orchestration layer for humans and AI agents working side by side. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Arnab to talk about the one principle that has defined his career, what it actually looks like to build and defend a conviction bet when no customer has asked for it yet, and why the era of being lauded for shipping your roadmap is officially over.

What you’ll learn:

The secret operating principle Arnab says separates good CPOs from exceptional ones, and why almost everyone claims to follow it but almost no one actually enforces it
How he built the business and technical case for continuous authentication at Okta before any customer asked for it, and what would have gone wrong if he had not
Why the largest product opportunities are almost never customer-requested, and how to build conviction without customer pull
What the CWM industry has to become in the age of AI agents, and why Arnab says the per-seat SaaS model is getting completely upended
How the CPO role is shifting from roadmap ownership to revenue and retention accountability
The two future archetypes for product orgs: head of R&D with engineering, product, and design reporting in, or CPO with general managers owning real revenue numbers
Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana internally, and what still requires a human being

In this episode, we cover:

(1:10) Arnab’s career from Microsoft to Okta to Asana

(3:10) The one operating principle that separates good CPOs from exceptional ones

(5:37) How to operationalize outcome-driven thinking across a product org

(11:39) The continuous authentication conviction bet at Okta: building the case before customers asked

(13:33) How to build technical truth and a financial business case for a net-new market

(16:37) What gets missed when commercialization, partners, and sales enablement are afterthoughts

(18:38) What AI speeds up and what still requires human judgment

(20:39) Why the entire CWM industry must transform from human collaboration to human-AI orchestration

(24:06) How CPO accountability has shifted toward revenue and retention outcomes

(27:15) The two future archetypes for the product org

(29:42) Where AI is actually moving the needle at Asana, and where it isn’t yet

(33:59) The headwinds Arnab sees in AI adoption, and why buyer ROI isn’t matching the hype

(37:03) How Asana thinks about build vs. buy vs. partner in an AI-native world

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-conviction-bet-no-customer-asked-for-and-how-asanas-cpo-builds-the-case-for-one/

What a CPBO Learned Building a Personal Fleet of AI Agents

SC Moatti — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:23:25 GMT

Michael Affronti is the Chief Product and Business Officer at DriveCentric, the number one CRM and engagement platform for automotive dealerships, and one of the most hands-on product leaders building and using AI agents today. He spent three and a half months earlier this year back in the code, learning how agents actually work from the bottom up, memory, state management, harnesses, before returning to the executive seat. In this episode of Product Talk, Sonjoy Ganguly sits down with Michael to unpack how he runs a personal fleet of over a dozen agents (named Jarvis at home, Q at work), how his AI Labs team ships two production agents a month, and what product leadership actually looks like when the team is a mix of people and agents.

What you’ll learn:

1. Why Michael says the most important thing AI does for product managers isn’t automation, it’s shortening the distance to a decision

2. How he built a personal agent fleet for everything from Sunday meal planning to conference talk prep, and what happened when agents went rogue

3. The SDLC next-gen project at Drive Centric: mapping every step from idea to shipped product, then cutting everything that doesn’t require human judgment

4. Why product briefs are actually getting longer at Drive Centric while everything else in the process is getting shorter

5. How the AI Labs team operates as single-person full-stack companies, owning the brief, the code, the customer conversation, and the launch

6. Why being too restrictive with AI access is the biggest mistake companies are making right now

7. What the best product leaders will look like in five years, and why portfolio thinking is the skill that won’t get automated away

In this episode, we cover:

(0:51) Michael’s career arc from Microsoft Outlook to Salesforce Payments to Bumble trust and safety to Drive Centric

(8:44) How the role of product management shifted from tactical launches to business impact ownership

(10:52) How AI changed his leadership style, and what he’s deliberately kept the same

(11:02) Shortening the distance to a decision: prototypes, voice notes, and same-day customer feedback

(13:29) Why one-on-ones are becoming less frequent but more meaningful

(14:17) The “back to being builders” thesis and AI’s shift toward judgment over artifacts

(16:41) The SDLC next-gen project: mapping every step from idea to shipped product and cutting the rest

(19:41) Why engineers are now joining customer meetings, and what that signals

(20:53) The personal agent fleet: Jarvis at home, Q at work, and what went wrong

(24:41) How Drive Centric built agent-building into company OKRs

(26:01) Where companies are making mistakes with AI, and the AI Labs experiment

(28:26) What the best product leaders will look like in five years

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]

3 conversations you should listen to

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:14:22 GMT

With the CPO nominations call just out, I wanted to share three CPO Rising conversations from this summer that the community keeps talking about. Each one tackles building at scale in the age of AI from a different angle, and together they capture where enterprise product leadership is headed next.

Comcast’s Randall Hounsell showed what it looks like to rewire an entire product lifecycle for AI when your product touches nearly every American household. He pushed back on the idea that “data-driven” means what most of us think it means, and made the case that connected living is a much bigger surface area for AI than most people give it credit for.

Intuit’s Wyatt Jenkins reminded us that opportunity cost is still the heart and soul of product management. What stuck with me most was his case for why the systems of record layer will outlast this whole AI shift, even as everything built on top of it gets rewritten in real time.

And Tubi’s Mike Bidgoli made the case that this is a golden era for product management, precisely because coding is no longer the constraint it used to be. He shared how Tubi runs “Tinker Days” to keep the whole org experimenting, and why the entertainment industry is about to go through its biggest disruption yet.

The shared thread is that award-winning CPOs aren’t waiting for AI to settle down before they act. That's exactly the energy I'm hoping to see in this year's CPO nominations.

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CPO Rising Series: IBM CPO on Building Products for a World That's Five Years Away

SC Moatti — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:09:40 GMT

How do you make product bets today for a world that will not arrive for another six years? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, IBM Z and Linux One Chief Product Officer Tina Tarquinio will be speaking on how she and her team manage hardware, firmware, and software roadmaps across multiple time horizons at once, from quantum-safe encryption to AI inference built directly onto the chip. Tina also shares how IBM's shift to design thinking transformed its product culture from a checkpoint-driven process into a client-obsessed discipline, why usage data matters more than revenue as a product metric, and what it actually took to grow a flagship product line more than 4x over a decade.

ŌURA VP of Product on Building the Future of Women’s Health

SC Moatti — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:08:27 GMT

What does it take to build health products that truly understand women’s bodies? In this podcast, Planned Parenthood Direct CPO Hannah Park sits down with ŌURA VP of Product Inessa Lurye to discuss how she’s building science-driven products that turn wearable data into meaningful health insights and better conversations with clinicians. She shares what it takes to adapt algorithms to the complexity of women’s health, balance product development with long-term research, and build for diverse populations. The conversation also explores AI, health equity, and how product leaders can make informed bets on where healthcare is headed.

Speed is now the scoreboard

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:36:08 GMT

This year's CPO Insights Report showed us how quickly the CPO role is evolving. So to keep up, we're moving the CPO Awards from once a year to three times a year. Nominations for the fall CPO Awards are now open, and I want to share a few things to recap before you nominate:

Speed is the scoreboard. Development cycles that used to take months now take days, and the CPOs pulling ahead have closed the gap between building something and getting it adopted.

AI is also giving teams the ability to deploy at a velocity that used to take entire departments. The CPOs worth recognizing right now are the ones using that leverage to go on offense.

And one in three CPOs are now driving M&A at their companies. It’s a new type of CPO, one who allocates resources and shapes outcomes like a portfolio manager.

If someone in your network fits that description, please nominate them below.

Nominate a CPO who's going on offense

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Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder on Producing Sustainable Natural Gas in Energy Transition

SC Moatti — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:38:58 GMT

What if the waste product of one industry could become the clean fuel source for another? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Loa Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Shearman to discuss producing cost-effective and sustainable natural gas from CO2 waste, the use of artificial intelligence in product development, and the importance of market demand and commercialization strategies when building a product.

Stack Overflow VP of Product on Why Nobody Is Building for the New Moat

SC Moatti — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:14:33 GMT

Everyone says trust is the new moat in AI, but is anyone actually building for it end to end? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, Stack Overflow VP of Product Alex Lato will be speaking on why the knowledge problem hasn't been solved yet, how Stack Overflow is evolving from a developer Q&A platform into an agent-native enterprise product, and what it really means when SMBs are outpacing enterprises on AI adoption. She also gets into why hesitation is the real risk in product leadership, what clarity over consensus means in practice, and how the designer's role is quietly becoming something entirely new.

Help us rewrite the rules of product

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:49:34 GMT

AI is changing how product work gets done. The harder question is how it’s changing the principles behind great product management.

We’re building AI Product Builder, an applied-AI layer mapped to the nine topics in our Strategic PM course. It’s the same curriculum that's been taught at Stanford Executive Extension, Columbia Business School, Walmart, SoFi, Siemens, and more, and I’m opening it up. For each topic, I’ll host one 20 to 30 minute fireside with a single expert I select from the submissions.

I’m looking for product leaders, founders, builders, and researchers with a specific point of view backed by real experience. The strongest submissions will cover what remains true from the original principle, how AI changes the tools and workflows used to apply it, and the real evidence or framework behind the argument.

Topics range from the Product Equation and product-led growth to prioritization, category design, high-performance teams, and career development. You can pitch up to three. Selected experts will also earn a seat on our Advisory Council.

Written submissions are due Wednesday, September 9, end of day. Apply below to make your voice heard in the era of the AI product builder.

Become an AI thought leader

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CPO Rising Series: Paychex CPO on Reimagining The User Experience With AI

SC Moatti — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:49:42 GMT

What happens when a 50-year-old software company tries to move at the speed of AI, and what does it really take to merge two very different product cultures after an acquisition? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Paychex CPO Ryan Bergstrom will be speaking on reimagining the user experience with AI, how his team learned the hard way that accelerating only engineering just moves bottlenecks around, and why utilization is the only product metric that ultimately matters. He also gets into the HIPAM budget framework he uses to track and shift R&D spend, and why incumbents with deep customer data have a genuine moat in the AI era.

CPO Rising Series: Tubi CPTO on Why This Is a Golden Era for Product Management

SC Moatti — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:11:09 GMT

What happens when coding stops being a constraint for product teams, and what should product leaders do right now to get ready? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Tubi Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli will be speaking on why this is a golden era for product management and how the entertainment industry is about to go through its biggest disruption yet. Mike shares how Tubi runs "Tinker Days" to keep the whole org experimenting, why he's investing countercyclically in junior talent, and what it means to build for model capabilities that don't exist yet.

LiveKit Head of Product on Betting on Voice AI and Leading Without Authority

SC Moatti — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:45:03 GMT

What does product leadership look like when AI makes everyone a builder? In this podcast hosted by iDonate VP of Product and Engineering Nacho Andrade, LiveKit Head of Product Ben Cherry will be speaking on how LiveKit made a high-conviction pivot from video infrastructure to voice AI, why making AI sound human is harder and more important than most people realize, and what he learned moving from software engineer to product leader. His take on the "PM as CEO of the product" framing: it's about accountability for outcomes, not authority over people, and getting that wrong is one of the most common traps in early product careers.

What makes a winning Product Builder in 2026

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:42:11 GMT

Today we released the 2026 Product Builder Awards eBook, and it explains in depth why we retired the name “Product Manager Awards”. Product Builders are redefining product work as the first AI-native role in business. They fine-tune the models, debug the pipelines, and ship the thing themselves.

Our reviewers had a phrase for it this cycle: the Cube versus the Deep-T. Narrow, single-lane expertise doesn’t get rewarded the way it used to. What wins now is depth across three or four disciplines at once.

The level of ownership in this cohort is what truly impressed me. The winners rebuild entire workflows around AI, own the outcome end to end, and build governance and compliance into the product itself. And they could prove it moved the business with real numbers.

Download your free copy to get the deep dive on what separates award-winning Product Builders from the rest in 2026.

Download the 2026 Product Builder Guide

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CPO Rising Series: Carta CPO on Why Knowing What to Build Matters More Than Ever

SC Moatti — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:18:29 GMT

What does it take to stay relevant as a CPO when the very definition of the product manager role is being rewritten in real time? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Carta CPO Vrushali Paunikar will be speaking on how she thinks about product management in an AI-transformed world, why she frames her best PMs as systems architects rather than feature owners, and what eight years at a founder-led company has taught her about trust, speed, and creating excess value. She also gets into how she structures product reviews, why the hardest problems at Carta are the ones you can't measure, and what battle scars really mean in a product leader.

Your next standout hire is on this list

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:58:07 GMT

This year, we renamed the Product Manager Awards. It’s now the Product Builder Awards. The traditional PM role is quickly evolving into the Product Builder role, and we want to reflect that change through our awards. The Product Builder is the first AI-native role in business, the first job where using AI is the operating model.

Today, we announced the 2026 Product Builder Awards winners: 30 builders chosen from 5000 nominees. And here’s why I think you should pay attention to these winners. Each one owned their product start to finish.

That’s the exact shift we’ve been tracking all year: judgment and execution living in one person instead of getting handed off across a team. Past winners have gone on to found their own companies and step into chief product officer roles. Whoever’s on this list is worth knowing now, not in two years when everyone else catches up.

Meet and connect with the winners below. And keep an eye on your inbox next week, because I’m going to share what this class taught all of us about where product work is headed.

Meet the Product Builder Awards winners

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Queens Carbon CEO on Decarbonizing the Built Environment With Low-Carbon Cement

SC Moatti — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:04:01 GMT

What does it actually take to decarbonize one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, and how do you build, fund, and scale the company that bets on it? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Queens Carbon CEO & Co-Founder Daniel Kopp to discuss enabling built environment decarbonization through cement and concrete that requires lower energy and water usage, optimizing various financing structures to scale the company, leveraging AI and diverse team to build a full product system.

The 5 Durable Pillars Every AI Product Leader Needs

SC Moatti — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:47:03 GMT

What if the biggest mistake product leaders are making right now isn't moving too slowly, it's moving fast in the wrong direction? In this episode of Product Talk, CentralSquare Technologies CPO Denise Hemke sits down with AWS Head of Product Acceleration Jim Kim to discuss the five durable principles that help product teams thrive in the age of AI. From prioritization and customer obsession to trust, context, and the rise of the full-stack builder, Jim shares a practical framework for building products that create lasting value, not just the latest AI feature.

Where are our past winners now?

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:36:40 GMT

While we finalize this year’s Product Builder Awards selections, I went back and looked at what happened to our past winners. Three patterns stood out, and they say something bigger about where product careers are headed.

The first: a significant share of past winners are now Chief Product Officers. If that’s you, congratulations, you earned that award a hundred times over.

The second: many of them are becoming founders. Building got so much easier with AI that there’s no reason a strong product person can’t start their own company anymore.

The third is the one I keep thinking about. Winners are moving from large companies to small ones. Many big companies have resistance to a transformation that’s already inevitable, so the best product builders have decided they can drive more change from outside than from inside.

If large companies keep losing their best innovators, they’ll have to buy their way back to relevance. This makes the move a lot more calculated than it looks. Spin off, build the company, get acquired by your former employer, and end up with more impact than you ever would have had staying put.

If any of this resonates, especially the M&A part, reply to this email and let’s have a conversation.

Know a VP, Sr. Director, or Head of Product who’s setting the standard? Nominations are open for the Product Leader Awards. Winners join me for an in-person VIP celebration this September. Click the banner above to nominate.

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