Trey Courtney started his career as a software developer at Accenture and spent 16 years evolving into the role of Global Chief Product and Partnership Officer at Mood Media, the largest provider of audio and visual in-store experiences in the world. If you have heard music playing in a Macy’s, seen a menu board at Whole Foods, or walked through a Ferrari showroom, you have experienced what Mood Media builds for roughly 600,000 locations worldwide. Trey was selected as a finalist for Products That Count’s 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of Product Talk, host and Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi sits down with him to talk about what it takes to bring a product mindset into a sales-led, private equity-backed company, how he is navigating AI investment when the stakes are high and the tools keep changing, and what he thinks the CPTO org chart looks like in three years.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:23) Trey’s path from software developer at Accenture to running product, creative, and partnerships at Mood Media
(3:24) What Mood Media actually does: the brand behind the brand at 600,000 locations worldwide
(5:32) How product decisions get made when the roadmap is largely driven by custom client requests
(7:14) Sales-led, private equity-backed: how that shapes product culture and what Trey has tried to change about it
(9:17) Why Trey now owns creative and partnerships in addition to product, and what breaks when those functions are siloed
(13:23) Where AI is going in the experience economy: real-time personalization and why they started with 11 Labs three years ago
(16:04) The hardest part of AI leadership: which tool to bet on, when to launch, and how to manage compliance in a large company
(20:57) The jagged line: what it actually looks like when AI investments go wrong on the way to going right
(22:55) How AI is landing differently across creative, engineering, and product management teams
(26:01) What happens when salespeople start vibe coding and showing prototypes to clients
(29:47) What the CPTO org chart looks like in three years: QA, DevOps, and the PM-to-engineer ratio
(33:43) The competitive analysis agent that builds battle cards automatically so salespeople stop asking
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
