Ghazal Badiozamani is the SVP of Product Management at Cengage, one of the world’s largest education companies with roots in publishing that go back over 100 years. Before Cengage, she spent eight years at Elsevier helping legacy businesses understand and adopt emerging technology, starting with machine learning before it was mainstream, eventually building a digital team from scratch and launching a digital authoring system from nothing. In this episode of the CPO Rising series, Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Renee Niemi sits down with Ghazal to talk about what it takes to lead product inside a company that has existed for over a century, why the squad model may be approaching a fork in the road, and her take on the most pressing question in AI-era product development: what does product even mean now?
In this episode, we cover:
(1:11) Ghazal’s path from strategy to product at Elsevier, and what prompted the move to Cengage
(4:32) What it actually feels like to lead product inside a company that’s been around for generations
(6:08) Why product problems always end as people problems, and why that’s the most interesting part of the job
(7:28) How design principles and core values serve as anchors through both digital transformation and AI adoption
(12:59) AI’s progression: from efficiency tool to fundamental question about what product even is
(14:55) Why building for nonlinear human thinking is the new product challenge
(16:58) Team structure today and two very different futures for the squad model
(19:46) Why removing design from the triad is a mistake, and what each personality type actually contributes
(23:23) Development speed: from 3 to 5 months down to 2, and why customer absorption is now the real constraint
(27:14) The CPO alpha effect: the two capabilities that are almost never found in the same person
(30:45) The funnel-based product analytics dashboard Ghazal checks almost every day
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: https://productsthatcount.com/the-question-ai-still-cant-answer-about-product-management-cengage-product-svp/
