Nikita Miller spent 15 years building products before becoming President of Product and Technology at Perk, an AI platform for business travel and spend management. She made the move from the U.S. to Barcelona about a year ago, arriving right in the middle of Perk’s transition from a single travel product to a multi-product platform. The timing meant navigating that transformation while also rethinking how product teams work in an era where AI has changed almost everything about how work gets done. In this episode, host Cassio Sampaio sits down with Nikita to talk about the UX renaissance she sees happening in B2B, the concept of shadow work and why removing it is one of the biggest product opportunities right now, why she thinks the most important PM skill in the AI era is discernment rather than taste, and what she tells early-career product managers who are trying to figure out where to invest in themselves when the landscape keeps shifting.
In this episode, we cover:
(1:32) What surprised Nikita most about moving from the U.S. to Barcelona and leading an international team at Perk
(3:27) How AI changed the structure and pace of her product teams: smaller teams, cross-functional flexibility, designers doing front-end coding
(7:55) Travel as a massive wedge: why winning in B2B travel is harder than it looks and how it opens the door to spend, events, and more
(13:26) The UX renaissance in B2B: why B2C expectations have permanently raised the bar for enterprise product
(17:31) Whether AI helps disruptors or actually empowers incumbents more
(19:21) How Perk is actively thinking about disrupting itself
(20:10) Discernment over taste: why the ability to judge which problems to solve and when is more important than ever
(22:44) Shadow work: the framework for identifying what can be automated so customers can focus on what matters
(24:31) Where the interface goes from here: MCP, voice, visual, and why it probably will not collapse to just one thing
(28:27) Advice for early-career PMs: what persists across every wave of technology change
Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: [link]
