Most PM content is the highlight reel. This episode is what gets said after the camera turns off.

Alyx Priestley is a Product Director who came up running her own creative agency before someone called her "the product person" and she had to go figure out what that meant. She now writes some of the sharper PM essays on Medium and is rebuilding her consultancy alongside an in-stealth sports brand in the golf space.

This is the conversation PMs have on their own, not on LinkedIn.

A few things this episode gets into: what Alyx actually says to PMs drowning in imposter syndrome, what to do when leadership doesn't respect the function they hired you to lead, and the bluntest one - what not doing the thing is costing you right now.

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He has a spreadsheet. 350+ contacts and still emails 30–40 of them every couple months.

It didn't land him a PM job. What it did was keep him in motion long enough to take the advice that actually worked: stop waiting for the title.

Kartikeya Shah is now Project Manager II at RozieAI, where he's been handed a product to manage about a year into a job he took instead of holding out for a full PM role.

We get into the two questions he asked at the end of every networking call, why he stopped only reaching out to PMs, and what to do when the books and frameworks don't fit your actual reality.

If you're trying to pivot into product right now, don't skip this one.

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Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn
Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn
Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

She'd been doing the job for nine years before she found out it had a name.

⁠Riëtte Verster ⁠spent the first chapter of her career as a "publisher" at Pearson in South Africa, running Scrum, leading a national reading program in 5 languages, doing all the work of product management without ever calling it that. Then she moved to Canada and discovered her job had a title.

Now she's a Senior PM at Liferaft, building AI into a threat-intelligence platform for analysts and investigators, a customer base that is, by training, deeply suspicious of black boxes.

Riëtte and Santi (her current Liferaft colleague) get into what actually changes when AI lands on your roadmap, why "shower ideas" are killing your simplification work, and the kind of customer who needs AI to not feel like AI.

Plus: the red flag every PM should watch for in themselves.

Support the show

Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn
Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn
Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/