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

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 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.

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Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/

A company fired its entire product team because nobody could explain what they did.

Three months later, they called every one of them back.

Steve Johnson has been coaching product teams for 30 years, started as a programmer, stumbled into sales, got pulled into product management by a VP who watched him train salespeople and said "that's not your job." And is the founder of Product Growth Leaders.

A few things he gets into:

Why "product engineer" might be the wrong answer to the AI question. What he thinks product management is actually about, and why he'd rename the role entirely. The specific bad habit that sinks more PMs than any skill gap.

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

Most PM careers don't go in a straight line. Christina Aragon's went through civil engineering, software, sales, and a seven-month job search before she landed her first associate PM role.

In this episode, Christina gets honest about what that non-linear path actually taught her, and why it might make her better at the job than someone who went straight in.

We dig into what the associate PM role really looks (they're rarer than you think), how her engineering and sales background helps her speak both languages, and why imposter syndrome doesn't care how experienced you are.

If you're pivoting into product or wondering whether your background counts, this one's for you.

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

We brought Heidi Ram back, and she came with receipts.

Heidi is the Practice Lead of The Product Recruiter and has spent 25 years placing product leaders across North America. She's seen every version of this market: the boom years, the layoffs, the slow rebuilds. And right now, she's watching a lot of talented product people make the same avoidable mistakes.

This episode picks up where Part 1 left off, and it gets specific fast. Heidi introduces a concept she's coined called candidate mode, and breaks down what it actually looks like when product people fail to enter it. She talks about the PM who's technically sharp but can't talk to a customer, the candidate who's been interviewing for months without ever doing real discovery on the roles they're pursuing, and the senior leader still hunting for a team to scale in a market that's gone flat.

Then she goes deep on resumes - and this part alone is worth the listen.

If you're job searching, sitting on a dusty resume, or just starting to feel the market shift beneath you, this one's worth a listen.

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

The best PMs don't wait for perfect conditions. They build anyway.

In Season 3's opener, Meagan and Santi get honest about the past year — gestational diabetes, a toddler, a day job, and somehow still shipping Prodfolio and recording a full podcast season before maternity leave.

This episode covers how they ran discovery, why they think low pressure ships more than urgency, and what building a side project actually does for your PM career.

But mostly it's proof that "not the right time" is never really the reason.

Welcome to Season 3.

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

Everyone’s hyping AI like it’s a magic trick.

Aaron Kesler sees it differently — it’s just really good at boring stuff.

Now VP of Product at RozieAI, Aaron’s focused on solving the unglamorous problems that make real business impact. But his path to product didn’t start in a boardroom.

In college, he built a startup that got acquired. Then he realized he hated coding but loved talking to customers, so he walked away from tech completely and started working at Starbucks.

That’s where he learned the skill every great PM needs: listening.

That same curiosity pulled him back into tech, through SnapLogic’s biggest launches, and into leading product at RozieAI, proving that the best PMs chase problems worth solving.

We cover:

→ Why AI should be boring (and why that’s a good thing)

→ The difference between having AI and creating real value

→ How PMs can use AI to bridge creative and technical gaps

→ Why you should claim a job title once you’re already doing the work

This one’s sharp, honest, and packed with lessons for anyone building in AI or trying to break into product.

Aaron’s Links:

🔗 LinkedIn

📖 Newsletter: “Become an AI Product Manager” on LinkedIn

Support the show

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