In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, interviews Vanessa Lee, Vice President of Product at Shopify, the engine of global commerce powering over $1.1 trillion in sales. As the most senior product leader at Shopify reporting directly to the CEO, Vanessa oversees the product strategy for a platform with a $165B+ market cap and recent 30% year-over-year revenue growth. A two-time YC founder, Vanessa brings a builder’s mindset to leadership, emphasizing the need for technical fluency and courage as a service when making high-stakes decisions.

What you'll learn:

• AI-Native Playbook: How Shopify transitioned from traditional SaaS to agent-led commerce.
• Internal AI Evals: How to use LLM-based judges to grade and ensure product quality.
• Technical Product Leadership: Why staying involved in API details and technical cohesion is critical for senior roles.
• The Versioning Framework: The strategy Vanessa used to successfully push back and convince her CEO to version Shopify's API.

Key Takeaways:

• Beyond the PRD: Shifting focus from rigid specs to training AI models for non-deterministic outcomes.
• Courage as a Service: How to leverage deep domain expertise to find your screw it moment and drive organizational change.
• The Founder Mindset: Maintaining autonomy and an experimental spirit within a 10,000-person global organization.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Vanessa Lee

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, sits down with Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search. Google Search serves billions of users and holds over 90% of the global market share, acting as the engine behind Alphabet's $400 billion in annual revenue.

Robby is steering the most significant shift in Search history: the transition to AI. He oversees a massive portfolio, including the new AI Mode, which has already scaled to 75 million daily active users. Drawing from his time building Stories and Reels at Instagram, Robby breaks down how to build zero-to-one products inside a tech giant and why you need high conviction to push through early bad data.

What you’ll learn:

• Building Like a Startup: How to maintain crazy speed and focus on zero-to-one initiatives while protecting a massive core business.
• True Product-Market Fit: Why flat or J-curve retention in early cohorts is the only reliable indicator that a product is actually working.
• The Value of Colossal Disasters: The untold story of how early failures with Instagram Reels and Close Friends were necessary steps to global success.
• Agentic Search: How Google is moving beyond providing links to executing complex, multi-step tasks by deeply understanding personal context.

Key takeaways:

• Start Small to Win Big: Even at Google's scale, massive AI products begin with just 500 trusted testers and a focus on solving specific user complaints.
• Look for the Golf Shot: When building AI, look for that rare moment when the whole system works perfectly to build the conviction needed to keep iterating.
• Leaders Must Co-Create: To move fast in a large org, leaders shouldn't just approve from the top; they need to form working groups and operate in the details.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Robby Stein

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Chris Geoghegan, VP of Product at Zapier. As the company’s first-ever Product Manager, Chris has spent nearly a decade scaling Zapier into a $5 billion automation giant that serves over 3.4 million businesses and 69% of the Fortune 1000.

Zapier is not just building AI tools; they are powering their entire company with them. Chris reveals that his team currently runs over 800 active AI agents internally to manage everything from calendar prep to engineering triage. He breaks down the Code Red moment that shifted their strategy and how they are defining the future of Agentic Workflows.

What you’ll learn:

• Agentic vs. Deterministic: Why standard workflows follow a set path, while agents can reason, access knowledge, and change course to solve problems.
• The Orchestration Layer: How to hire and onboard AI agents using Context Engineering and Model Context Protocols (MCPs).
• Adoption vs. Transformation: Why adoption is just doing old tasks faster, while transformation unlocks business models that were previously impossible.
• Building a Moat: How Zapier uses its vast data on user intent to stay ahead of commodity LLM features.

Key takeaways:

• Treat Agents Like Employees: You can't just deploy an agent; you must onboard it with specific context and tools to be effective.
• Lead by Building: Transformation fails if leaders don't use the tools. Zapier’s execs do show-and-tell sessions to prove they are hands-on.
• AI Governance is Key: To move up-market to the enterprise, you must solve for Observability (who sent what data) and Access Control.

Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Chris Geoghegan

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here