Why GitHub threw away six months of work and won.

Why GitHub threw away six months of work and won.

Six months of work. Ninety percent of the code thrown away. Not because it failed, but because the technology moved faster than the roadmap. Chris Butler [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbu/], Director of Product Operations at GitHub [https://github.com/], made that call without hesitation and it set the tone for everything he shared on the Mind the Product stage at Pendomonium 2026. Most product teams are asking the wrong question right now. It is not how fast AI can ship code. It is what happens to the decisions, rituals, and human dynamics that sit around the code when everything else accelerates. That is the problem Chris has spent his career solving. In this episode, Trisha Price and Chris dig into how agents can participate in meetings without creating more noise, why brainstorming is one of the worst ways to generate good ideas, and what just-in-time decision making actually looks like inside a large organization. Here's what you'll discover: * Chris threw away six months of code when GitHub's agentic workflows made it obsolete. The hard call was not technical, but accepting that speed of learning matters more than sunk effort. * Brainstorming is groupthink in disguise. Chris makes the case for adversarial product management, red team thinking, and why productive disagreement is a skill most product teams have never been trained to use. * Agents in meetings are not there to take over. They are there to surface the viewpoint that is not in the room. Chris explains the interaction model that makes this useful rather than disruptive. * Just-in-time rituals do not eliminate planning cadences. They change who owns the signal that something needs to change and how fast a team can respond to it. * PM burnout is accelerating alongside AI adoption. The treadmill is speeding up, and the only way off is better discernment about what actually matters, which remains a deeply human skill. Episode Chapters * (00:00) Welcome and Introduction * (00:31) Recording Live at Pendomonium 2026 * (01:45) The Hard Call: Throwing Away Six Months of Code * (03:30) GitHub's Agentic Workflows and What Changed * (04:15) Adversarial Product Management and Red Team Thinking * (05:30) Why Brainstorming Is a Horrible Way to Generate Ideas * (07:00) AI as a Mirror: Rubber Ducking 2.0 * (08:00) Can Agents Participate in Product Reviews * (09:45) Pulling Qualitative and Quantitative Data Into the Room * (11:30) Generating Four Spec Variations and Four Prototypes at Once * (13:30) Just-in-Time Decisions and the Limits of Human Attention * (16:00) People Process Tools: What Product Ops Actually Owns * (17:30) Why Senior Leaders Avoid Hard Decisions to Survive * (19:30) The PM Burnout Problem Is Getting Worse Not Better * (21:30) Product Taste and Sense: The Human Edge That Remains Additional Resources Agentics Beyond Code [https://github.com/chrizbo/agentics-beyond-code]: Agentic GitHub workflows for PMs, ops, and compliance teams, no coding required. Things like launch readiness reports, compliance reviews, GTM drafts, and decision logs, all running on GitHub's agentic workflow system. Liminal Drive Analytics [https://github.com/chrizbo/liminal-drive-analytics]: A graph-based dashboard for Google Drive that shows which docs are rising, stale, or load-bearing across an organization. Room Clarity [https://roomclarity.com/]: A Zoom app that creates a live decision board during meetings. It surfaces candidate decisions, flags risks and assumptions, and pushes confirmed items to GitHub or Jira, all host-approved before anything is written. Love the episode? Follow or subscribe to Hard Calls and share this episode with any product leader rethinking how their team makes decisions, runs rituals, or works alongside agents. Every subscription helps more product leaders find the show. Presented by Pendo. Discover more insights at https://www.pendo.io. Connect with Trisha Price: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/ Connect with Chris Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbu/

AI didn't kill discovery. It made it more important.

AI has made it easier than ever to build fast. What it hasn't done is tell anyone what to build. Christian Idiodi [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cidiodi/], partner at Silicon Valley Product Group [https://www.svpg.com/] and one of the most respected voices in product leadership, came off the Pendomonium 2026 stage with a message that every product team needs to hear: the fastest way to accelerate your misery is to use AI to build the wrong things faster. Recording live at Pendomonium, Trisha Price and Christian dig into why discovery remains the weakest muscle in almost every product organization, why prototyping has replaced the PRD, and what it actually means to lead an empowered team when everyone can suddenly write code. In this episode, they tackle what separates great product leaders from people with great titles, and why the hard calls that matter most often happen in a boardroom, not a backlog. Here's what you'll discover: * * Discovery is more important now than ever, not less. As AI accelerates delivery, the only competitive advantage left is deciding what to build. Most teams are shorting the one thing that removes risk. * Prototyping is the new thinking. Christian no longer wants to see documents or roadmaps in meetings. Show him. Fifty iterations in a day is now possible, and teams that prototype fast discover what works faster too. * Empowered teams win, but only when they are built on competence first. Christian breaks down why trust is the foundation of empowerment and why leaders who stay in every decision are the ones blocking scale. * Your product is no longer the things you build. The best leaders build people, not features. Creating talent better than yourself is the only way to scale judgment across an organization. * Christian's hard call: he told a board chairman that the CEO was the problem. Not the strategy, not the roadmap. The leader. That conversation changed the company. Episode Chapters * (00:00) Welcome and Introduction * (00:31) Recording Live at Pendomonium 2026 * (01:15) AI Is a Tool Not a Strategy: Rescuing the Product Discipline * (03:00) Garbage In Garbage Out: Why Discovery Still Decides What to Build * (05:00) Prototyping Is the New Thinking: Show Me Not Tell Me * (07:30) Strategy and Outcomes Are the Only Things Worth Writing Down * (08:45) How Roles Are Blurring and Why That Is a Good Thing * (09:30) Top Line vs Bottom Line: Where AI Creates Real Value * (11:30) What Empowered Teams Actually Require to Work * (13:00) How to Explain Product Management to Any CEO * (15:00) Trisha on Transforming Product Culture at Pendo * (17:00) Hiring and Coaching as the Real Job of Product Leadership * (18:30) Product Reviews Are Practice Not Performance * (21:00) AI and the Return of Fun in Product * (22:30) The Hard Call: Telling the Board Their CEO Is the Problem Love the episode? Be sure to follow or subscribe to the Hard Calls podcast and share it with anyone navigating product transformation or working to build better product sense. Every subscription helps more product management leaders find Hard Calls.  Presented by Pendo. Discover more insights at https://www.pendo.io [https://www.pendo.io/] Connect with Trisha Price on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/] Connect with Christian Idiodi on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cidiodi/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cidiodi/]

Stop asking for buy-in and just ship it.

Most pivots fail not because the idea was wrong, but because the leader waited too long for everyone to agree. Steve Sewell, CEO of Builder.io, didn't wait. He told his team the decision was made, the conversation was over, and they were burning the boats. It worked and it resulted in two products now growing simultaneously. The inflection point for Builder.io was the same one every product company is navigating right now: when AI enters the picture, layering it onto an existing product rarely works. Sometimes you have to build something entirely new. In this episode, Trisha Price and Steve dig into what it looks like to completely invert the software development lifecycle, why the cost of code is trending toward zero, and how QA becomes the next bottleneck no one sees coming. Here's what you'll discover: * Steve made the call to pivot Builder.io without full alignment and stopped the conversation entirely. What he learned about leadership when consensus isn't possible. * Prototyping with the real codebase instead of throwaway tools means developers receive a "mockup" that's already working code. The handoff practically disappears. * The entire software development lifecycle is inverted. Code first, get feedback immediately, and iterate in hours instead of months. The bottleneck is no longer writing code. * When you spawn a hundred agents and ship fast, QA becomes the wall you hit. Steve's approach to autonomous QA bots that negotiate fixes with coding agents before a human ever reviews. * Perfect specs are a fantasy. Text is a low-fidelity medium for representing a user experience, and no amount of planning replaces putting something real in a customer's hands. Episode Chapters * (00:00) Welcome and Introduction * (00:31) Recording Live at Pendomonium * (01:05) The Hard Call: Pivoting Builder.io Without Alignment * (03:54) Burning the Boats: Leading Without Consensus * (05:35) The Strategy vs. Ground-Level Tension * (06:18) Empowering Designers and PMs to Build with Real Code * (08:54) Why Static Designs Still Fail at Handoff * (10:10) Inverting the Software Development Lifecycle * (13:00) Ship Fast, Get Feedback, Iterate Relentlessly * (13:41) When PRs and QA Become the Bottleneck * (17:00) Why Perfect Specs Don't Work….and Never Did * (18:55) Autonomous QA Bots and Agent-Human Collaboration * (21:05) Greenfield vs. Mature Products: QA Risk Is Different * (22:47) The Curmudgeon Agent: Testing for User Resistance Love the episode? Be sure to follow or subscribe to the Hard Calls podcast and share it with anyone navigating product transformation or working to build better product sense. Every subscription helps more product management leaders find Hard Calls. Presented by Pendo. Discover more insights at https://www.pendo.io. Connect with Trisha Price on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/.] Connect with Steve Sewell on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve8708/]

Planview's CPO on Making Intelligent Bets When You Can Barely See Six Months Ahead

Too many companies are treating AI like a checkbox. Board pressure, competitive anxiety, and a fear of being left behind are driving product teams to ship AI features before they've defined the problem they're solving. Louise Allen, Chief Product Officer at Planview, [https://www.planview.com/] has seen this movie before and it ends the same way Agile did when it became the goal instead of the means. Recorded live at Pendomonium 2026, Louise joined Trisha Price to talk about what it actually looks like to lead product through transformation: reorganizing around a platform model, making intelligent bets with incomplete information, and building AI into your product in a way that delivers measurable business outcomes. In this episode, they dig into how Planview built Anvi, its agentic AI product, why governance isn't a dirty word, and how a novel integration with Pendo guides is bridging the gap between conversational AI and traditional SaaS interfaces. Here's what you'll discover: * Louise's hard call was restructuring her org around a platform model, which meant hard conversations with people who built the products that got Planview here. Being right about the future doesn't make it easier. * AI is not the goal and treating it like one is exactly why most AI initiatives fail. Louise draws a direct parallel to how Agile became the destination instead of the vehicle. * Product management is a business role, not a requirements role. As the CPO title expands across the Fortune 500, Louise makes the case for why product has to lead transformation, not support it. * Three-year roadmaps are gone. The job now is making an intelligent bet, shipping it, and being ready to pivot. Louise explains how her team operates with confidence inside that uncertainty. * Trust in AI agents comes from transparency and audit trails, not just performance. Louise breaks down how Planview thinks about governance, and why getting that right is what separates real enterprise AI adoption from a failed rollout. Episode Chapters * (00:00) Welcome and Introduction * (00:31) Recording Live at Pendomonium * (01:45) The Hard Call: Reorganizing Around a Platform Model * (03:30) When People Become Bigger Than Their Products * (04:45) Making Faster Bets with Less Information * (05:55) Why Three-Year Roadmaps Are Gone * (06:45) Product Management as a Business Role * (08:45) AI Accelerates the Need for True Product Leadership * (09:30) AI Is Not the Goal: Lessons from the Agile Era * (11:00) How Planview Built Envy and Got a Head Start * (13:00) The Hybrid World: Agents and Traditional Interfaces * (14:30) Managing Agents, Governance, and Who Gets to Push the Button * (16:00) Building Trust in AI Through Transparency and Audit Trails * (16:45) How Pendo Guides Bridge Envy and the SaaS Interface * (19:30) Paying It Forward: Women in Product and Technology Love the episode? Follow or subscribe to Hard Calls and share this episode with any product or business leader navigating AI strategy, org transformation, or both. Every subscription helps more product leaders find the show. Presented by Pendo. Discover more insights at https://www.pendo.io. [https://www.pendo.io/] Connect with Trisha Price [https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/] on LinkedIn Connect with Louise Allen [https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-k-allen-5703861/] on LinkedIn

How a Designer Shipped a Year of Work in Two Months

A year-long project. Two months. A small team, a few back-end engineers, and a QA resource. Ed Case, Director of Product Design and UX at Vantaca, didn't set out to become an engineer. He set out to ship faster and figured out that the fastest path ran straight through the codebase. The shift happening in product teams right now isn't just that AI writes code. It's that the walls between design, product, and engineering are coming down - and the teams moving quickest are the ones who stopped caring which role owns what. In this episode, Trisha Price and Ed Case dig into what it actually looks like when a designer gets into the codebase, how that changes the relationship with engineering, and why velocity without the right feedback loop still gets you nowhere. Here's what you'll discover: * Ed's team had months of momentum behind a full application rewrite and had to kill it. What he learned about incremental value shaped everything that came after. * Moving designers into the actual codebase (not just prototyping tools) compressed a year-long project into two months and made engineering handoffs nearly disappear. * Fewer people, tighter communication, and shared ownership of outcomes removed the noise that slows most software teams down. * Shipping faster means shipping the wrong thing faster, too. Early access groups, feature flags, and real usage data keep the speed honest. * From learning version control to building a design OS, Ed's practical steps for any designer or PM ready to move beyond prototyping tools. Episode Chapters * (00:00) Welcome and Introduction * (01:34) Ed's Background: Fine Arts to Product Design * (02:04) The Hard Call: Killing a Full Application Rewrite * (05:09) What Incremental Value Actually Means * (05:36) How AI Is Compressing the Product Lifecycle * (06:32) From Figma Prototypes to the Real Codebase * (08:09) The Project: Rebuilding a Major Product in Two Months * (11:20) How This Changed the Relationship with Engineering * (13:10) Using AI for Analysis and Building Conviction * (14:19) Tools of the Trade: Cursor, Claude Code, and GPT * (16:49) UX Research in an AI-Accelerated World * (19:18) Why Production Is Where You Learn the Most * (22:00) Faster Velocity to Outcomes, Not Just to Ship * (22:29) Practical Advice: Getting Into the Codebase * (28:37) QA as a Critical Part of the AI Workflow Love the episode? Be sure to follow or subscribe to the Hard Calls podcast and share it with anyone navigating product transformation or working to build better product sense. Every subscription helps more product management leaders find Hard Calls. Presented by Pendo. Discover more insights at https://www.pendo.io [https://www.pendo.io/]. Connect with Trisha Price on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/]. Connect with Ed Case on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-case/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-case/]