Podcasts about CPO

On this episode of Open Space Radio, we explore what it means to lead with empathy and why people-centered leadership can have a lasting impact on our teams and our communities as a whole. Joining us for the conversation is Shannon Harris, CPRE, CPO, executive director of the Carson Valley Swim Center and past president of the Nevada Recreation& Parks Society. Throughout her career, Shannon has built a reputation as a thoughtful, compassionate leader. Someone who shows up, listens, builds trust, and creates opportunities for others to grow and thrive. After spending some time with her at the Nevada Recreation & Parks Society Annual Conference, as well as this conversation, it's extremely clear that Shannon prioritizes her people, relationships and continuous growth. And, on this episode, she shares lessons learned from leading intergenerational teams, creating supportive workplace cultures and empowering others to discover their own leadership potential. So whether you're leading an organization, managing a team or just looking for ways to make a positive impact in your community, Shannon's insights are a powerful reminder that leadership starts with recognizing the humanity in others (and in ourselves). Tune in to the full episode to learn: Why showing up and being present are foundational leadership skills. How empathy and active listening help build trust and create healthier workplace cultures. Ways leaders can use policies and organizational culture to demonstrate care and support for staff. The importance of empowering employees at every level to see themselves as leaders, regardless of their title. How kindness, vulnerability and community partnerships can create spaces where people feel valued and supported. And much more! This season of Open Space Radio is sponsored by BCI Burke Play brings people together through connection, creativity and growth. At BCI Burke, they design outdoor recreation environments that inspire exploration and support the work of parks and recreation professionals — including the next generation of leaders shaping the future of play. Together, we're creating spaces where everyone feels welcome to move, play and belong. Learn more at bciburke.com

What separates a good product manager from a great one, and can you actually spot it in an interview? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Axiom Law CPO Katrina Benjamin, OpenTable SVP of Product Shayani Roy speaks on the three qualities she hires for above everything else, why the CPO role is fundamentally shifting from people management to doing, and what it means to build products for an industry as creative and relationship-driven as restaurants. With 60,000 restaurants and 1.9 billion diners annually, OpenTable's approach to AI, velocity, and innovation offers a masterclass in how to move fast without losing focus.

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Scott Castle, CPO at CloudZero, a company that delivers the financial control plane purpose-built for the way AI actually generates cost joins Enterprise Radio.… Read more The post A conversation with CloudZero, the AI ROI company appeared first on Top Entrepreneurs Podcast | Enterprise Podcast Network.

Last evening the Kerry branch of the IFA organised a meeting in Foilmore, near Cahersiveen to discuss issues arising out of the South Kerry Greenway. There have been a number of controversies including the issue of compensation paid to property owners whose lands were acquired by compulsory purchase order (CPO). Sari Houlihan attended the meeting and spoke to chief executive of Kerry County Council Fearghal Reidy and to solicitor Brian Harrington who represents many of the affected landowners. She also interviewed Morgan Lyne who farms near Kells Station and to Christy McDonnell who has a farm near Foilmore. This package is funded by the News Reporting Scheme.

Welcome to the second episode of Inside the Badger Den!This series is your backstage pass to Ad Badger, where we bridge the gap between powerful Amazon PPC software and high-level advertising strategy.In this episode, we don't just show you the tools; we show you the "why" behind them. We dive deep into our brand-new Custom Algorithm Feature to help you mix your own "algorithm cocktails" using smart If/Then/When rules. Plus, we're breaking down advanced negative filters for search terms, and how to utilize our new CPO (Clicks Per Order) metric to see how many clicks it typically takes to land an order across your campaigns and keywords. Also featured in our opening segment: BuyBox Checker! We are introducing their new multi-channel alerts (email, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS, Zapier, n8n, webhook). Plus, Ad Badger members get an exclusive 40% discount - check it out here.We'll see you Inside the Badger Den!

Commercial pool service can look like the fast lane to bigger revenue, until you realize how many forces you do not control. We walk through the real differences between residential pool care and commercial pool maintenance, starting with what “commercial” actually means: community-used pools like apartments, HOAs, hotels, the YMCA, and public facilities that live under health department oversight. That oversight changes your day, your paperwork, and your stress level in ways most new techs do not see coming. We get specific about the operational realities: inspections, daily logs, and shutdown triggers tied to chlorine and pH ranges, plus the unpredictable stuff like user behavior that can close a pool even when you did your job. We also talk about the people side of the business, because commercial accounts often add management companies, approval delays, and the challenge of pleasing 30 or 40 voices instead of one homeowner. If you have ever felt stuck waiting on authorization while a motor is down and the water is slipping, you will recognize this problem instantly. Then we dig into the money, the right way. Yes, commercial accounts can pay significantly more, but they usually demand three to five visits a week, higher insurance limits, and a “headache factor” you should price honestly. We also cover the risk of concentrating your income in a few large accounts and the cash-flow pain that can come with net-30 billing and slow payments. If you are deciding what kind of pool service route to build, this conversation will help you choose with open eyes. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a pool pro friend, and leave a quick review so more service techs can find the show.We break down why residential pool care often beats commercial pool care for working pool pros, even when commercial accounts look more lucrative. We compare regulation, workload, pricing, risk, and the day-to-day realities that make one route easier to live with and easier to keep stable.  • defining commercial pools vs residential backyard pools  • health department regulation, inspections, and required logs  • certification differences like CPO requirements for commercial work  • dealing with management companies, approvals, and multiple stakeholders  • heavy bather load and why commercial water turns faster  • shutdown triggers and chemistry ranges that can get you closed  • pricing a commercial account, including the “headache factor”  • higher insurance requirements and building costs into bids  • time demands, service frequency, and why mixing routes is hard  • concentration risk when you lose a high-dollar account  • payment delays, net-30 billing, and the hassle of collections  Join the Pool Guy Coaching Program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support. Learn more at swimming poollearning.com.  Send us Fan MailSupport the Pool Guy Podcast Show Sponsors! HASA https://bit.ly/HASAThe Bottom Feeder. Save $100 with Code: DVB100https://store.thebottomfeeder.com/Try Skimmer FREE for 30 days:https://getskimmer.com/poolguy Get UPA Liability Insurance $64 a month! https://forms.gle/F9YoTWNQ8WnvT4QBAPool Guy Coaching: https://bit.ly/40wFE6y

Send us Fan MailThis week on the Talking Pools Podcast, Wayne Ivusich and Steve Sherwood take listeners on a journey through some of the strangest, funniest, and most unforgettable experiences pool professionals encounter in the field. What begins as a discussion about a pool overrun with frogs quickly evolves into a collection of stories that highlight the reality of working around water every day. Wayne and Steve invite listeners to share the weirdest things they have ever discovered in skimmer baskets and pool systems, leading to stories involving snakes, squirrels, possums, underwear, rodents nesting beneath winter covers, and even a horse that found its way through a safety cover and into a swimming pool. The conversation is both humorous and educational, reminding listeners that no two days in the pool industry are ever the same. The episode then shifts to a more serious discussion about water clarity and swimmer safety. Wayne recounts a tragic real-world drowning incident in a cloudy public pool, emphasizing why clear water is not simply an aesthetic goal but a critical life-safety requirement. The hosts discuss why operators should never compromise visibility standards and why maintaining proper filtration and water chemistry remains one of the most important responsibilities in aquatic operations. Steve also addresses the growing trend of misleading social media pool "miracle fixes" and viral videos that promise instant water recovery through tablets or additives. The hosts explain why proper pool chemistry does not work that way and encourage listeners to be skeptical of products that appear too good to be true. In this week's insurance segment, Steve is joined by Pat from California Pool Association Insurance Services to continue their discussion about a unique consulting project involving pools at a doggy daycare facility. The conversation explores liability concerns, insurance requirements, hold-harmless agreements, commercial pool responsibilities, and the challenges of maintaining aquatic facilities that are operated by people whose primary focus is animal care rather than water management. The discussion provides valuable insight for service companies considering unusual or high-liability clients. The second half of the episode dives deep into robotic pool cleaners, filtration systems, and service efficiency. Steve explains why robotic cleaners have become essential tools for modern pool professionals, discusses the pros and cons of suction-side, pressure-side, corded, and cordless cleaners, and shares how automation can dramatically improve service quality while reducing labor hours. The hosts also discuss customer expectations, communication, and the importance of establishing clear responsibilities between pool professionals and facility operators. Finally, Wayne and Steve discuss professional education, the value of Certified Pool Operator (CPO) training, and opportunities for experienced professionals to become CPO instructors themselves. The conversation highlights how education improves safety, builds confidence, creates additional revenue opportunities, and helps elevate professionalism throughout the industry. Topics Covered Weirdest things ever found in skimmer baskets  Wildlife encounters in swimming pools  Pool safety and water clarity  Real-world drowning prevention lessons  Social media pool chemistry myths  Doggy daycare pool liability concerns  Insurance and hold-harmless agreements  Commercial pool management challenges  Robotic pool cleaners and automation  Sand filters vs. cartridge filters  Customer expectations and communication  CPO certification and instructor training  Building a stronger pool service business Connect With Talking Pools

There's a question sitting underneath a lot of leadership conversations right now, one that most people aren't saying out loud: am I actually adding value to what matters — or am I just busy? Felecia Pryor received a piece of feedback early in her career that stung: don't play in the garden when the house is on fire. More than any other conversation in the CPO series, this line has resonated and I think it might be the most important question any executive can ask of themselves right now. Not in a performance review. Not in a strategy session. Right now, today, looking honestly at where your time and thinking actually goes. This episode is my reflection on the Shaping the Future CPO series — six conversations with some of the most senior people leaders. I let the insights settle for several months before coming back to them. What rose to the surface wasn't about HR frameworks or people strategy in the traditional sense. It was about what it actually takes to be at the centre of strategic decisions rather than downstream of them. And it applies far beyond the CPO role. What's inside: Don't play in the garden — Felecia Pryor's confronting early-career feedback and the question every executive should be sitting with right now Step towards the tension — Why Amy Walker's deliberate practice of moving into discomfort is what earns you a place at the strategic table — and why so many senior leaders are conditioned to do the opposite The influence you can't see — What Amy Stanley and Shomaice Zowghi revealed about the influence that has no audience — and why it's often more powerful than anything visible on your CV Curiosity is not optional — Why Anu Villarosa designs for curiosity deliberately, what Damian Zahra's feedback work taught me, and what happens to leaders who stay too long in their own lane Are you in the house? — What being at the strategic table actually requires, and why getting invited to the meeting isn't the same thing If this lands, come and find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to know which of these insights hits closest to home. https://www.linkedin.com/company/brave-feminine-leadership   Book time to connect with Melissa - 15 mins: https://calendly.com/brave-feminine-leadership/curious-for-feedbackb WORK WITH MELISSA: The Executive Shift — 8-week intensive for senior women ready to lead at full power: https://bravefeminineleadership.com/the-executive-shift INFLUENCE Mastermind — 6-month peer advisory for sitting CEOs (max 6, invitation only): https://bravefeminineleadership.com/programs/ceo_mastermind 1:1 Executive Coaching — https://calendly.com/the-brave-group/executive-coaching   ----------------------- Craving inspiration? I send an email each Sunday about leadership reflection, top tips to build an intentional & sustainable life and other things that have captured my attention and are too good not to share! Sign up here: https://www.bravefeminineleadership.com/leadershipinspiration Loving the podcast? Leave us a short review. It takes less than 60 seconds & will inspire like-minded leaders to join the conversation! Access Your Free Clarity Tool Between the endless to-do lists, competing priorities, and decisions piling up, it's easy to lose sight of what matters most. But here's the truth: you can't give more if you're running on empty. That's why we created Balance Your Brave—a free 15-minute diagnostic tool to help you regain control and clarity. In just 15 minutes, you will: ✅ Pinpoint energy drains holding you back. ✅ Identify where to focus for the biggest impact. ✅ Walk away feeling calmer and more confident in your next steps. Think of it as your personal roadmap to balance and alignment. ⬇️ Click here to access your free Balance Your Brave diagnostic tool. https://www.bravefeminineleadership.com/Balance-Your-Brave   Are we friends? Connect with Us. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bravefeminineleadership Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brave-feminine-leadership

The role of the Chief People Officer has evolved far beyond traditional HR. In high-growth, private equity-backed businesses, today's CPO is a commercial leader responsible for driving growth, enabling strategy, shaping culture, and creating the conditions for long-term business success. In this episode of the People Agenda Podcast Chris Howard and Debbie Mitchell speak to Michelle Wall as she shares how modern people leadership is becoming a key driver of business value rather than a support function. The modern CPO is no longer focused solely on people processes. The role has become a strategic leadership position that drives growth, supports transformation, strengthens culture, and helps organisations create lasting business value. If you want to understand how people leadership is shaping the future of business, listen to this episode of the People Agenda Podcast.

Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

Send us Fan MailWelcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Ralph O'Brien and Dr. K Royal, while Paul Breitbarth is out, meet with Ryan Boos of TrustArc. What's on the mic? Simplification of privacy programs. Ryan comes to this with the experience to back up his knowledge - he has fought in the data trenches and flown through the danger zone! Okay... he has major chops. If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

In this episode, host Seth O'Brien, CP, FAAOP(D), is joined by Leigh Davis, MSPO, CPO, LPO, FAAOP(D), of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, and Beate Flügel of Heidelberg University Hospital for a conversation about international collaboration, scoliosis management, and advancements in orthotic care. Drawing on nearly a decade of partnership between the Academy and Germany's OTWorld, the guests compare educational pathways, clinical practices, and professional development opportunities in the United States and Germany. They discuss Germany's unique dual vocational training system for orthotists and prosthetists, as well as the similarities and differences between OTWorld and the Academy Annual Meeting. The conversation also explores current approaches to adolescent idiopathic scoliosis bracing, including the use of Rigo-style braces, the importance of physiotherapy, and strategies for improving patient adherence. Davis and Flügel discuss the role of nighttime versus full-time bracing, the growing use of objective wear-time monitoring to measure compliance, and efforts to standardize digital workflows and advance 3D-printed scoliosis brace technology. Together, they highlight how international collaboration can drive innovation and improve outcomes for patients around the world.   This episode is sponsored by Spinal Technology.   O&P Clinical Care Insiders is produced by Association Briefings.

Send us Fan MailIf a buyer offered you $600,000 but you'd pocket $500,000, would you still take it over $575,000 that nets you $520,000? That simple question exposes a trap many home sellers fall into: obsessing over sale price while ignoring net proceeds. I'm Deanna Allen hosts today: "I'm sharing the tool we rely on to help homeowners make smarter, calmer real estate decisions: a four-option net sheet comparison."We break down why two sellers can close at the same price and walk away with totally different results. Closing costs, mortgage payoff, repairs, buyer concessions, carrying costs, time on market, and even the risk of a deal falling apart can quietly erase “top dollar.” We also talk about a reality most people don't plan for: once inspections happen, many contracts hit turbulence, leading to re-trades, credits, or worse, a canceled deal right when your move is already in motion.Then we lay out four clear home selling options: for sale by owner, the traditional listing process, conventional Certified Pre-Owned (CPO), and Cash CPO. You'll hear how CPO flips the script by identifying issues up front through a pre-inspection, helping reduce surprises and improve certainty to closing. We also cover why Cash CPO can be a game changer for sellers who need flexibility, speed, or peace of mind, including relocations, inherited properties, and seniors transitioning to assisted living.If you're thinking about selling a house, don't start with “What's my home worth?” Start with “What are my options?” Subscribe for more practical real estate guidance, share this with a homeowner who's weighing a move, and leave a review with the question you want us to tackle next.

À 13 ans, Mathieu Nebra lance Le Site du Zéro depuis sa chambre — un site pour apprendre à coder « à partir de zéro », parce que les livres existants ne lui parlaient pas. 25 ans plus tard, ce site est devenu OpenClassrooms — une scale-up française qui a formé des millions d'apprenants et que Mathieu a portée jusqu'à 100M€ de CA. Aujourd'hui, il accompagne en coaching et en mentorship des fondateurs tech qui veulent franchir le même cap : passer de builder à CEO.Dans cet épisode, on prépare ensemble la première édition de son Mastermind — qui aura lieu les 23 et 24 septembre 2026 au Set Club d'Aix-en-Provence.Dans cet épisode, vous découvrirez :Le piège du « one more feature » : pourquoi les fondateurs tech continuent à ajouter des features pour résoudre un problème de croissance — et pourquoi ça ne marche jamaisLa bascule du builder au CEO : ce que Mathieu a mis 25 ans à comprendre — et pourquoi la posture compte autant que la stratégie ou la techniqueLe coaching vs le mentorship : pourquoi Mathieu a élargi son métier de mentor technique pour intégrer une dimension coaching — et pourquoi les blocages comportementaux sont souvent ce qui empêche la croissanceLa liste des compétences hors-tech : stratégie, finance, levée, systèmes, management, communication, go-to-market — Mathieu déroule la roue des compétences que les entrepreneurs tech sous-estiment systématiquementL'opposition run vs build : pourquoi 90% du temps d'un fondateur est mangé par le run — et comment libérer du temps pour le build qui crée le prochain palierL'IA comme sujet d'équipe, pas d'individu : pourquoi les fondateurs tech maîtrisent déjà l'IA mais buttent sur l'acculturation de leurs équipes — et comment Marjolaine Grondin viendra creuser ce sujet au mastermindLa prime au terrain : pourquoi Mathieu n'a jamais vu un fondateur qui passait la moitié de sa semaine au contact échouer — et pourquoi le « contact » est le boss à battre des entrepreneurs techCet épisode est pour vous si : vous êtes un fondateur tech (CTO, CPO, CEO tech), vous avez construit un produit qui marche mais vous sentez que la prochaine étape n'est plus une question de feature, et vous voulez incarner le CEO que votre boîte attend.LIENSRencontre Mastermind :https://www.squared.eu/mastermind/edition-limitee/mathieu-nebra-septembre-2026Liens de Mathieu :https://www.nebra.fr/https://startup-scaleup.nebra.fr/https://openclassrooms.com/Site Squared : https://www.squared.eu/Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In this episode, we sit down with Daniel Thulfaut, Head of Product at saas.group, one of Europe's most active SaaS acquirers. With 24 companies in the portfolio and more than €100M in ARR, Daniel has a unique perspective on how product organizations are evolving in the age of AI. We discuss why many product managers have spent the last decade acting as backlog managers rather than true product leaders, and why AI is now forcing a return to the fundamentals of product management: customer understanding, strategic thinking, prioritization, and decision-making. We also explore why "good enough" products are becoming easier than ever to build, why that raises the bar for SaaS companies, and what legacy SaaS businesses must do to stay competitive against a new generation of AI-native startups. Topics we cover include: • Why the traditional product manager role is changing rapidly • The difference between backlog management and real product leadership • Why AI makes customer discovery more important, not less • Why legacy SaaS companies struggle to realize the promised 10x AI productivity gains • The rise of the "product engineer" and what it means for teams • How feature flags, experimentation, and faster feedback loops change product development • Why shipping more features is not the same as creating more value • What CEOs and CPOs should do right now to prepare their product organizations for the future • Why understanding customer problems remains the most valuable skill in product management One of the most interesting takeaways from the conversation is that AI is not replacing product thinking. If anything, it's making it more valuable. When building becomes easier, deciding what to build becomes the real competitive advantage. If you're a founder, CEO, CPO, product leader, or anyone trying to navigate the future of SaaS, this episode is packed with practical insights and plenty of food for thought.

The structure of camp and the calming outdoor activities are just some of the lessons you can use in your daily life. We re-visit these lessons this week. Colleen Klimczak, CPO, discusses organizing home offices & small businesses, paper & time management, using home spaces in their best possible way, and creating time with family in this weekly podcast. Learn more at PeaceOfMindPO.com!

This episode explores the critical issue of bonus abuse in the iGaming industry, its impact on operators' revenue, and innovative solutions like AI-driven tools to combat organised fraud. Featuring Tetiana Dychenko, CPO of Casino at EveryMatrix, the discussion highlights how evolving tactics and technology are shaping the future of fraud prevention.Key TopicsThe scale of bonus abuse in 2026 and its impact on revenueThe evolution of bonus abuse tactics and organised groupsThe role of AI and behavioural analysis in detecting fraudRegulatory pressures and their influence on bonus abuseFuture trends and how operators can stay ahead of organised fraudRelevant Articles: https://igamingexpert.com/features/everymatrix-igaming-bonus-abuse/https://everymatrix.com/news/everymatrix-plays-mythbusters-on-igaming-bonus-abuse/ Host: Charlie HornerGuest: Tetiana DychenkoProducer: Anaya McDonaldEditor: Anaya McDonaldLearn how Optimove's Positionless Marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using Optimove's Positionless Marketing Platform to launch personalised CRM campaigns, dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips, and create engaging gamified experiences. Learn more at optimove.com.Finally, remember to check out Optimove at https://hubs.la/Q02gLC5L0 or go to Optimove.com/sbc to get your first month free when buying the industry's leading customer-loyalty service. 

Today I want to talk about the relationship between a CRO and a Chief Product Officer, especially when they share OKRs.The first thing I'll say is that I love shared OKRs. They create accountability, trust, communication, and teamship. They force revenue and product leaders to work through challenges together instead of operating in silos.The challenge comes when the CRO is measured on bookings and revenue while the CPO is measured on adoption and product usage. Both leaders are trying to achieve business growth, but they're often looking at different data and hearing different signals from the market.So how do you solve that tension?For me, it starts with communication. The CRO needs to understand how the CPO prefers to receive feedback and market intelligence. Product teams don't just need complaints—they need patterns, context, and evidence that help them make informed roadmap decisions.This is especially important in HR tech because buyer expectations change quickly. The reasons HR leaders bought software a few years ago may be completely different from the reasons they're buying today.That's why companies need a structured way to gather market feedback and translate it into actionable insights for product teams. When that happens, product leaders gain more trust in revenue feedback, revenue leaders gain more appreciation for product constraints, and both teams become more aligned.At the end of the day, most CRO-CPO conflict isn't about each other. It's about reacting to pressure and trying to hit goals.The best leaders remember that neither side is the enemy. The market is simply providing information, and both teams need to respond to it together.When product and revenue align around what the market is actually telling them, shared OKRs become a true competitive advantage.

AJ (Apparicio Junior), Head of Design do The Times de Londres, veio ao Product Guru's falar o que a maioria dos designers e PMs não quer ouvir. Processo não é produto. Protótipo bonito não é entrega. E a profissão que está na moda hoje pode ser a próxima a ouvir “por que vocês estão aqui se não colocam nada no ar?” Nesse episódio, AJ e Paulo Chiodi discutem por que grandes empresas como The Times usam IA de forma completamente diferente do que o Twitter descreve, como personas sintéticas com 97% de precisão estão mudando o research, por que design e produto vivem um ciclo de "corrida dos ratos", e quem de verdade vai conseguir popularizar a IA para o grande público.LinkedIn do AJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/appariciojunior/X (twitter) do AJ: https://x.com/appariciojuniorSe você ouve no Spotify ou Apple Podcasts, clica em seguir e deixa 5 estrelas. Se está no YouTube, se inscreve e comenta o que achou.

A lot of residential pool techs learn water chemistry the hard way: a few rules of thumb, a few opinions from the internet, and a lot of costly guessing when something won't clear up. We wanted to change that conversation, so we brought Terry Arko back on to share real news about a new training rollout that preserves Bob Lowry's legacy while making it easier for today's pool service pros to actually use.We dig into why Bob Lowry's Pool Chemistry Training Institute (PCTI) mattered so much for the backyard pool professional, especially in a world where CPO certification is aimed at commercial operations. Terry explains how HASA took on the responsibility of maintaining and expanding that residential pool care education, and how the growth of on-demand learning (including the influence of Orenda's education approach) helped shape the new direction. The goal is simple: practical pool chemistry training that's clear, relatable, and built for what you see on route.Then we get into the big update: HASA is filming 14 short training videos based on Bob's residential material, followed by a quiz and a certification. We also talk about the specific concepts that make this training worth your time, including cyanuric acid (CYA) and chlorine effectiveness, water balance and LSI for residential pools, the importance of free chlorine over combined chlorine, and how understanding buffering and source water can help you save chemicals while keeping pools more stable.If you want smarter, simpler pool chemistry that you can apply immediately, listen through and keep an eye out for the video series dropping on the HASA site. Subscribe, share this with a tech who needs it, and leave a review so more pool pros can find the training they've been missing.We share breaking news on a new HASA-hosted training series that brings Bob Lowry's residential pool chemistry teachings back in a modern format. We also talk through why practical, poolside chemistry education matters and how techs can access certification-style learning again.  • the training gap between residential pool service and commercial certification paths  • Bob Lowry's teaching style and why it resonates with backyard pool pros  • how HASA and Orenda help expand access to pool chemistry education  • why the condensed two-hour format works better for many techs  • what to expect from the 14 short videos, quiz, and certification  • the downside of overly theoretical instruction and the value of usable concepts  • key chemistry topics like CYA, free chlorine, combined chlorine, LSI, source water, and buffering  Join the pool guy coaching program. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. Email Terry Arko at terryarko@hasa.com. You can also learn more about the coaching program they offer at PoolGuyCoaching.com.Send us Fan MailSupport the Pool Guy Podcast Show Sponsors! HASA https://bit.ly/HASAThe Bottom Feeder. Save $100 with Code: DVB100https://store.thebottomfeeder.com/Try Skimmer FREE for 30 days:https://getskimmer.com/poolguy Get UPA Liability Insurance $64 a month! https://forms.gle/F9YoTWNQ8WnvT4QBAPool Guy Coaching: https://bit.ly/40wFE6y

O mercado de saúde movimenta bilhões de reais todos os anos, mas ainda convive com ineficiências financeiras, processos fragmentados e desafios de acesso a capital. Ao mesmo tempo, a digitalização do setor vem criando espaço para novas soluções capazes de conectar tecnologia, pagamentos, crédito e gestão financeira em uma única jornada.Para discutir esse cenário, recebemos Rafael Tinoco, CPO e cofundador da Arvo, startup que vem construindo uma infraestrutura financeira especializada para o ecossistema de saúde.Ao longo da conversa, falamos sobre os desafios financeiros enfrentados por profissionais e empresas do setor, as particularidades de construir soluções financeiras verticalizadas, o papel da tecnologia na redução de fricções operacionais e como a integração entre software e serviços financeiros pode gerar mais eficiência para um mercado historicamente complexo.Também exploramos a trajetória empreendedora de Rafael, a construção da Arvo, e as oportunidades que surgem quando infraestrutura financeira passa a ser desenhada para resolver dores específicas de uma indústria.Confira!

What if the biggest constraint on your product organization is no longer engineering capacity but the speed and quality of your decisions? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Jay Patel, Aliaswire CPO Nirmal Kumar speaks on how the CPO role has fundamentally shifted in the age of AI, what a disciplined layered bets framework actually looks like in practice, and why the future of payments is invisible, embedded, and intelligent. Drawing on nearly two decades at a Boston fintech he helped found, Nirmal brings a rare combination of engineering depth and product leadership to a conversation about building platforms that multiply, making calculated bets with real kill criteria, and transforming a team without leaving anyone behind.

Dave Martin has spent more than two decades in product leadership, with a string of C-suite roles, a couple of exits and a book, The Product Momentum Gap, to his name. He is also dyslexic and ADHD, and has built a career while masking the effort it takes to "think normal". In this episode he makes the case that the advice handed to neurotypical leaders often fails the roughly half of tech workers who are neurodivergent, and lays out a practical playbook for landing your message, leading the room and progressing without pretending to be someone else. Chapters00:00) Welcome, and Dave's background in product(02:03) "I've been masking it": faking thinking normal(02:37) The meeting where your idea is ignored, then credited to someone else(03:28) AI as a "spell check for influence"(04:07) The myth that growth requires pretending to be neurotypical(05:15) Why standard leadership advice fails neurodivergent leaders(06:45) Executive presence, signal presence and signal drift(07:57) Is this universal, or specific to neurodivergence?(09:48) From "dumb kid" to writing C++ at ten(11:27) When a word processor flipped his Fs to As(13:24) The trap: leading with detail(15:42) The boardroom moment that gets you labelled "not strategic"(17:05) Designing for re-tell: what the room repeats when you leave(18:19) Three mistakes that kill your influence(19:36) The CALM framework(21:32) Authority and the signal prep exercise(22:14) Three questions: outcome, one-line recommendation, re-tell(24:44) "Minutes not months": seeding the line that gets repeated(26:56) Learning: vulnerability and psychological safety(28:27) Momentum, well-being and burnout(31:21) Why burnout is a leadership fault(32:01) Mia's story: the head of product who wanted to be CPO(34:20) Recognising the trigger and practising signal prep(37:06) When stakeholders started calling her strategic(38:31) The opposite trap: abandoning detail entirely(39:22) Why some leaders step back into IC roles(41:16) Free training and AI as your spell checker for influence(42:26) Closing thoughtsKey takeaways— Authenticity is not the goal; deliberate communication is. Dave's central provocation is that "be your authentic self" assumes everyone in the room thinks the way you do. For a leader who sees patterns instantly and works in deep, hyperfocused bursts, behaving authentically can mean failing to explain the obvious and struggling to empathise with those who need the journey, not just the destination.— The symptoms are universal, the tax is not. Everybody's message gets lost in meetings. What separates neurodivergent leaders is the cognitive cost of noticing that drift and correcting it. As Randy and Dave agree, the tools discussed here help everyone, but the impact is far larger for those paying the higher tax.— Leading with detail is the career trap. The very trait that makes someone an exceptional individual contributor, the ability to go deep and surface every edge case, can sink them in the boardroom. — Answer a strategic question with edge cases and you are labelled "not executive" with alarming speed, and undoing that label takes months of work.— CALM is the alternative. Clarity, authority, learning and momentum, delivered calmly. Authority comes from being clear on the outcome and the ask, asking for support and guidance rather than permission, and not feeling obliged to justify every edge case.— Signal prep is the practical tool. Three questions: what do I need from this room; what is my one-line recommendation; and what will they repeat when I am not in the room. A bonus question for higher-stakes meetings asks what the room feels now and how you want them to feel when you leave.— Design for re-tell. Dave's example of a leader who reduced a lengthy objective to "minutes not months for our customers", and repeated it, is the clearest illustration. That phrase, not someone else's reframe, is what got repeated in the room afterwards.— Well-being underpins momentum. Dave nearly named the framework around well-being. Without a sustainable pace, leaders cannot lead, and the unprocessed meeting that keeps you awake at 3am is a momentum problem. He frames widespread tech burnout as a leadership failure, because leaders set the expectation.— AI is a spell checker for influence. Just as a word processor turned Dave's Fs into As without changing his brain, AI tooling can help neurodivergent leaders translate their thinking into the right language for the room, supporting the communication without doing the thinking or the judgement for them.Our HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

Send us Fan MailWelcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Ralph O'Brien and Dr. K Royal, while Paul Breitbarth is out, discuss some reent events, namely graduation speakers, boos, and AI. If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

There is a lot to say about joining a startup, and I'm saying that as somebody who has been a part of four of them. Nothing prepares you for the first time, because you truly have no idea what you're walking into! Not even the offer letter or the job description paints the full picture, so Christine Song, founder of the 5 to 9 Society and former CPO at Knix, is here to give you her expertise. We're talking about walking into a company with no HR infrastructure, a CEO whose behavior made her want to run back to corporate, working 100 hours a week until her hair (literally) started falling out, and somehow still coming out the other side with more love for startups than ever.  00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:01 - Something Christine Believed About Work That She Had to Unlearn 00:08:26 - What Stepping Into a Startup Role Felt like Vs The Expectation of It 00:21:01 - The Important Role of HR in Startups 00:35:18 - Picking Up on Signs of Burnout 00:40:40 - Startup Culture and Its Demands 00:49:10 - Creating a Life and Identity Outside of Work 00:55:11 - Christine's Advice For Someone New to The Startup World --- The Predictive Index behavioral assessment reveals how people work, think, and thrive—so teams can understand each other better and perform at their best. Because when you truly understand your people, work just works. Learn more: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠trypi.com/ihateithere⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- If you love I Hate It Here, sign up to Hebba's newsletter! It's for jaded, overworked, and emotionally burnt-out HR/People Operations professionals needing a little inspiration. ⁠⁠https://workweek.com/discover-newsletters/i-hate-it-here-newsletter/⁠⁠ And if you love the podcast, be sure to check out⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@ihateit-here⁠⁠ for even more exclusive insider content! --- Follow Christine LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/songchristine1/ Follow Hebba YouTube:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@ihateit-here/videos⁠⁠ LinkedIn:⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/hebba-youssef⁠⁠ Twitter:⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/hebbamyoussef⁠⁠

The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent frameworks like LangGraph and Pydantic and Flue, and managed agents from Anthropic and Gemini and Amazon. There has been a wave of companies building their own background agents from Shopify to Stripe to Paradigm to Razorpay, and even Cognition's friends Ramp have built their own coding agent with other friend Modal.You'd think Cognition might feel a bit threatened, but they're not - even after all this, they were way oversubscribed for the $1B Series D they just announced:Walden Yan, coiner of context engineering and Chief Product Officer/Cofounder of Cognition, invited OpenInspect's Cole Murray to talk about why the Devin is in the Details.Full conversation live on the pod today: In retrospect, async agents were the most AGI pilled bet you could make in 2024 - the models weren't good enough yet to vibecode, and people didn't trust AI enough to let it rip, nobody (including early Cognition) was sure about the form factors. Now it is obvious:* The first wave of AI coding tools made the developer faster but remain heavily in the loop. Copilor and Cursor's tab autocomplete are prime examples However, the workflow was still heavily centered around and bottlenecked by the developer's local workflow: a developer in an IDE, watching the model, accepting or rejecting changes, and pushing code one interaction at a time.* The second wave was local agents: Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor's agents pane: first one and increasingly many terminals all running concurrently.* The current Age of Async Agents points to a different future focused more on agent orchestration which drives end-to-end development.According to previous guest Steve Yegge, there are finer-grained 8 levels to agent adoption, but we have collapsed it into three.As Cursor's Michael Truell put it in The third era of AI software development:Cursor is no longer primarily about writing code. It is about helping developers build the factory that creates their software. This factory is made up of fleets of agents that they interact with as teammates: providing initial direction, equipping them with the tools to work independently, and reviewing their work.The agent should not sit solely inside the developer's flow. It should be setup to work in the background so that you can give it a task, a repo, a machine, a shell, a browser, tests, memory, and review loops to go do the work somewhere else.In less than a year, the sentiment has shifted from avoiding multi-agent systems:to suggesting approaches that actually work:From coining “context engineering” to building the infrastructure behind Devin's 7x PR growth and jump from 16% to 80% of commits across Cognition repos, Walden Yan has had a front-row seat to the background-agent shift. In this episode, Cognition co-founder and CPO Walden Yan joins swyx alongside Cole Murray, creator of OpenInspect, to unpack why everyone is building their own Devin, what changed after the December 2025 model inflection, and why “spec to pull request” is now becoming a real production workflow.We go deep on the architecture of background agents: harness-in-the-box vs out-of-the-box, why Devin separates the “brain” from the machine, why repo setup is still one of the hardest problems, why Docker is not always enough, and how full VMs, snapshots, scoped secrets, GitHub bots, Slack integrations, and video-based testing all fit together. Walden and Cole also dig into memory, MCP limitations, multi-agent orchestration, AI code review, SRE auto-triage, PMs shipping code from Slack, Windsurf 2.0, hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems, and the real failure mode of uncontrolled vibe coding: your codebase regressing to your worst engineer.And as agents eat software… and software eats the world… you can draw the conclusion on what is next:We discuss:* Why the engineering world is waking up to background agents and cloud agents* The December 2025 model inflection that made spec-to-PR workflows practical* Devin's 7x merged PR growth and rise from 16% to 80% of commits* Why Cole built OpenInspect as an open-source background-agent system* The economics of $20/seat agent products and why monetization is tricky* What Cognition actually sells beyond Devin: infra, onboarding, integrations, and adoption* Harness in the box vs out of the box, and why architecture matters* Why Devin separates the brain from the machine for security and permissions* Repo setup, scoped secrets, Docker Compose, and agent-ready dev environments* Why full VMs matter when agents need to run real applications and test them* Android, macOS, Windows, nested virtualization, and machine-specific agent work* Why testing is much harder than “computer use”* Screenshots, video verification, and the “I know it works” merge moment* GitHub UX, Devin Review, AI reviewers, and agents responding to PR comments* Why MCP alone is not enough for first-class Slack and enterprise integrations* Memory, Knowledge, skills, Claude.md, and why retrieval is still unsolved* Devin's auto-generated memories and the challenge of memory pruning* Always-on agents as permanent PMs for issues, tickets, and product areas* Sub-agents, meta-Devin management, and what multi-agent systems actually add* Why pure auto-merge vibe coding breaks down after about two weeks* AI code smells, lint rules, reward hacking, and Semgrep for agent-written code* GitAI, inline context, and preserving the “why” behind code changes* Local testing, mock servers, older codebases, and preparing companies for agents* Windsurf 2.0 and the handoff between local foreground agents and cloud background agents* SRE auto-triage, support workflows, and agents as first responders* PMs, marketing, and non-engineers creating pull requests from Slack* AI agent budgets, $1k-$5k per engineer spend, and hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems* The rise of autonomous coding factories and who Cognition is hiringWalden Yan* X: https://x.com/walden_yan* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waldenyan/Cole Murray* X: https://x.com/_colemurray* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colemurray/* OpenInspect / Background Agents: https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agentsTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:43 Why Everyone Is Building Their Own Devin00:01:57 Devin's 2025 Ramp: 7x PR Growth and 80% of Commits00:03:49 OpenInspect and the Rise of Open-Source Background Agents00:07:59 What Cognition Actually Sells Beyond Devin00:09:56 Background Agent Architecture: Harness In vs Out of the Box00:12:08 Separating the Brain from the Machine00:14:07 Repo Setup, Secrets, Docker, and Full VMs00:19:13 Why Testing Is Harder Than Computer Use00:22:40 Video Verification and the “I Know It Works” Merge Moment00:23:19 GitHub UX, Devin Review, and AI Code Review00:25:42 MCP, Slack, and Enterprise Agent Integrations00:28:59 Memory, Knowledge, and Always-On Agents00:36:16 Sub-Agents, Multi-Agent Orchestration, and Meta-Devin00:43:55 Vibe Coding, Auto-Merge, and Codebase Decay00:48:38 Agent Infra, VPCs, Cloud Providers, and Fast VM Restore00:52:25 AI Code Smells, Reward Hacking, and Code Review Systems00:56:10 Making Codebases Agent-Ready00:58:30 Windsurf 2.0 and the Local-to-Cloud Agent Handoff01:01:15 SRE Auto-Triage, PMs Shipping Code, and Agent Use Cases01:04:32 Agent Budgets, Hybrid Models, and Autonomous Coding Factories01:06:51 Hiring at Cognition and OpenInspect Consulting01:07:45 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Walden Yan, Cole Murray, and Context EngineeringSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're in the studio with Walden Yan, co-founder of Cognition, CPO.Walden [00:00:08]: Happy to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Which is a cool title. And coiner of context engineering.Walden [00:00:15]: Although I think there are many people who'd used the terms in various ways beforehand, but I did find that people, both internally and externally, enjoyed the upgrade from prompt engineering or model wrapping into maybe a more thoughtful way to build agents.Swyx [00:00:33]: For those who haven't caught up on that, I have on screen the Don't Build Multi-Agents post, which you should go read on and we might refer to, and Cole Murray, who created OpenInspect.Cole [00:00:43]: Great to be here.Swyx [00:00:43]: So let's talk about it. Everyone is building their own Devins. What's going on?The December Shift: From Handholding Models to Autonomous PRsCole [00:00:51]: So I think the engineering world is waking up to this idea of background agents, cloud agents, whatever you'd like to call it. And I think we saw a shift around the December timeframe of 2025, where the models Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, they reached a capability where we moved away from handholding the model and being able to actually more or less autonomously drive the model. And what I mean by that is that we could pretty much go from a specification to a completed pull request, assuming the spec was good enough, with very little friction. And that paradigm alone, I think, changed a lot of how we interact with agents, and opened this world where background agents became more practical.Swyx [00:01:41]: I think for Cole, everyone experienced this in December, but I feel like there was just this increasing ramp, right? There was this moment which was, I think, Sonnet 3.7, where, You guys rewrote Devin in one night or something. So describe 2025 or how it felt from your side.Walden [00:02:01]: In retrospect, we always thought it was ramping up, but then even now, over the last three, four months from today, it's been ramping up even faster. So it's almost funny to be talking about how, big of a leap Sonnet 3.7 was, and honestly, a lot of it was stripping out parts of Devin that were no longer needed with that jump in of intelligence. But I also just think that a lot of the recent leaps, especially, you look at, models like Opus and the latest GPT models, they are reaching levels of autonomy where people are actually finding that they actually can just be hands-off. And people who were once debating, “Oh, do I need to be in the weeds with my model in the IDE? Can I just completely move it off into the cloud?” That's a more serious conversation, and we've seen that in all of our growth charts. Internally there's this funny graph where our usage has, of PRs, our merged PRs, has grown 7X since I forget what it was called.Swyx [00:02:57]: I think Dev, maybe tweeted that. Yes.Walden [00:03:01]: it grew like 7X over, the last, I think it was, two months, three months, something like that. And then you see our engineering headcount growth. It's, gone up by, 10% or something.Swyx [00:03:11]: We were, we were afraid To release this. So this is Devin commit percentages on all Devin repos, was 16% in January and now 80% in March.Walden [00:03:25]: It's a big shift right now. And so it makes sense that a lot of people are now thinking about, buying Devin, but also maybe, trying to build their own and there's Lots of I have a lot of fun building Devin, so I can see why other people would want to build their own cloud agents as well. Matt, well, maybe it's good to hear, what initially inspired you to try to build OpenInspect?OpenInspect: Ramp, Cloud Agents, and Open SourceCole [00:03:49]: OpenInspect came about, through primarily my clients observing how they were using tools like Claude, OpenAI's Codex at the time, and seeing some of the friction that they were having with it. Primarily the Claude was being used through Slack, and a big issue they ran into was that the sessions that were launched were specific to whoever called it via Slack. And so if a PM was the one who invoked the session and they would then go to pass context to engineering can't see the session. And that in itself was a deal breaker because the PM, “Hey, engineering, can you jump in?” But there's nothing to jump in on unless they're copy-pasting out or the single response that came back. And so seeing some of these problems, I had built a similar architecture internally, just to experiment with, test out different ideas as this trend of moving off of localhost was starting to become, And as Ramp released their blog post, I had a lot of the pieces for this already in place, and just thought it would be funny to, see what Claude could do just purely from the blog post. And on my X account, there's actually a thread of where I live tweeted, going through thisCole [00:05:14]: comparing GPT and Claude as both of them are going through it.Swyx [00:05:17]: On the announcement thing or something else?Cole [00:05:19]: right after it got released. We can put it in the show notes. Yeah, it was helpful that I had already knew how to verify the system. I knew what I was looking for. I think Ramp did a great job of really illustrating, the technical aspects of how to build something. It was much more than just like, “Hey, we built a great system.” It was, “And here's how you can build it too.” And so, I resonated a lot with that, just with the problems that I was already seeing, and I thought that, looking around, I didn't really see anything in the open source community that, met this type of system. I think there's a lot that run, in localhost like Superset, Conductor, and many others.But nothing that was actually running in the cloud. And so, I built it, and I thought it was interesting to just open source it and allow anyone to then have a foundation that they can mix and match on top of.The Business of Background Agents: Open Source vs. DevinSwyx [00:06:16]: So literally after Devin was launched was, there was OpenDevin Which became All Hands. I don't know if you tried that orWalden [00:06:22]: I was going to say, one of the things that interested me a lot with OpenInspect was, you didn't try to go make it then something you monetize. There are a lot of, I think, these open source projects would then go and really try to, raise VSwyx [00:06:36]: That's why no OpenDevin. Yeah.Walden [00:06:38]: yeah, and how did you think about that? I thought that was very interesting.Cole [00:06:44]: I thought, and just what I had seen across my clients, was that having a background agent system is going to become a critical infrastructure within their company. And so because of that, I think that I wanted to open source it so that they could fork it and put in whatever customization they wanted. To that question though, I get asked all, “Oh, are you going to raise? Are you going to turn this into a service?”Walden [00:07:08]: I'm sure you've gotten offers.Cole [00:07:09]: but primarily I don't want to do that for a few reasons. One, I think that I don't want to compete for, $20 a seat. I think that is just a really difficult business. I think it's very easy to copy the main pieces of it. Again, I built this fairly quickly. And I think because you are not owning, I guess, the entire stack, it's hard to monetize. You have money being made at the sandbox layer with Daytona, E2b, many other players. You have money being made at the model layer. And you sit in this weird in-between gray area where what are you actually selling? You're selling, I guess, the infrastructure. You're selling, the integrations maybe.Swyx [00:07:55]: let's ask the guy. What are you What are you selling?Walden [00:07:59]: Well, yeah, there's multiple layers to this in practice, and actually it's funny you mentioned the infrastructure, ‘cause when we got started building Devin as well, we had to go figure out how to make the infrastructure as well because,Swyx [00:08:10]: You had to build this two years before everyone else,?Swyx [00:08:15]: Including, the model sideWalden [00:08:17]: It was not, it was not very polished at the start, when we just built it off of raw VMs from cloud providers like EC2, the boot up time was so slow, I think, And especially then, turning off the machines, saving them, and then to be able to bring them back up again when the, when you want Devin to wake up again later. It would just be out cold for like 10 minutes because that's just how long these systems took. They were not built for this repeated down and up usage. And so we actually had to go do all of that. And as a result now, one thing we offer when we go and sell Devin to people is, you don't have to worry about all the compute side of things. We'll make it work. We'll make it work in your cloud if you want it to. But aside from the product, and I want to go into the agents and the tuning of the intelligence part later, but I think a big part of what we do at Cognition as well is to just make sure that your company learns and uses and adopts these coding agents. ‘Cause I think for especially the largest enterprises in the world, you find that there is a lot of people who want to move over to using AI for their day-to-day workloads. But because of the way projects are planned, because, not everyone is literate in using AI in these ways, having a team of engineers who can actually go in and onboard you, set up all the integrations you need, the automations you need to really get to that level of, leverage with AI, is super helpful. And so We do that. We show thought partners to the customers that we work with as well.Swyx [00:09:56]: So let's talk about, architectural stuff. I think that's always, that is something that was the topic of conversation between the two of you. Is this, the mental model that you want to start with or something else? I'll just leave the floor open to you guys.Agent Architecture: Harness in the Box vs. Out of the BoxCole [00:10:11]: I think, maybe we can start here as just a general what are the pieces of a background agent system. And then maybe we can go into some of the nuances of, Decisions that you can make.Swyx [00:10:22]: But I guess I also Like, what, maybe what Walden is saying is the agent is like in this open code box, I guess. Right? This is infra, and then there's, that's the agent. And you had this discussion about whether you put the agent in here or in Out externally. Can you tease that out?Cole [00:10:39]: In a background agent systems, you have a decision to make of where the agent is actually going to run. This is typically described as the harness in the box or out of the box. With running the agent in the box, you're making some trade-offs by doing that. The negative trade-off you're making is primarily security. Because the agent is running in that box, unless you otherwise design it, all of your secrets need to go into that box as well. And given the nature of AI, it can be unpredictable, and you could very easily end up accidentally exfilling your secrets, or other unintended behavior. Now, the out of the box is the idea that we are going to have the actual agent running not directly in the sandbox, and we will have, quote-unquote, the brain of the agent running in some type of worker, control plane. That sandbox then is going to serve as the hands where the brain is basically operating and making tool calls into that environment to manipulate it. I guess other trade-off that you're making between the two systems is that, in my opinion, running it out of the box is much more complex because, you have state that has to be managed, whereas if you're running it in the box, all of the state of that agent is actually in the box, and yes, it's you could persist it elsewhere, but it's all localized and you have less concerns to worry about.Walden [00:12:08]: I think a lot of that, what you mentioned, is why we actually from the start built Devin to what we called separate the brain from the machine. The other thing that this allows you to do is reuse any existing infrastructure you have for dev boxes Perhaps. And so you don't have to worry as much about making a new type of dev box that has all the dependencies the brain needs, as you mentioned, the secrets the brain needs as well. One thing that we've seen some customers run into is, you have a GitHub app and you want Devin, your agent, whatever, be able to interact with GitHub through this application, but then you have different users with different actual permissions. If they are all interacting through the same GitHub app and there's no actual, separation between the system that decides, what it does and the actual secrets on the machine, then you run into an issue where, okay, it's hard to do the separation. But in practice, with Devin, it's much easier because we just say whatever you put on the machine, that is, the scope of basically what the user is free to do, what the agent is free to do. So only put the most scoped secrets on that machine, and then the brain is fully not accessible from the machine. So you don't have to worry about messing with the, any of the most secure parts of the brain if the user is free to do whatever they want with the machine.Swyx [00:13:31]: I was going to just bring, I have this, chart from OpenAI, where I don't know if this is, in the box, out of the box. That is something that they do use to describe it. And then also recently Anthropic did, managed agentsSwyx [00:13:44]: Which is, this is their thing. I don't know. It's all, it's all variations of the same pattern, right?Cole [00:13:49]: So this would be out of the box.Swyx [00:13:51]: Which, is preferable for them because it's less work?Cole [00:13:56]: I would say it's more work.Swyx [00:13:58]: It's more work?Cole [00:13:58]: But it, in my opinion, it is the better architecture of the two. It's just, you're taking on a bit of complexity by doing that.Repo Setup, Docker, and VM-Based Development EnvironmentsWalden [00:14:07]: One thing I've not seen a lot of other players do well is how do you manage what's actually on the box? And this can be complex for many reasons. Let's say you have a big repository that's changing and updating a lot with changing dependencies. How do you make sure that the working environment of the agent actually stays up to date, has all the credentials it needs to, let's say, run the app and test it, and all the things you want your autonomousSwyx [00:14:34]: So a repo setup.Walden [00:14:35]: Exactly. So in, internally At Cognition, we call this repo setup.Cole [00:14:39]: The hardest part ofWalden [00:14:40]: It's been a perennial problem since the start of the company, of how do we help people get this set up? Because not everyone just has, working cloud environments working out of the box. And do you find this to be a common problem withSwyx [00:14:53]: How do you solve it?Walden [00:14:53]: Your clients?Cole [00:14:54]: This is a very common problem, and through my consulting, this is a lot of what I help teams do. A lot of teams don't really have great developer environment setups, if any. A lot of the times it's, “Go talk to Bob and get the secrets,” and that obviously doesn't work when the agent needs to actually set this up. And so a lot of that, most teams are using Docker Compose or some type of microservices. And so for theSwyx [00:15:19]: Even in prod?Cole [00:15:20]: Not in prod. With the OpenInspect, you are using this primarily to interact, and make code changes. There is other use cases, but you can hook, whether through CLI, MCPs, other tools, you can then hook that into your production systems primarily for, SRE type use cases. But you are not, necessarily, trying to test your prod internal microservice through the system.Walden [00:15:48]: And you mentioned Docker Compose. I think one direction we saw some of our friends take early on was, using Docker containers as the level of abstraction for their models. There's lots of reasons, I think, why Docker containers are not great. One thing is, Docker container's not really a true security boundary, for one. But the other is, if you are running real applications, a lot of times those applications use Docker, and then you have to think about Docker in Docker, which is, really weird. And so I think part of, the really hard challenge of getting VMs to work, why did we do that? Well, it was because we realized that you actually needed, full VMs to be able to do these types of things. And especially nowadays where there's actually value in running the application and clicking around and sending you screen recordings of these things. The value just, keeps adding on top of that. But it is a decision I see people run into when they try to build their own systems, is, “Oh, do we, in addition to this, do we put the agent in the machine or out of the machine? Do we use Docker? Do we use something else?” What do you recommend people nowadays?Cole [00:16:57]: I think Docker is a good solution for maybe not running the agent, but running your infrastructure, because that is more or less the same setup your engineers are probably already using. If they're not, then I don't know what they're using. But they're probably already using Docker Compose.Swyx [00:17:14]: I've always had a small candle for web containers. I don't know if you guys have tried them before.Swyx [00:17:19]: To me, they were, supposed to be like Docker Light.Cole [00:17:22]: Is it?Swyx [00:17:22]: I don't know.Cole [00:17:22]: No, I haven't tried it. But yeah, I think any environment that you've set up that is a good experience for your developer naturally lends itself to being easy to set up for the agent. And once you figure out that local developer story, you've more or less solved the agent in a sandbox, environment setup. OpenInspect does have hooks as well, where you can, run a setup SH script that will pre-install everything. You can then pre-snapshot that build so it starts instantly, and then there is a second hook to actually then, restore the state of the sandbox when it comes back. And so you can already have all of those microservices running and basically get the same experience that you would on your machine within the sandbox.Testing Agents: Computer Use, Screenshots, and Real App WorkflowsWalden [00:18:08]: Another thing that we've been thinking a lot about is like Different VM service offerings. Have you had customers where they needed like macOS specific VMs or like Windows specificWalden [00:18:20]: VMs?Walden [00:18:22]: There are like many technologies in the world that only work on specific types of machines, right? If you're building a.NET application that has to run on Windows or like, maybe more commonly if you want to build iOS or macOS Does that workSwyx [00:18:32]: Does Commission supportSwyx [00:18:33]: Choices like that?Walden [00:18:35]: The fundamental architecture we do, because we do the separation, it does support, but the actual work in progress is happening right now on these. Another thing that we've actually recently added support now for, it's in beta, is doing Android development. To do that, we needed to support, I think, nested virtualization within our machines because the VM itself is like a, is a virtualized Firecracker instance, and then you had to then run another Android emulator inside. And there's like weird performance issues that like, it, which is why it's like still in beta. We have to think through these problems, but it unlocks a lot for anyone who wants to do Android development.Swyx [00:19:13]: I was trying to find like a reference video for the testing thing. I couldn't find it, but I think you worked on the testing, capability. Why call it testing and not like computer use or I don't know, it's, what's the general Category of problem?Walden [00:19:26]: I think that when people think about the ability of an AI to run your app and test it, I think they actually over-index on the computer use part of it because computer use in my mind is the literal, okay, you want what button you want to click. Can you emit the right coordinates to go click that button? I think testing is actually a really interesting likeWalden [00:19:48]: Problem-solving, challenge for these AIs because if you wanted to do arbitrary testing, imagine you make a change that spans the frontend and the backend, maybe, even some other like even more deeply nested service. To actually test that change, we have to reason through what-- how do you first run these applications to orchestrate with each other with the right version of the code? Then, okay, how do I trigger the feature or how do I make the thing actually happen? And this can get arbitrarily hard, maybe you have to be an admin. Maybe a certain thing has to be feature flagged on. Maybe, you have to like run two sessions and then send us a very specific word into one of them to trigger a specific behavior. And figuring out how do you do that requires a lot of code base context, requires, a lot of orchestration that we've specifically done. And in some cases, we found that you actually, no one frontier model can actually do this full end-to-end task itself.Walden [00:20:42]: We've seen cases where we actually had to orchestrate different frontier models together to solve this problem together. That is where we spend most of our time when we think about this testing problem, not so much the computer use part. Computer use for what it's worth has gotten a lot better with recent models and it's made that part of the job certainly easier.Swyx [00:20:58]: Especially with like even 4.7, that they released yesterday, apparently like way better in terms of the vision stuff, which is going to be encompassing computer use.Walden [00:21:08]: Having evals for all these as well is something that like takes a while to build up. And having the evals be right is tricky as well. Do you ever see like, clients who are building their own agents have to start standing up evals to make sure things don't regress?Swyx [00:21:25]: Not so much evals in the traditional sense, but specific to the testing part that has just gone in. I just added support for screenshots And in theory you can also do video. I need to put in a plugin to do that. But they do show up natively, and it was a very heavily requested feature, especially after Cursor's recording came out. I think that was very enlightening for everyone of like, “Oh, this is a very good feature to actually have.”, I think with Devin you guys have had this for a while.Swyx [00:21:57]: Oh, yeah. See how screenshots work. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything, super and not obvious. It's like once what feature to build, you can just prompt it and it Will mostly work.Walden [00:22:09]: I think to Walden's point, though, the computer use is a subset of the larger testing problem, and I think that's very specific to the code base that you're working and it's not something that, out of the box that you could just solve it. The-- you do need the code base context to actually know how to test it. And I think in the case of a background agent system, you fortunately do have that code base locally that what is changing and could then inspect it and use that to drive the model.Swyx [00:22:40]: For those who haven't seen it before, this is an example of how it works. You, after the PR is done, you click testing approved, and then it sends you back a video. What I really like is that it labels, It's very small here, but it actually labels what it's testing. And then it-- and then you actually see the cursor and everything. So I don't know, yeah, the engineering in this, just Whatever you want to show. ‘cause this is like, this is one of those like, oh, few of the AGI moments, right? ‘cause Once I look at this, I actually don't I wish I can just merge inside Of Slack instead of going to GitHub ‘cause I don't need to see the code. I know it works.Walden [00:23:19]: Maybe a new feature in Cursor. Yeah, the annotations at the bottom was also a big difference for me when I, when I added those.Swyx [00:23:27]: It's just like, what am I looking at? What are you trying to demonstrate?Walden [00:23:30]: Exactly. There's a surprisingly long tail of small details that ends up making a big difference for this end metric of like how fast do you actually merge the code in. One experience that we spent a lot of time tuning early on was what is the right experience on GitHub for these tools. Because I think, most tools out there when you build the agent, you'll think about, oh, it'll create the PR for you. We try to take that a step further and say, “Oh, what if we actually made sure you could interact Devin, with direct Devin directly on GitHub?” And so we made sure that you can comment on GitHub, and Devin would actually receive those comments and address them back. But there's actually quite a bit of tuning you have to do here because you can imagine that actually like-We recently have Devin Review, for example. Devin Review will post comments on his own PR And then Devin has to then goGitHub Workflows: Devin Review, Comments, and PR AutomationSwyx [00:24:23]: He answers his own comments, which is Really loopy. So like, yeah, I like that it just updates here that it's, that I have commented But usually it's just me saying like, “Hey, merged, fix any merge conflicts.”Walden [00:24:37]: The, so when Devin fixes his own comments, you might be scared that, oh, maybe I'll infinite loop. But we've put a lot of work into making sure it doesn't, both by making sure that the comments are high signal, but also that the agent is thoughtful about what comments it immediately goes and tries to fix, and what comments it's like, “Wait a second, I think you're wrong.” Actually, that's one of my favorite moments is when Devin tells me that I'm wrong, when I try to get it to do something different. But tuning that behavior, actually makes a big difference in terms of how useful the actual GitHub experience is.Cole [00:25:06]: I think to touch on that as well, I think having the AI reviewer integrated into the system is a critical part of this background system. OpenInspect does have that. It has a GitHub code reviewer that you can control the prompt. It does do comments as well. It doesn't do them automatically yet. The capability is there, but it's not fully used.Swyx [00:25:27]: So you have to ask for it?Cole [00:25:28]: you do, yeah. You can tag it on GitHub, and then whatever you named your, GitHub bot, it will then follow up on it. It will then, if you have merge conflicts or whatever you have asked it to resolve, it will then resolve it, but it doesn't do it automatically yet.Integrations: Slack, MCP, and First-Party Agent InterfacesWalden [00:25:42]: Well, I'm curious, what is, the most common thing that people end up requesting, that they still need on top of OpenInspect when you help them go implement it?Cole [00:25:52]: I think a lot of it comes down to actually integrating it into the company. It's one thing to have the background agent system set up, but if it isn't actually integrated into your larger ecosystem, it isn't that useful. It is useful to be able to kick off sessions, but what we really want to be able to do is hook it into all of our other systems, whether that is the production database with read-only credentials, the logs, a Confluence or internal knowledge-based system. I think that is where I see the huge leap for companies, and that can be a challenge for companies as well who are maybe not familiar with exactly how to approach it, especially if they're in environments that have more compliance type things where, access control can be pretty big and how do you deliberately think about these problems, I find to be, one of the problems that comes with a system like this.Walden [00:26:46]: The thing we found is So, MCPs, obviously it has been like this, really big explosion of, oh, you can go, integrate it with all these different things. But to actually get the integration right and the and get the right experience, oftentimes we found that we had to go build our own ad hoc things. I think Slack is a great example of this. You could give your agent a Slack MCP and okay, it can post messages back to you on Slack. But we actually use Devin like a coworker in Slack, and that's how it's been built from the ground up. But to do that, you actually need to, support webhooks that come back, right? And then Devin has to respond in a natural way and then hopefully don't spam your threads too much and annoy the people in your company. So you got to tune that experience just right. Especially when there's a lot of back and forths, we find that we actually have to go beyond the simple MCP integrations in these places.Swyx [00:27:39]: I just pulled up the MCP marketplace. I know this is a Fair amount of work. Is the answer to eventually take first party control of all the top MCPs? Is that theWalden [00:27:48]: I would love a world where you could have something that's more expressive than MCP. That, goes both ways, not just a set of tools, but a proper system that interacts back and lets it Have the right experience with all these interfaces.Swyx [00:28:03]: So there actually is sampling in the MCP spec, but nobody Uses it, right?Walden [00:28:07]: And so I think that's the other part is, actually we found that when the MCP spec starts to get too complicated, it starts to lose its original promise of Being like a simple one-step connect. Now then we have to go figure out how to support all these different variations of things and It starts to look a lot like just building the first party integrations in a lot of these cases now.Cole [00:28:29]: I think it matters, too, how critical it is to your company, right? If this is something that nearly every session is going through, it probably makes sense to own it so that you can make optimizations on top of it Versus just whatever is off the shelf.Swyx [00:28:43]: Awesome. Other than MCPs, what else, sorry, well, I don't know if that's Narrowing in too much on, integrations. But what else? What other elements of building OpenInspect or Devin that you guys really sink on?Memory and Knowledge: What Agents Should RememberCole [00:28:59]: I think, a problem that comes up very frequently is this idea of memories or knowledge base.Swyx [00:29:05]: Oh, boy. How do you solve it?Cole [00:29:08]: so not solved yet, is the short answer.Cole [00:29:11]: it's something, there's a open issue for it, someone asking about it.Swyx [00:29:16]: There's, I, D Wiki hasn't indexed anything about memory yet.Cole [00:29:20]: how I'm seeing it solved across my clients is primarily through skills. I find that skills can be a good gap within that or updating Claude MD, but I think memory as a whole is a pretty unsolved problem, and it is why I've been hesitant to add it. I think there is parts of memory and that can be addressed, but I think as a whole it's a very difficult retrieval problem.Swyx [00:29:44]: Oh my God. RAMP didn't write anything about memory? I see zero search results.Walden [00:29:50]: No. Memory can be quite tricky to get right because it's the retrieval, but also the generation of the memories that can be really tricky. You don't want it to just like Remember very specific details.Swyx [00:29:59]: Walk us through the Devin memory journey because I know there's been a journey.Walden [00:30:03]: the first version of memory that like stuck around for a while was A system we have called Knowledge. And the idea was we wanted it to pick up things over time and not need the user to be proactive about teaching Devin things. So, okay, any time you remind Devin, “Wait, no, that's not quite the way you're supposed to use Git”Like, we actually want Devin to say, “Hey, do you want me to actually just remember this for the future?” And for you to just basically quickly approve or reject and for it to build up over time. ‘Cause I find that, 95%, I think, or some crazy stat like that of the memories that Devin has are all through these auto-generated things. Very few people actually just want to sit down and write big docs on Here's how you're supposed to work with the technology, et cetera. The generation and the retrieval has been something that we've been trying to tune a lot over the years. Generation, you don't want it to remember something like, if you asked one time to like, “Oh, please open as a draft PR,” you don't want to be like, “Oh, everyone forever now should get their PRs as draft PRs.” But you do want some, conveyor. Maybe you want to say like, “Oh, Cole generally likes, things to be created as draft PRs.” Same with retrieval, if you have thousands of these memories, how do you actually make sure they're retrieved at the right time? And that can be quite tricky to do right without exploding the context with a bunch of useful yeah, useless information. Surprising amount of just, eval work to just make sure that, memory is, remains a reliable system as new models come and go.Cole [00:31:31]: Do you have anything that you could share on, memory pruning? And like the temporal aspect of memory?Swyx [00:31:36]: Deleting and forgetting?Walden [00:31:39]: The, today, the, So the things they could do is it could edit memories. And so if your memory used to say like, “Oh, Cole likes to open everything as like a draft PR,” then you can imagine, “No, don't do that.” And then it'll say, “Oh, do you want me to update the memory to be Cole now want everything as, open PRs?” I think that at the same time we don't know if this is going to be the final version of the system. Whatever we have here will probably, translate into the new system that we'll be coming up with. But I think one big difference between two years ago and today is these agents are really good at using anything that resembles a file system natively. And so part of us are, is thinking, “Oh, should we rebuild memories to feel more like a file system that we let the agent navigate on its own?” That's been an interesting exploration. Also similar ideas in the scale space.Swyx [00:32:35]: I am pulling up OpenClaude's memory thing right now. So memory, OpenClaude has like this like daily memory journal thing, right? And you can I mean, that is a file system you can grep through and is a source of truth. I don't know if it's the best. It's probably super noisy, but at least, if you lose something you can discover it or you can apply some, forgetting algorithm to, more ancient memories that don't get recalled again or something. I don't know.Walden [00:33:01]: One thing we've been trying to do to push the boundaries of how you use agents at your company is letting an agent basically have a very similar file, a memory.md or something, and just like be your permanent PM for a specific set of issues maybe. So we have like some Slack channels internally, maybe a Slack channel dedicated to, a specific product like DeepWiki maybe. And you can imagine that, or you want a Devin that never stops, it's just always awake, but it has this like memory dock that it can just maintain for itself about, okay, what are like the number one priorities of what we have to fix and prioritize? Who is responsible for some upcoming work? Maybe they'll even Devin will even tag you on some recurring basis. And so it's been an interesting move to see, okay, how can we actually use Devin for more than just engineering? Can we actually upstream above the engineering process and maybe it's just Devin creating tickets, which then maybe some humans do, but then maybe other Devins do.Swyx [00:34:00]: One of my more fun automations is go research competitors and just suggest stuff to me on a weekly basis. That's the automation. I can't find it right now, but basically it just like, “Look at competitors and suggest things.” “And here are three things that you've suggested that I don't want any more of,” and you just stick that in the prompts. But like I wish actually So for like when I, for example, when I reject a PR, I wish that it updated memory so that I can then just not have to go up, go back and update the scheduled, sync, but anyway, feature request.Walden [00:34:31]: what? We might change it soon. I guess OpenInspect, in the time you've been around, has there been anything you tried to implement but then you had to like undo and like do a different way?OpenInspect Architecture: Webhooks, Control Planes, and Agent StateCole [00:34:41]: Nothing yet, but something that is on my mind. The initial way that I built it was that each of the integrations lives as its own package. And so you have The Slack bot, which is what's handling the webhooks, and then is basically interacting with the control plane. As I'm seeing the system starting to be more integrated, specifically with the GitHub bot integration, I'm considering bringing that all into the central control plane because especially now I want to start, And a request that I'm getting is the ability to monitor, the actual, pull requests being merged, as well as just tracking ofSwyx [00:35:19]: What do I have open?Cole [00:35:21]: What do I have open? How many of these are getting merged? How many comments are showing up? To just understand the health of the system. And so in the case of a GitHub app, you only have one webhook. And so then it's a question of do I put that webhook in that GitHub bot package? That's weird. It doesn't really make sense to live there because that package is more for like the code reviewer. Or do I like centralize it? So that's something that's on my mind of, making that decision. I think the other one we touched on earlier is the harness in the box versus out of the box. I think long term the architecture will eventually come back out of the box. Some of the newer tools that I've added are calling back into the control plane so that you don't have the secrets in the sandbox. And so I think long term I probably will pull the actual, agent out of the box, but I think for now it's fine.Subagents and Multi-Agent Systems: When Parallelism Helps or HurtsSwyx [00:36:16]: Just, a quick question on pulling the agent out of the box. I'm One thing I'm very bullish on this year is agents calling other agents or spawning sub-agents or Whatever you want to call it. Does that make it harder or easier? I can't tell. Because if the harness is in the box, you can just spin up more boxes. If the harness is outside the box, then you're, it's less easy because you are, you have a unicorn pet of a, of a harness that's, living outside the box.Cole [00:36:45]: In theory it would be the same way, right? Whether, one agent has launched many, sub-sessions within it, OpenInspect, for example, can launch sub-sessions and actually create other environments and then monitor them. In the case where it is out of the box, that would basically just be an additional session that's running. And so that session is also running outside of the box. It's running in your worker plane, wherever you're running this. And then you really just have to think about how does your top level agent then interact with it. I do think it can be more complex, just ‘cause again, you have now a more difficult architecture. But I think if you figured it out once, it's probably fine.Swyx [00:37:26]: Well, then I'm just, throwing it open to you in terms of, I call this like meta Devin management. Which is like the, Devin's calling Devins or Devin scheduling Devins or querying trajectories or anything like that. What have you built or unshipped, anything?Cole [00:37:46]: I think one of the surprising things we've seen is that a lot of the ways that, these, separate agents work with each other, and you want them to, parallelize their work, has still mostly followed the same manager sub-agents regime. And a lot of people I think are excited about this world where you have swarms of agents that, talk with each other all over the place. We've actually given Devin an MCP so they can just go arbitrarily message other Devins And create new Devins, et cetera. But I guess, it somehow creates, a really chaotic world in that sense. And so we've still found that most practical use on a day-to-day basis has been one single Devin.Cole [00:38:33]: Figuring out how to segregate the work and get, have other Devins work on it in, a relatively isolated sense, each with their own boxes Not sharing machines, so there's, a very little room for conflict is the regime that you have to create today.Swyx [00:38:50]: I'll call out, the experiments from Cursor, right? This is Wilson Lin's work on Single agent to multi-agent, and you're obviously famously on the side of don't build multi-agent. But they went through the whole thing, only to arrive at, this Which is exactly what Devin has, I think.Cole [00:39:08]: I think there will be a revision to that post at some point AboutSwyx [00:39:12]: Tell us about itCole [00:39:12]: I think multi-agents were very much not at all possible a year ago. You do see more multi-agent experiments today, but you can argue, are they really multi-agents, or are they just just, tool calls,? There are people who, will create sub-agents to go look for XYZ file, XYZ implementation. Has really nice context management benefits because all of the tool calls and tokens that it spends then get collapsed back to just the answer for the main agent. There's a lot of benefits to doing this. We basically have Devin do this with Deep Bookie, make a call out to Deep Bookie, give you back the results, but that feels like a tool call,? It's not like these, two collaborators actually talking back with each, back and forth with each other. But I think the thing that gives me the most bullishness that multi-agents might actually be possible is actually what I said earlier about Devin will actually sometimes tell me I'm wrong and push back, and I think that demonstrates a level of maturity and communication today that makes a multi-agent world possible. One, can two agents who have seen different information come back to each other and actually figure out who is right, what is the correct implementation? They're not just, yes men. Claude, I guess is like, used to just say, what is it? “You're right,” or,Swyx [00:40:25]: “You're absolutely right.”Cole [00:40:26]: “You're absolutely right.” Yeah.Swyx [00:40:28]: The Have you seen, did you seeCole [00:40:29]: The age is overSwyx [00:40:30]: The Codex app troll in Topic? This is the Codex app. Inside of Settings, there's a little, there's a little Easter egg, right? So if you go to, the Themes or Appearance, right? There's all these, color codes, and the top is absolutely, and it's the Topic's colors. Which is such a troll. Anyway.Model Behavior: Pushback, Adversarial Prompts, and Agent SkepticismCole [00:40:53]: I love that Easter egg. Did you discover that yourself?Swyx [00:40:54]: No, it was, someone was, tweeting about it And I was like, I was like, “Is this true?” Because, sometimes people just tweet stuff to, get a rise out of you. But yeah, there you go, in Topic colors.Cole [00:41:06]: Yeah. So yeah, we're out of this regime where, it just says you're absolutely right, and they can have real conversations and real back and forths.Swyx [00:41:13]: You can prompt it as well to be more adversarial or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that, I mean, to me, that is more intelligence, right? That is not just something that's, a dumb tool, it's actually pushing back on you I think. Yeah.Cole [00:41:24]: when you mentioned, of course, the blog posts. There was one blog they had where they fed a swarm of agents together and built a browser.Swyx [00:41:34]: That was I think that was the one.Cole [00:41:36]: You can have, likeSwyx [00:41:37]: I think it's the same oneCole [00:41:37]: Creation of it. We found a surprising success of, don't do a swarm or anything, just have one Devin, it does its own context management. Just let it keep running for a while and give it some crazy tasks. I think we asked it to, rebuild, a Windows OS system. And it managed to do it just like, going on for long enough. It'sSwyx [00:41:55]: Was this Andrew's thing?Cole [00:41:58]: there were lots of demos that we ended up not posting, ‘cause at some point we'd just be posting way too much a bunch of, Demos. But I love that because it shows that I think the multi-agent thing still has, a bit of exciting sexiness to it, which is maybe still beyond still, the actual delta it adds to the capabilities of these systems. But it's absolutely the future. I think we're heading in that direction and we can see the progress being made there already.Swyx [00:42:25]: If I were to, make one super minor pushback because I don't feel that confident about it yetCole [00:42:33]: Go for itSwyx [00:42:33]: But I've had Ryan Lopopolo from OpenAI on the pod And he's a super slop cannon, right? Oh my God, that's my coding agent being done. I downloaded this, Peon Ping. I don't know if you guys have heard this. It takes like-, sound packs from popular games like, Command and Conquer and Warcraft, and then it plays it whenever it's done. And so it's like, “Work,” or whatever, “At your command,” or something. Anyway, what I got from the Cursor code base and from Ryan's thing was that there's a slop cannon approach where you try to loosen the single agent's, bottleneck, and I feel like that is, probably an, a very important thing to try to figure out. I don't think anyone's, really solved it. Because then you just have more reviewer slop on top of the agent slop To try to wrangle it all. Ryan will probably very strongly object that I say that he hasn't solved it, but he thinks he's He thinks he's completely solved it. But I think it's still I think it's, very important, ‘cause, that is a bottleneck, right? I feel Devin is slow sometimes Because I'm like, well, yeah, this is very readable and very sensible, but also it is slower than it could be if I just, I want a button to just say, “Just ramp this up 1,000 next parallel, in parallel and just, see what happens,”? And I don't know if that's, feasible at some point in the future.Code Review, Entropy, and AI SlopWalden [00:43:55]: I And we've also run experiments internally where we've basically tried to build entire products, true products that we knew we would eventually ship, but for now, let's try to see if we can do it just by purely, vibe coding on top of each other, auto merge, no code review at all. And then there's this benchmark of how many weeks can you go onto this for Before you say, “We have the trashiest code base.”Walden [00:44:18]: “Let's actually rewrite it from scratch.”Swyx [00:44:19]: Start a new factory, yeah. What'd you find?Walden [00:44:21]: I think we found that the state-of-the-art in December was you can probably, run this for about two weeks. By the end of those two weeks, you'd find that, hey, you want to, change the color of a button. Well, it turns out this button is implemented in, 10 different places, and they, have All these different variations, and oh, you forgot one of them, and actually it's a slightly different color in one spot. And you're like, “Okay, this is too much to work with. Let's actually try to do code review at the same time.” And make sure that we're on top of our software, actually cleaning it up a bit And making sure it's done in a scalable way.Cole [00:44:54]: I think building on that, the idea of, you don't have to look at code, I think is generally a bad idea. And the meme that I have for thatWalden [00:45:03]: What timeline, all right, is Do you think that statement will be true on?Cole [00:45:06]: I think probably for a while it'll be true that you should continue to look at your code. A problem that I see a lot of teams run into that I work with who are embracing AI native, AI first coding, is The meme that I have is that your code base regresses to your worst engineer, because that engineer who is, very gung-ho about AI and is not auditing their code, their pattern starts cementing into the code, and now the AI is referencing their patterns. And so now their if/else block that, is 20 if/elses back and forth, the AI is seeing that as the pattern of how things are done and starts to then exponentially grow this slop. And I find to your point, a pretty good approach to that is having scheduled cleanup, whether by humans or through systems, that are looking for duplication. They then address that. You'll end up with like 12 helpers for how to format a date. And you need to address that, because otherwise it will continue to sprawl.Swyx [00:46:09]: Within balance, I think it's fine to have some duplication, and then sometimes To have garbage collection, right? Yeah. The What I've been, talking about with a lot of engineering leaders is that you want to be very strict about the boundaries between modules, and it's your job as an architect, as a CTO, whatever, to say like, “Okay, here's the hard contract between you guys and you guys. Whatever you do inside this black box is your business. You do whatever. But between these guys, let's be, really damn clear, and any movement must be signed off by a human or me,” or. Then, and like that's that. I don't know if you have any other modifications or advice.Walden [00:46:44]: Well, I guess generally on the topic of, where humans can be useful, I found that ‘cause, some of these, really deep infra problems, sometimes just having a human that just has, really deep expertise can make a big difference. I've actually seen this come into play when actually building agents. So we've had a few friends now, try building their own coding agents, and I think one same problem that I recurringly heard a lot of them run into was this problem of like, “Oh, Grep is really slow on our agents' machines.” And so a lot of them, I assume because they're using AI and they themselves don't have, super deep infra background knowledge, say, “Okay, we're going to go build our own custom Grep index. It's going to be really fast,” and use that as a way around this problem. When we ran into this problem About like, maybe like a year and a half ago when we were, in the early days of building Devin, we obviously didn't have AI then. We just asked our, how to, how to do this. You can just swap out a new Grep index, so.Infrastructure Details: Grep, File Systems, and SandboxesSwyx [00:47:45]: What do you mean you hand-coded Devin? What?Walden [00:47:48]: It's like, can you believe we hand-wrote this code? And we had, our infra people who are really amazing, they were looking into it and they're like, “Oh, what? We realized that actually the root cause of this problem is actually super simple, but like fine-grain detail,” which is that a lot of these virtual machines actually underlying them don't use real file systems. They use these, network file systems where things are actually cached over the network actually in S3. So when you're Grepping, you're actually making network calls Every time you're doing these things, and that's why Grep is extremely slow on these machines. And so again, goes back to, what is all of the crazy infra work that we had to do to actually get these machines working. If you try to do this yourself, there are tons of small details like this, and so we had to eventually go swap out that network file system. ButSwyx [00:48:35]: I think there's a write-up about it, right? Silas did one about the virtual file system.Walden [00:48:38]: Oh, that was a whole other thing. TheSwyx [00:48:39]: Oh, that's a different thingWalden [00:48:40]: The BlockDev file storage formatSwyx [00:48:42]: I'll bring it upWalden [00:48:42]: Which is, a file system format that we built so that the VMs could be spun up and down very quickly. Basically, the intuition behind this is-Imagine you have, a terabyte of disk, and your agent only, wrote, a hundred lines of code on top of that disk. How long does it, say, take to, save and re-bring up that disk? And most systems, because you're not optimizing for this case, it's just, on the order of a terabyte of work because you have to Save all of that and bring it back up. In our system, we try to build a file system that incrementally builds on top of each other. So every time you save and bring the machine back up, you're only doing work that is proportional to effectively the diff in the file system. And so this, shaves off a lot of time in the boot-up process of Devin. I think we This is actually now outdated. We have a newer system inside of Devin. But yeah, there's a lot of tiny details you have to get right here to actually get the day-to-day experience of Devin to be good.Swyx [00:49:39]: It's, not technically agents, but it is agent infra, and when you sell an agent as a company, you sell agent plus agent infra.Walden [00:49:46]: At least the way we do it be And the other The nice thing about having the agent infra being done together is, you We get to deploy Devin in whatever environment we want now. We don't need to wait for some underlying infra provider to also go and support VPC or on-prem or FedGovCloud, for instance. So we can actually go and figure out, okay, since we own the infrastructure, how can we get that set up for you?Cloud Providers: Modal, Daytona, and Enterprise SandboxesSwyx [00:50:12]: Whereas you're Cloudflare dependent.Cole [00:50:15]: so Cloudflare runs the control plane. The sandboxes, Modal is supported. A contributor just added Daytona. E2B is on the roadmap, and I think there's an abstraction in place that if any contributor wants to add a new provider, they can add that in.Walden [00:50:32]: Well, what are, How are the customers you work with Do they generally try to then go set up a contract with another one of these third-party providers? Do they try to do the VMs in-house?Cole [00:50:44]: most of them I see using Modal. I think Modal has a greatWalden [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Swyx [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Cole [00:50:50]: I think Modal has a great offering. It captures all of the sandbox pieces you need, snapshots being a pretty big piece of that, and given that they also offer GPUs, I think it's a pretty nice offering as a whole.Swyx [00:51:04]: no debate there.Walden [00:51:07]: Modal is great, especially, I think their container offering is, the most natural, and so especially if you are willing to, forego, the full VM requirements Modal is, a really vast place you can spin something up on.Swyx [00:51:20]: Is there a point So Modal's very Python, and I feel like most workload, has really shifted to JavaScript. I don't know if you guys Get the same feeling. So, okay, when I started Landspace and IE and all these things, I was like 50/50 Python and JS, right? That's roughly. I think that's wrong now. I think JS has won. I don't know if you guys Like, I Maybe I'm overstating it, and maybe for cognition, there's, C# and Java and what have you. But for, new greenfield apps, do you feel that Do you get that sense? Does it matter?Cole [00:51:52]: I think that most of the libraries that I see in this space are Python native first, especially in theCole [00:51:58]: Observability space. That said, I think that there is a pretty big appeal of having your entire system in one language. Especially when you have both your frontend and backend communicating, you can have one central type Which is very nice.Swyx [00:52:11]: That's my case against Modal, which is Then you have to run JS. You can run JS inside Modal. It's just, one extra step That, isn't native to the runtime. I don't know ifWalden [00:52:22]: I don't knowSwyx [00:52:23]: Reviews. Do you have numbers? I don't know.Walden [00:52:25]: the one thing I don't like about Python is whenever AI, whenever it writes Python, it always does, the weirdest patterns, andSwyx [00:52:32]: Oh, because it's, mixing two and three or what?Walden [00:52:34]: I think it's something mixing two and three, yeah. The I don't know if you see this. It always tries to do, has attribute on objects as likeCole [00:52:41]: Oh, my God.Walden [00:52:41]: But it's like But that you shouldn't be doing that. It should error if there wasSwyx [00:52:45]: Because it's training on library code?Cole [00:52:47]: I think it's more of, likeCole [00:52:48]: From what I've seen, it's more of, a reward hacking mechanism where it doesn't want to basicallyWalden [00:52:54]: It'll never error.Cole [00:52:54]: It doesn't want the code to fail. And so it Even when it knows it has the attribute, it'll call getattr on a, and for a lot of my clients who have moved towards more autonomous coding, we've put that in as a lint rule That if you do getattr, your pull request is going to fail.Slop Signatures: Comments, Backwards Compatibility, and TypesSwyx [00:53:12]: Ooh, this is a fun topic. Can you tell me more about this? What else is a sign of AI coding that you have to put guards in?Walden [00:53:21]: So we were talking just before this about Opus 4.7. One of the things this new model likes to do is it writes lots of comments. Not like, it'll, comment every line, but it'll write, paragraph, PRDs, on top of every function. But I will say, to its credit, these aren't slop, descriptions like they were before. “Oh, here's what this function does.” It's like, “Oh, here's actually the r

Barry O'Reilly is an entrepreneur, author, and founder of Nobody Studios, an early-stage venture studio focused on building AI companies. Over the last six years he has worked with founders, executives and enterprise leadership teams to rethink how organisations operate in the age of generative AI, while simultaneously building and launching companies inside the studio model.A former startup advisor and executive coach, Barry has spent the last several years studying why most AI transformations fail despite enormous investment. Through his coaching and advisory work with leaders from companies including American Airlines, Skyscanner, and Slack, Barry has developed practical frameworks for improving decision-making, reducing administrative overhead, and increasing what he calls "decision velocity".In this episode, Barry explains why AI adoption fails when companies focus on tools instead of behaviour change, why judgment is becoming the most important human skill, and how teams can use AI to improve collaboration rather than replace people.Key takeaways — Most AI transformations fail because organisations start with tools instead of behaviours. Installing AI software does not change how people work, make decisions or collaborate. — The most effective AI use cases amplify a person's natural way of working. Barry realised he produced better writing by talking through ideas and using transcription tools instead of forcing himself into traditional writing workflows. — Capturing meetings, conversations and decisions as structured data creates long-term organisational intelligence. Every interaction becomes a reusable asset that improves preparation, follow-through, and future decision-making. — Leaders must role-model AI adoption themselves. Organisations see better outcomes when executives openly experiment with tools, share lessons learned, and create psychological safety around adoption. — Decision velocity matters more than raw productivity. Teams improve when they arrive prepared, make decisions faster, reduce reversals, and spend more time solving meaningful problems instead of handling administration. — AI should be used to challenge thinking, not replace it. The most valuable prompts ask for blind spots, alternative scenarios, and pressure tests rather than definitive answers. — Teams working with AI outperform individuals working with AI. Barry cites research showing that collaborative ideation with AI produces significantly stronger outcomes than isolated use. — Productivity gains are meaningless if they simply create more exhaustion. The real opportunity is creating space for reflection, slow thinking, and better judgment. — Judgment is the critical human capability organisations cannot outsource. If people stop exercising judgment and rely entirely on AI-generated answers, they gradually erode their ability to make decisions under uncertainty.Chapters 1:03 — Building AI companies at Nobody Studios 3:16 — Why AI transformations fail 5:05 — The danger of focusing on tools 6:35 — Discovering natural workflows with AI 8:51 — Turning conversations into data assets 12:02 — Measuring successful AI adoption 13:14 — Why leaders must role-model behaviour change 18:39 — Decision velocity as a leadership metric 21:33 — Escaping administrative overload 23:02 — Why leaders need time to think 26:54 — What CFOs are worried about 28:08 — Can AI replace startup teams? 29:45 — Why distribution still matters most 33:13 — Capturing and synthesising ideas with AI 34:38 — Using AI to challenge your thinking 37:11 — Avoiding top-down AI-driven strategy 39:00 — Why teams plus AI outperform individuals 42:31 — The problem with AI-generated certainty 43:12 — Preserving human judgment 44:55 — Hiring for judgment and decision-making 47:19 — Final reflections on leadership and AIOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

Send us Fan MailIn this week's episode of a week in privacy, hosts Paul Breitbarth and Ralph O'Brien discuss some key movements in privacy, data protection, cyber law, and AI around the world. Dr. K Royal was off speaking at a Governance or Emerging Tech and Science conference in Arizona. Join Paul and Ralph to cover both the highs and lows and share concerns about trends we are seeing. If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

As procurement looks toward 2035, leaders will have to face deeper transformation requirements than simply adding AI tools. They will have to rethink their operating models, talent, data, and decision-making. Uncomfortable though it might be, this will be essential if the function is to move from transactional purchasing to strategic value creation. In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes David Loseby. David is a former CPO, a speaker, an author, a “pracademic”, an advocate, and the editor of two very well regarded journals: The Journal of Public Procurement and the Journal of Responsible Production and Consumption. David shares and discusses some of the key points from his recent article on procurement leadership in 2035: How the role of Chief Procurement Officer will differ from today's version of the job How procurement leaders should think about AI as part of their operating model rather than just a tool layered on top of existing processes The new skills and mindsets procurement teams will need to succeed in an AI-enabled environment Links: David Loseby on LinkedIn Procurement Leadership in 2035… and why just adding a bit of AI won't do

In this episode, Dr. Steve Gard, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics, speaks with Amandi Rhett, MS, CPO, LPO, FAAOP, assistant professor in the Baylor College of Medicine Orthotics and Prosthetics Program and assistant dean of community health at the college's School of Health Professions, about the impact of microaggressions in healthcare and efforts to address them within the orthotics and prosthetics profession. Rhett explains how subtle verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights directed toward marginalized groups can affect workplace culture, clinician-patient relationships, and patient outcomes. Drawing from her own experiences and recognizing a lack of O&P-specific training in this area, she and her coauthors developed an interactive workshop using real-world scenarios to help clinicians identify and respond to microaggressions. The conversation explores examples such as mispronouncing ethnic names, assumptions about patient behavior, and misuse of pronouns, along with the workshop's early results, which showed increased participant confidence and awareness. Rhett also discusses the study's limitations, future plans to expand the training, and the importance of fostering more inclusive and respectful healthcare environments.   Show notes JPO article: Examining the Impact of Microaggressions in Healthcare and the Efficacy of Microaggressions Education in Orthotics and Prosthetics O&P Research Insights is produced by Association Briefings.

Is it necessary to have a morning routine? No, but you need something to to stay on track. Colleen Klimczak, CPO, discusses organizing home offices & small businesses, paper & time management, using home spaces in their best possible way, and creating time with family in this weekly podcast. Learn more at PeaceOfMindPO.com!

In dieser Episode taucht Erik Siekmann tief in den wohl größten Paradigmenwechsel der digitalen Suche ein: Die Ablösung der klassischen organischen Suche durch KI-Antwortmaschinen. Zu Gast ist Malte Landwehr, Branchen-Veteran und Co-Founder/Schweizer Taschenmesser bei Peec AI. Malte erklärt messerscharf, warum traditionelles SEO im klassischen Sinne vor dem Ende steht und warum Unternehmen schleunigst auf Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) umstellen müssen. Er bricht sein viel beachtetes Dark Search Manifesto auf die Praxis herunter und zeigt, warum die Bewertung von KI-Plattformen anhand von Klicks ein fataler Denkfehler ist. Erfahre in dieser Folge, mit welchen drei konkreten Methoden (Self-Reported Attribution, Logfile-Analyse und Prompt-Monitoring) du deine KI-Sichtbarkeit wirklich messbar machst und mit welchen simplen Hebeln auf YouTube, Reddit und durch kommunikative Konsistenz Marken und Personal Brands die Algorithmen von ChatGPT, Claude und Gemini dominieren können. Über Malte Landwehr: Malte Landwehr blickt auf über 20 Jahre im Digitalmarketing zurück. Nach Stationen bei seoFactory und kpunktnull prägte er fünf Jahre lang als VP Product die Plattform Searchmetrics. Zuletzt steuerte er über fünf Jahre als Vice President of SEO den wichtigsten Traffic-Kanal bei idealo. Angesichts der Bedrohung klassischer Klick-Modelle durch KI wechselte er auf die Betreiberseite: Heute baut er als CPO & CMO im Führungsteam von Peec AI die führende europäische Plattform für GEO-Analytics auf und begleitet globale Marken bei der Transformation ihrer organischen Sichtbarkeit. Hier geht es zum Connected Commerce Guide von Front Row. Der Marketing Transformation Podcast wird produziert von TLDR Studios.

In this episode, we sit down with Annie Chechitelli, Chief Product Officer at Turnitin, to unpack one of education's most urgent tensions: how do you preserve genuine learning in an age where AI can write a passable essay in seconds? We go beyond the detector-versus-cheater framing to ask what assessment, academic integrity, and the role of the teacher actually need to look like now.Annie Chechitelli is Chief Product Officer at Turnitin and has spent over 25 years in education technology - from building live online classrooms before Zoom existed, through roles at Blackboard and Amazon, to leading product at Turnitin for the past four years. She's one of the few people who has watched AI go from a quiet API curiosity to a classroom crisis in real time.We cover:- Why Turnitin shifted from detecting cheating to giving educators clarity on how students use AI- The move from summative to formative assessment and what it demands of teachers- How oral assessments, AI simulations, and peer feedback could replace the traditional essay- What it means that 13% of papers submitted globally contain 80% or more AI-generated content- Why Nature Magazine just retracted a major study claiming AI is good for learning- The cognitive shortcut question: what parts of thinking can students safely offload to AI, and what can they not?- Whether "AI literacy" is a meaningful term or just marketing language- Why institutional policy decisions keep going wrong when educators aren't in the roomIf you're a teacher trying to figure out where AI fits in your classroom, a leader shaping institutional policy, or someone who wants an honest conversation about what AI is actually doing to learning, this episode cuts through the noise. Annie doesn't arrive with neat answers. She brings the data, the hard questions, and a genuine commitment to getting this right for students.Chapters00:00 Introductions02:04 Meet Annie Chechitelli, CPO of Turnitin03:29 25 years in EdTech from Wimba to Amazon to Turnitin07:04 Why Annie bet on education technology in 199909:31 What is Turnitin? A plain-language explainer14:24 Essay mills, contract cheating, and the misconduct economy17:12 AI and the shortcut to thinking23:55 Who does Turnitin design for: teachers, students, or admins?27:05 How assessment needs to change in the AI era31:21 Oral defence, AI simulations, and peer feedback at scale36:50 Why the UK is doubling down on exams39:23 From AI detection to Turnitin Clarity44:25 Who decides what counts as misconduct?48:31 The research gap nobody is filling52:34 Nature Magazine retracts its AI learning study54:40 Is "AI literacy" a real term?58:35 Quick-fire questionsFind out more about Turnitin ClarityThanks so much for joining us again for another episode - we appreciate you.Ben & Steve xChampioning those who are making the future of education a reality.Check out all about EdufuturistsGet your tickets for Edufuturists Uprising 2026

Industrial Talk is talking to Jay Allardyce, CPO at Octave about "Unleashing operational data for greater intelligence and insights for industrial success". Overview Scott Mackenzie hosts the Industrial Talk podcast, featuring Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave. Octave, formerly Hexagon, focuses on asset management and operations, leveraging data to drive efficiency and innovation. Jay discusses the importance of data accuracy and context, emphasizing the need for a robust data foundation to support AI applications. Octave's platform integrates design, construction, and operation phases, aiming to simplify workflows and reduce costs. The company also supports co-creation with customers through Octave Colabs. Upcoming Octave Live event is scheduled for June 17-18 in Austin, Texas. Outline Introduction to Industrial Talk Podcast and Jay Allardyce Scott welcomes listeners to the Industrial Talk podcast, celebrating industry professionals for their bravery, innovation, and problem-solving skills.Scott introduces Jay Allardyce from Octave, a new company in the market, and discusses the importance of technology and the speed of market changes.Scott mentions Octave Live, an event taking place on June 17-18 in Austin, Texas, and encourages listeners to support industrial education and the next generation of industrial leaders. Jay Allardyce's Background and Role at Octave Scott transitions to the main conversation with Jay Allardyce, who is introduced as the Chief Project Officer at Octave.Jay Allardyce shares his extensive background in technology, including roles at Hewlett Packard, GE, Uptake, Google, and Inside Software.Jay discusses his co-founding of Gen AI Works, an AI community focused on helping people discover, learn, and grow through AI.Jay explains his current role at Octave, focusing on the built environment and industrial applications, and his excitement about the future of data-driven experiences in the physical world. Octave's Mission and Market Position Jay elaborates on Octave's mission to drive lifecycle value in the design, build, operate, and protect phases of industrial projects.He emphasizes the importance of data in simplifying workflows and reducing costs for large EPCs (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) companies.Jay discusses the significance of repeatability and efficiency in the construction industry, and how Octave's platform helps manage changes and costs effectively.Scott and Jay discuss the importance of data in driving innovation and optimizing asset performance, highlighting the need for accurate and trustworthy data. Octave's Platform and Technological Advancements Jay explains the transition from Hexagon to Octave and the benefits of focusing on a pure-play software company.He describes the platform's ability to integrate multiple workflows across the lifecycle of a project, from design to operation.Jay highlights the role of AI in creating new value and optimizing supply chains and maintenance rounds.Scott and Jay discuss the importance of building a robust data foundation to ensure trust and accuracy in AI-driven insights. Octave's Customer Base and Future Plans Jay shares insights into Octave's robust customer base, including large EPCs and public safety organizations.He discusses the company's focus on expanding into new markets and creating new applications using AI.Jay emphasizes the importance of context and trust in data to drive innovation and value for customers.Scott and Jay discuss the potential for Octave's platform to revolutionize asset management and create a more efficient and reliable industrial ecosystem. Conclusion and Call to Action Scott wraps up the conversation by encouraging listeners to support industrial education and inspire the next generation of industrial leaders.He highlights the importance of telling industry stories to bring awareness and attention to the next generation.Scott invites listeners to connect with Jay Allardyce and Octave for more information and to explore the opportunities in the industrial sector.The podcast concludes with a reminder of the Octave Live event in Austin, Texas, and a call to action for listeners to engage with the Industrial Talk community. If interested in being on the Industrial Talk show, simply contact us and let's have a quick conversation. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2026. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy! JAY ALLARDYCE'S CONTACT INFORMATION: Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayallardyce/ Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/octaveintelligence/ Company Website: https://www.octave.com/ PODCAST VIDEO: https://youtu.be/M3yJCs3t9Ho THE STRATEGIC REASON "WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST": OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES: NEOM: https://www.neom.com/en-us Hexagon: https://hexagon.com/ Arduino: https://www.arduino.cc/ Fictiv: https://www.fictiv.com/ Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/ Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/ Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/ We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/ YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX: LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/ Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/ Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader): Business Beatitude the Book Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? 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These episodes of #thePOZcast, live from Transform 2026 in Las Vegas, are proudly brought to you by our friends at PIN. AI recruiting tools that automate candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling across 850M+ profiles. Built for recruiters, agencies, and hiring teams. Learn more and check out a demo:  https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner Thanks for listening, and please follow us on Insta @NHPTalent and www.youtube.com/thePOZcast For all episodes, please check out www.thePOZcast.com CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Serendipity: How This Episode Happened A mutual friend, a caffeine need, and a chance introduction — Adam welcomes Lívia Martini, CPO of Wellhub, in what turned into one of the most data-packed conversations in the series. 02:00 – Meet Wellhub: 16 Years, 100,000+ Partners A global wellbeing platform serving companies of all sizes across gym studios, personal trainers, nutrition, sleep, mental health, and physical health — one platform, fully personalized. 04:30 – The Adoption Problem: Why Great Benefits Get Ignored The biggest challenge in corporate wellness isn't the product — it's education and adoption. People leaders have to be genuinely bought in, and the first step has to be frictionless. 07:00 – How a Wellness Movement Starts Inside a Company What happens when adoption takes off: colleagues watching each other change, bad knees getting better, muscle being built. The movement becomes self-sustaining — but it has to start somewhere. 09:30 – 5% vs. 50%: The Adoption Gap That Defines the Market The industry average for gym-only wellness benefits is 5% adoption. Wellhub's platform sits at 40-50%. Breadth, personalization, easy onboarding, and people team support drive the gap. 12:00 – The 86% Number That Changes Everything 86% of employees say they would consider switching jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and that number is growing year over year. 15:00 – Wellness as a Healthcare Cost Strategy Healthier employees mean lower medical costs. Wellbeing benefits aren't a morale spend — they're a healthcare offset. The direct business case, made clearly. 17:30 – GLP-1s: Medication Is Only Half the Solution Why weight-loss medication without lifestyle change is unsustainable: muscle mass loss, bone density loss, the rebound effect. GLP-1s need to be paired with nutrition, exercise, and sleep to hold. 21:30 – Sleep Is a Weight Management Tool Most People Ignore Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. The interconnected nature of sleep, weight, and wellness — and why all of it needs to be addressed together. 24:00 – AI at Wellhub: Coach, Recommendations & Selling at Scale An AI wellness coach, personalized content recommendations, and AI tools on the sales side to explain the product at scale across companies of all sizes and geographies. 26:30 – Letting Teams Experiment: The Chaos and the Clarity Wellhub gave its people teams license to experiment freely with AI — lived through months of productive chaos — and is now in the best practices sharing phase where one solution is solving 15 problems. 29:00 – Transform 2026: Connection Over Content Lívia's first Transform — and her verdict: the value is in the unscheduled moments, the hallway conversations, the person who sits down mid-introduction and becomes the best exchange of the conference. 31:30 – Where to Find Wellhub wellhub.com for product, partnerships, and getting in touch — and a reflection on what makes conferences like Transform genuinely worth attending. TAKEAWAYS: 1. 86% of Employees Would Consider Switching Jobs Over Wellbeing Benefits This is the most striking retention data point in the series. Wellhub's annual survey shows 86% of employees would consider or actively switch jobs if their company didn't offer wellbeing benefits — and the number is growing. For HR leaders and total rewards strategists, this moves wellness from ancillary to foundational in any competitive benefits package. 2. Industry Adoption Averages 5%. Wellhub's Is 40-50%. The gap between a generic gym benefit and a well-designed wellness platform isn't marginal — it's a 10x difference in adoption. The combination of breadth, personalization, easy enrollment, and people team support is what drives utilization from a footnote to a movement. Companies measuring benefits ROI by the number of options offered rather than the percentage of employees actually using them are measuring the wrong thing. 3. Wellness Benefits Drive Healthcare Cost Reduction The business case for wellness investment isn't just retention and morale — it's medical spend. Healthier employees drive lower insurance claims, fewer sick days, and more sustainable long- term healthcare costs. Lívia makes this connection directly: wellbeing benefits are a healthcare offset strategy, not a culture spend. 4. People Leaders Have to Be Genuinely Bought In — Not Just Compliant Adoption starts at the top. When HR and people leaders are personally using and visibly championing a wellness benefit — not just administering it — that signal travels through the organization. Lip service produces 5% adoption. Genuine conviction produces 50%. 5. A Wellness Movement Is Self-Sustaining Once It Starts The most powerful driver of wellbeing benefit adoption isn't communication or incentives — it's the moment employees start watching each other change. A colleague's bad knee gets better. Someone builds muscle. Someone sleeps through the night for the first time in months. Those visible transformations create organic pull that no marketing campaign can replicate. 6. GLP-1 Medication Without Lifestyle Change Is a Dead End Lívia's GLP-1 take is the clearest and most medically grounded in the series: the medication works by burning energy indiscriminately — it doesn't distinguish between fat, muscle mass, and bone density. Stop taking it without having built sustainable habits, and the weight returns. The medication is a tool, not a solution. Nutrition, exercise, and sleep have to accompany it for the program to hold. 7. Sleep Is a Weight and Wellness Variable Most Companies Aren't Tracking Lívia's personal data: two to three nights of poor sleep raises her weight regardless of diet or exercise. This connection — between sleep quality and metabolic health — is well-documented but largely absent from most corporate wellness conversations. Any wellbeing platform that doesn't address sleep is leaving a critical variable unaddressed. 8. Wellbeing Personalization Is the Future of Benefits Design The choose-your-own-journey model — where employees select their own wellness path from a broad menu of options, and can change it as their life changes — is the direction all benefits design is heading. One-size-fits-all packages are already failing on adoption metrics. The companies that move to personalized, flexible, employee-directed wellbeing will see the utilization numbers that justify the investment. 9. Give Your Teams License to Experiment With AI — Then Share What Works Wellhub's internal AI journey: give people teams permission to experiment freely, accept that it will be chaotic for a few months, and then create a structured best practices sharing process that surfaces the solutions that are actually working. The companies that are winning with AI internally right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated strategy — they're the ones who started experimenting earliest and created feedback loops fastest. 10. The Best Conference Connections Are Unscheduled Lívia's first Transform validated something this series has heard repeatedly: the most valuable moments at conferences like this aren't the sessions — they're the conversations that happen between them. The person who sits down mid-introduction, the hallway exchange that turns into a 30-minute deep dive on AI adoption and change management. Conferences that create more space for that serendipity deliver more value than those packed with content.  

Send us Fan MailOn this episode of the Talking Pools Podcast, Steve dives into the realities of commercial pool liability, leak detection, client communication, and the hidden responsibilities that separate true professionals from “just the pool guy.”The episode opens with Steve discussing the frustration surrounding the 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket prices before shifting into another edition of the Insurance Interlude with Pat Grignon of the California Pool Association. Together, they unpack a real-world commercial pool situation involving missing handrails, code violations, liability exposure, and the importance of documenting hazards before they become lawsuits.Steve also delivers a detailed masterclass on swimming pool leak detection—from the bucket test and common skimmer throat leaks to light conduit failures, dye testing, and why every pool company should build relationships with specialized leak detection professionals.The conversation expands into business growth, professionalism, continuing education through CPO certification, building vendor partnerships, and the importance of commanding confidence when speaking with clients. Whether you're a new pool tech or a seasoned operator, this episode is packed with field-tested advice, operational insight, and hard-earned lessons from the trenches of the pool industry. Show Notes Steve discusses taking his first real day off in weeks after nonstop CPO classes, commercial pool work, and field service calls  Frustration over 2026 FIFA World Cup ticket pricing and how rising costs are pushing longtime fans away from attending matches  Insurance Interlude with Pat Grignon of the California Pool Association  Commercial pool liability discussion involving missing handrails, code violations, depth markers, and no-diving signage  Why service companies have a legal duty to identify and document hazards at commercial pools  The importance of written communication, email documentation, and certified letters when addressing dangerous pool conditions  Discussion on foreseeability, negligence, proximate cause, and how lawsuits target everyone connected to a commercial pool incident  Why certain violations should potentially justify closing a commercial pool until repairs are completed  Overlooked commercial pool code requirements including transition lines, deck depth markers, and step visibility indicators  How courts may determine liability between service companies and construction contractors  Steve's philosophy on protecting clients while simultaneously protecting your company from exposure  A full breakdown of swimming pool leak detection basics for newer pool professionals  How to perform the bucket test to confirm water loss  Common leak locations including skimmer throats, light conduits, spa jets, and cracked tile lines  Why Steve recommends using marine epoxy products like Splash Zone for underwater repairs  The value of partnering with dedicated leak detection specialists rather than trying to handle every service internally  Business advice on building strategic partnerships with plaster companies, leak detection companies, and specialty contractors  Discussion about markup strategy and creating referral partnerships that benefit both companies  Why pool professionals should avoid sending outside contractors who may try to steal recurring service accounts  Steve explains why honesty and transparency with customers build long-term trust  The importance of education and CPO certification for newer pool professionals entering the industry  How knowledgeable communication builds authority and helps clients trust your expertise  Real-world examples of identifying hidden hazards clients never noticed themselves  Pool Corp's giveaway promotion for the Aper Scuba P1 robotic vacuum  Discussion about distributor pricing, OEM parts inflation, and why pool pros are increasingly turning to aftermarket options  Teaser for an upcoming episode discussing commercial bidding strategies, vacuum systems, and how Steve slowly closed a six-month commercial contract negotiation Support the showThank you so much for listening! You can find us on social media:FacebookInstagramTik TokEmail us: talkingpools@gmail.com

The Canadian Mental Health Association BC (CMHA BC) is at a pivotal moment, having grown into a $65 million powerhouse of community care. Now, they are seeking a highly strategic and mission-driven leader to step into the brand-new Chief Programs Officer (CPO) role.In this exclusive interview, CMHA BC CEO Jonny Morris opens up about the organization's transformative impact—from innovative, community-led crisis teams that avoid police involvement to provincial-wide employment services. He details why the CPO role is critical, describing it as the “engine of our programs and services,” requiring an agile, strategic collaborator ready to look 7 to 10 years ahead. Discover what it takes to join this leading-edge organization that “does not settle for the status quo.”

Dan Ciruli is VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. A computer science graduate of UC Berkeley, Dan spent a decade in engineering before pivoting to product management in 2003, a role that barely had a name when he started. Since then he has held product leadership positions at EMC and Google, where he was part of the team that helped create Kubernetes and open source Google's cloud infrastructure.He was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and a steering committee member for the Istio service mesh project, and has spent the last two decades with one foot in commercial product development and one in the open source community.In this episode, Dan explains why open source is not a charity exercise, how companies actually make money from code they give away for free, and what product managers get wrong when they tell their engineers to avoid it.Key takeaways— Open source is not crowdsourcing from individuals — much of the contribution comes from companies investing on the clock, because broad adoption benefits everyone more than proprietary lock-in.— The CNCF succeeded because it created a neutral space where the largest and smallest organisations felt equally safe contributing and consuming. That structure — not the code itself — is what made cloud native computing universal.— Being a product manager in open source requires the same core instinct as any other PM role: understanding the why. The difference is that your engineers may work for a competitor, and your roadmap is not entirely yours to control.— AI is multiplying the capability of both good actors and bad actors in open source security. The answer is not to slow adoption but to keep a credible human in the loop — someone with accumulated trust, judgement and accountability.— Before open sourcing your own work, be clear on how your company will make money, articulate it concisely for leadership, and then find at least one other organisation — even a competitor — willing to join you. A consortium signals a standard. A solo release signals a gamble.Chapters1:16 — From engineering to product management3:11 — Bridging open source and commercial work5:05 — The origin of Kubernetes at Google6:35 — How Nutanix embraces open source7:16 — The crowdsourcing misconception8:51 — Why the CNCF changed everything11:25 — Building a defensible moat in open source12:13 — The business models behind free code14:18 — Managing roadmaps you don't fully control15:04 — When your competitor writes your code16:04 — The CEO who wore his secrets around his neck18:13 — Developing an open source strategy19:37 — The one question every PM must ask22:44 — What is the CNCF?23:34 — AI, open source and the security arms race29:45 — Chop wood, carry water: the human in the loop31:48 — Advice for PMs running open source products33:15 — Harnessing a community you don't manage34:38 — Should you open source your own work?36:35 — How messy does it really get?39:33 — Linux is an anti-patternOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

Send us Fan MailIf ever there was a time to take AI governance seriously, it is now. Luckily, our guest today has written a great book about it. This week on the Serious Privacy podcast, Paul Breitbarth, Ralph O'Brien and Dr. K Royal speak with Shoshana Rosenberg. She is Managing Director of Logical AI Governance, General Counsel at SafePorter and of course one of the founders of the Women in AI Governance network. Shoshana's book, Practical AI Governance - Building a Program for Oversight and Strategy, is published by KoganPage and available now via your local bookstore or your preferred online store.  If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

On this episode, Arjan Hannink, Partner at Keensight Capital, explains how their growth buyout firm structures hands-on value creation support across a portfolio of B2B software and IT services companies. Learn why Keensight built an internal team of close to 40 value creation professionals—including in-house CPO, CTO, CMO and CRO functions—and how that team operates alongside management rather than above it.Hear about an approach to prioritizing growth initiatives when there is always more to do than bandwidth allows, why an all-you-can-eat resourcing model avoids the wrong incentives and how embedding value creation expertise into the deal process leads to faster execution post-close.The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.

"Digital masters aren't just deploying technology. They're changing the way procurement runs." - Chris Riley, Partner - Supply Chain and Procurement, Deloitte As AI-enabled tools shift the landscape from efficiency to true strategic impact, CPOs are tasked with making sense of new operating models, changing expectations, and how to redeploy talent toward higher-value work. In this episode, Deloitte's Chris Riley, Ryan Flynn, and Jocelyn Mayfield join Philip Ideson to break down the findings of Deloitte's latest CPO and AI surveys. They reveal what sets digital masters apart, how top teams link digital investments to business outcomes, and what it takes to move from process efficiency to business advisor. Whether you're rolling out AI for the first time or redesigning your operating model, this conversation dives deep into practical lessons and next steps for forward-thinking procurement teams. In this episode, Chris, Ryan, and Jocelyn will discuss: - What "digital masters" do differently  - Why operating model design now has existential importance for procurement - The real opportunity (and challenge) in reskilling for the AI era - How cultural change and reward systems drive sustainable transformation Links: Chris Riley on LinkedIn Ryan Flynn on LinkedIn Jocelyn Mayfield on LinkedIn Subscribe to the AOP Newsletter Subscribe to Art of Procurement on YouTube   As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please seewww.deloitte.com/us/aboutfor a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. This podcast contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this podcast, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This podcast is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this podcast.  

This episode of Permission to Speak Freely Podcast is dedicated to retired Command Master Chief Shay Robbie Farnsworth. Her influence helped shape careers, strengthen Sailors, and remind people what real leadership looks like. She poured into others, stayed connected long after transferring, and remained someone whose guidance and support never stopped mattering. We honor her life, legacy, service, and the countless people she impacted throughout her career and beyond. Fair winds and following seas, Command Master Chief Farnsworth. No guest pod. Let's go. Damo starts with smoke for Tyra, Aaron, and Damon (kind of). The guys talk about the realities of podcasting, not making any money from it, and why there's still no donation button. Iceman season is officially here, so the crew takes time to review the album while revisiting old debates about Kobe Bryant and whether Drake belongs in the top five music artists conversation. The conversation moves into the Kevin Hart roast, whether comedy should still be considered a sacred space, and what happens when culture changes faster than the jokes. The guys also finally catch up on life outside the podcast. Damo talks about heading back to California with the family, Damon gets flowers for his squadron's recent accomplishments, and the crew shouts out Charles Johnson for taking another major step with the launch of the Bump Serum. Other conversations include: - jewelry in uniform - SCPO/MCPO results - the viral barracks fight video - cars stopping for colors - the abrupt exit of John Phelan from the SECNAV office - Ombudsman of the Year recipients - Project Compass - changes to CPO initiation - SAFETALK and ASIST requirements - executive orders regarding psychedelics - President Trump's trip to China - Damon's random leadership questions - Damo introducing a new game The episode also features a deeper leadership discussion after a retired Master Chief asks how senior leaders are expected to promote policies they may not personally agree with. Later, the guys respond directly to a listener frustrated with the podcast's coverage of toxic Chiefs and leadership accountability. Highlighting Our Heroes returns with recognition of J. Paul Reason, while the crew also discusses the legacy of Medgar Evers during Picks of the Week. Aaron brings back his “Quote of the Week,” has a #DoBetter for Damo, and much more is discussed throughout Episode 189.

Nobody talks about their first termination the way they should, which is with a little bit of trauma, because we never forget the people we have to let go of.  In this latest episode of I Hate It Here, I sat down with Jennifer Laurie, fractional CPO and founder of Equitable HR Guild, to do exactly that!  We went all the way back to her very first termination…the nerves, the Googling "how to fire someone," the manager who was just as lost as she was, and then kept going.  We got into where managers go horribly wrong before they even get to the termination convo, how bias creeps into these decisions in ways that are really easy to miss, and why the debrief after is the part everyone skips but absolutely shouldn't.  Take a deep breath, and prepare yourself for this discussion! --- 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:51 - Something Jennifer Believed Early in Her Career That She Had to Unlearn  00:07:15 - What it Feels Like to Fire Somebody for the First Time 00:13:04 - Something Nobody Teaches You About Terminations 00:19:19 - Where Most Managers go Wrong in the Build-up to a Termination 00:24:17 - Addressing Bias in Termination Decisions 00:30:20 - Reflecting and Learning Done After a Termination 00:36:54 - Can Some Terminations Make Work Better for Everyone? 00:44:24 Advice for First-Time Termination Managers The Predictive Index behavioral assessment reveals how people work, think, and thrive—so teams can understand each other better and perform at their best. Because when you truly understand your people, work just works. Learn more: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠trypi.com/ihateithere⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- If you love I Hate It Here, sign up to Hebba's newsletter! It's for jaded, overworked, and emotionally burnt-out HR/People Operations professionals needing a little inspiration. ⁠https://workweek.com/discover-newsletters/i-hate-it-here-newsletter/⁠   And if you love the podcast, be sure to check out⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@ihateit-here⁠ for even more exclusive insider content! --- Follow Jennifer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferlauriehr/ Follow Hebba YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@ihateit-here/videos⁠ LinkedIn:⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/hebba-youssef⁠ Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/hebbamyoussef⁠

Send us Fan MailThis episode features Scott Hamilton, CEO of United Chemical, discussing the EPA's recent restrictions on sodium bromide, its implications for pool professionals, and the science behind bromate formation and safety. Gain insights into regulatory processes, chemical safety, and effective pool management strategies.keywordssodium bromide, EPA regulations, bromate, pool chemistry, pool safety, algae control, chemical risk assessment, United Chemical, Yellow Treat, bromine poolskey topicsEPA's restrictions on sodium bromideBromate formation and health risksScience and risk assessment of pool chemicalsguest nameScott HamiltonSound Bites"Don't let your mentor go, that's mentoreward.com.""Bromamines are effective and don't have a nasty smell.""Pool pros should voice their concerns to regulators."Chapters00:00Introduction to the EPA's Controversy on Sodium Bromide03:52The History and Impact of Bromate Regulations06:53Understanding Bromate Formation in Pools09:30The Chemistry of Bromine and Chlorine in Pools12:18The Misconceptions of Bromine Pools15:16Toxicology of Bromate and Cancer Risks18:12Bromate in Food Products and Regulatory Delays22:25Understanding EPA's Role and Challenges25:10The Impact of Lobbying on Chemical Regulations29:45Efficacy of Sodium Bromide in Algae Control30:50Trends in Mustard Algae Growth34:22Research Findings on Bromate Formation42:48Engaging with Regulatory Bodies45:40Legacy and Safety of Sodium BromideResourcesUnited ChemicalYellow TreatEPA Regulations on Bromide Products (2005)Bromate Risk Assessment Study AquaStar Pool ProductsThe Global Leader in Safety, Dependability, & Innovation in Pool Technology.BLUERAY XLThe real mineral purifier! Reduce your pool maintenance costs & efforts by 50%CPO Certification ClassesAttend your CPO class with Rudy Stankowitz!Jack's MagicIf you know Jack's you'd have no stains!Service Industry NewsDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showThank you so much for listening! You can find us on social media:FacebookInstagramTik TokEmail us: talkingpools@gmail.com

Kirsten Moorefield, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder at Cloverleaf, Sarika Lamont, CPO at Vidyard, and Sarah Royer, Sr. Manager of People Ops at Nirvana Insurance, joined us on The Modern People Leader for a live discussion on AI coaching. We talked about what AI coaching actually means today, building these tools in-house versus buying, and why career growth will never be a perfect checklist.----  Sponsor Links:

Send us Fan MailWelcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Paul Breitbarth and and Dr. K Royal, while Ralph O'Brien is out, discuss some fascinating news. Catch what's happening. First up - a decision from Spain on when data processing starts. We are so confused.#unexpectedquestion what fruit would be disappointed by the name we gave it? If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

"Isn't it true that everybody talks about supplier management, but nobody does it?"  This observation from Summit Procurement CEO and Founder Alan Veeck captures the delta between procurement's aspirations and the reality on the ground. It's a gap, he says, that AI might finally help close, but only if organizations resist the temptation to simply slash headcount when AI-powered efficiencies arrive. In this episode of "Buy: The Way...To Purposeful Procurement," co-hosts Philip Ideson and Rich Ham speak with Alan Veeck to explore what it might look like if procurement was unleashed to pursue actual value, and why the resistance to that vision remains so formidable. Alan presents listeners with a thought experiment: imagine a CPO given two directives: first, embrace AI to drive maximum efficiency, but second, keep every team member despite the bandwidth freed up by AI. His answer reveals momentous untapped potential: those 25 entry-level people whose salaries total $2.5 million annually? In a billion-dollar enterprise, he says, they could find 10x that value "in their sleep" within months through proper supplier engagement, category management, and relationship building.  This notion also brings procurement's existential challenge into the light. Without fixing flawed incentive structures, procurement will "continue to be the ones asking for a seat at the table."  One-off conversations and content won't solve these issues. Instead, Alan says it's time to convene "the smartest thinkers in our industry" into what Rich dubs a "fellowship." The goal: creating industry standards for measuring value across different contexts, giving organizations practical frameworks to escape the savings delusion. As Rich notes, there's no general ledger line item for savings, only costs. Procurement can be "the hero of the expense side of the ledger," but only if they muster the collective confidence to take the necessary steps. Links: Alan Veeck on LinkedInRich Ham on LinkedInLearn more at FineTuneUs.com

In the private sector, product teams pick their customers, generate demand, and ship into something close to a green field. In the public sector, none of that holds. Ayushi Roy — Chief Program Officer at New America's New Practice Lab and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School — joins Randy to unpack what changes when your user base is already sitting in front of you, your scrutiny is congressional, and the right answer is sometimes to delete ten systems rather than build an eleventh.Drawing on her work on IRS Direct File, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Illinois childcare voucher system, and a text-based 911 alternative that rolled out to 800,000 students across 13 universities, Ayushi makes the case for a distinct public-sector product playbook: thin-slicing for safe failure, designing for the lowest digital denominator, separating design problems from engineering problems, and treating unbuilding as a first-class option.Chapter markers01:48 — From aid monitoring in Jordan to digital delivery03:37 — Why she built a text-based alternative to 91106:33 — From a rollout to 800,000 students to Oakland City Hall08:58 — What the New Practice Lab does, and what a CPO does inside a think tank11:06 — Why private-sector product playbooks don't transliterate14:03 — No marketing, no early adopters: latent demand and the curb cut effect14:40 — Oakland's eviction tool, MacBooks, and the lowest digital denominator17:30 — Thin-slicing IRS Direct File without losing Congress22:36 — Building executive sponsorship that allows safe failure23:41 — Product vs service: the rest of the job that isn't writing code26:09 — Illinois childcare vouchers: when modernising the form makes things worse29:22 — Design problems, engineering problems, and the laptop-hinge analogy33:18 — Can AI prototyping close the policy–implementation gap?35:40 — The FAFSA simplification crisis and the case for bilingual builders37:31 — Unbuilding: how a request for a 15th CHIP system became one to remove ten41:18 — What keeps her goingOur HostsLily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She's currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She's worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury's. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group's Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He's the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager's Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon's music stores in the US & UK.

The traditional corporate ladder is a relic of the past. While we once viewed career growth as a predictable, linear climb, today's AI-driven landscape has replaced that fixed path with a much more fluid reality. In this episode, Denise Kulikowsky, CPO of Tapestry, joins me to explore the rise of the non-linear career path and how forward-thinking companies are formalizing professional fluidity to drive innovation. Tapestry, the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade, utilizes a "walk, run, fly" AI strategy where tools are treated as enablers for employees to proactively direct their own development. Denise reframes the concern that using AI is "cheating" by emphasizing that it is an efficiency tool, provided employees remain accountable for the final output. Denise highlights key strategies like the Talent Communities program, which facilitates six-month global job swaps for senior managers and directors to drive cultural immersion. The company also uses a "magic and logic" approach to build success profiles that define future-ready behaviors like leading with courage and activating the vision. Additionally, she shares insights on bridging the gap between frontline and corporate roles through rotational programs that bring store leaders into the home office. Get the strategic blueprint you need for building a resilient workforce that is adaptable to technological advancement. Watch the full video on YouTube ---------- Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: ⁠⁠https://greatleadership.substack.com/ Quick heads-up: my new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, is a practical playbook for building an environment where people do their best work—order a copy here: 8EXlaws.com