CPO Mastery Podcast

What happens to your brand when AI buys for your customers, not them? Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify, breaks down the biggest shift in commerce since the smartphone. In this episode, we go deep on agentic commerce: what it actually means, how merchants should prepare, and what happens to brand loyalty, conversion funnels, and the customer relationship when AI agents start making purchasing decisions autonomously. Mani shares Shopify's internal "crawl, walk, run, fly" framework for thinking about AI-driven commerce, walks us through SimGym (their simulated AI buyer testing environment), and explains the Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol built on programmable USDC. This is one of the most grounded, executive-level conversations on AI agents and the future of retail you'll find. What we cover:- Who really owns the customer relationship in an agentic world: the brand, the platform, or the AI?- The four stages of agentic commerce and where most businesses are today- Why brand loyalty is not going away, and how the "human persona" vs "agent persona" changes merchant strategy- Shopify's SimGym: running A/B tests with simulated AI buyers before going live- How the Universal Commerce Protocol changes discovery, interaction, and transaction- The Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol and why programmable money matters for global merchants- Why decision-making, not execution, is your real bottleneck in an AI-first world- How Shopify is using its merchant data advantage to stay ahead with Sidekick and Sidekick Pulse Guest: Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify Who this is for: Founders, C-suite executives, product leaders, and ecommerce operators trying to understand what AI agents mean for their business right now. Subscribe for weekly conversations with top executives navigating the AI era:https://www.youtube.com/@productfaculty

Ami Vora is the Chief Product Officer at Faire, an online wholesale marketplace last valued at $12.59b. She has a wide array of experience in tech, having been an early employee at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. She has also held a variety of roles, spanning product, marketing, and even operating Facebook’s VC fund (fbFund). Alongside her impressive career, Ami writes insightful blog posts about scaling tech products, teams, and cultures, and we unpack some of those posts in this conversation. In today's episode, we discuss: Ami’s fascinating journey through tech Tactical advice for forming a product vision and strategy What product simplicity means, and how to achieve it Some of Ami’s most popular career and product frameworks Advice for operating amidst uncertainty How to optimize your career like a product Where to find Ami Vora: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amvora/ Substack: https://substack.com/@amivora Where to find Moe Ali: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productfaculty Twitter: https://twitter.com/productfaculty ProductFaculty: https://www.productfaculty.com/ Referenced: Facebook’s VC fund (fbFund) that Ami operated: https://medium.com/swlh/fbfund-the-investment-fund-youve-never-heard-of-that-helped-start-lyft-bc57ee661162 Faire: https://www.faire.com/ “If I can see a problem, it’s mine to solve” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/if-i-can-see-a-problem-its-mine-to “It’s not prioritization until it hurts” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/its-not-prioritization-until-it-hurts “Listen, Document, Decide” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/learning-to-make-decisions-in-a-new Timestamps: [00:00:59] Ami's background [00:02:48] The mentality of leaving Microsoft for a temp role at FB [00:05:06] Advice for forming a product vision and strategy [00:09:12] What it means for a product experience to be "simple” [00:10:24] How to create simple product experiences [00:10:52] The "Listen, Decide, Document" framework [00:12:23] Ami's attitude to prioritising amidst uncertainty [00:13:37] Getting comfortable with making wrong decisions [00:15:48] It's not prioritization until it hurts [00:16:36] How to optimize your career like a product [00:18:52] How to make time for career development [00:20:53] If you see a problem, it's yours to solve [00:23:03] Leadership and career hack: Upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 [00:25:30] How to solicit valuable feedback [00:27:35] The future of PM and how to stay ahead of it

In this podcast, you'll hear from P.J. Linarducci, the CPO of Thumbtack, on structuring product teams. It turns out that organizational structures are all flawed, and it's a myth that there is one "perfect" solution. Learn about the four-step process to ensure that you have the best structure to meet your needs, and discover when it makes sense to adapt it.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from Surojit Chatterjee, the Chief Product Officer of Coinbase. Our conversation today will focus on three themes: the role of product in enabling disruptive technologies, the core PM skill set, and navigating your product career. Let’s dig right in.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from Shishir Mehrotra, the CEO of Coda. Shishir was an early employee and VP at YouTube, where he ran product, design and engineering teams. At YouTube, Shishir set an audacious goal of getting to 1 billion hours of watchtime, which was 2X the total bits on the entire internet. In 4 years,Youtube was able to achieve that goal. In this podcast we’ll go behind the scenes and learn about the power of Rituals during this time of Hyper Growth.

It’s no secret that diverse teams deliver better outcomes. At Etsy, Diversity isn’t just an initiative it’s a core value and it’s this focus on D&I that has led the company to have some of the best stats in the tech world. In this podcast, you’ll hear from Kruti Patel Goyal the CPO at Etsy on a range of D&I initiatives Etsy is doing from tactical things to systematically remove bias from their hiring process to tackling retention and growth of a diverse workforce once they are onboarded.

In this podcast, you'll hear from Manik Gupta, the former Chief Product Officer of Uber about what it takes to be a great product manager, why product leaders must adopt a Platform-thinking mindset if they want to be successful in capturing key trends and the importance of understanding product growth, even if you're not in that function.