Mario Rodriguez is GitHub's Chief Product Officer. And he believes that Copilot and other AI advances will unleash a wave of creativity and enable a billion people to be software developers.

Mario says the definition of “software developer” will have to change as non-professionals discover that they can make apps, too. And the way they do so will look very different: “It's gonna feel a lot more like how kids play. ​​It's like you create something you play with and you're like, Nope. Then you instruct it again… It’s going to be real time development.”

On this episode of CRAFTED., Mario gets us excited about the future of software development!

Takeaways:

• Mario says we’ve lost some of the creativity of the early days of the web; AI is helping bring it back
• With AI, it’s getting much easier (for non-professional developers) to build “micro experiences” and other ephemeral apps that just serve one purpose. 
• The craft of product management must change with AI, because building with non-deterministic AI is so tricky to get right
• When building with AI, run your scenario multiple times. Test your prompts repeatedly. You will get different responses each time. Are they all helpful to your user? 
• Invest in offline evaluation when building with AI or else you’ll have lots of problems later. 
• Psychology is key. How will users react if AI tells them something subjective? Mario has seen Copilot users get upset, e.g. “Nope, you're completely wrong. I know what I'm doing. You are a machine. I am not gonna ask you to ever review my code.” 
• Don’t optimize for just one metric. Mario says you should have three or so that you evaluate in concert. 
• Product sense matters! 
• Prompt engineering is real. How you can better prompt your Copilot
• Keeping developers in flow is critical. 
• How much time do developers spend on “sense-making” vs. coding? How much time do they spend waiting for reviews? These are some of the questions GitHub asks when evaluating developer productivity. 
• Mario came to the US from Cuba when he was in high school. His father is an electrical engineer and his mother is a teacher. Both influence him greatly.
• Mario founded a charter school in rural North Carolina because “everyone should have access to amazing education.”
• System thinking and evaluating things from first principles are key skills for the future. 

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

Key Moments 

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:32) - 1B Developers!
• (05:53) - Ephemeral apps and how they will unleash creativity and learning
• (06:21) - The time Dan programmed his TI-83 calculator to play blackjack
• (07:32) - Why “natural language is going to take center stage” as software development evolves
• (10:30) - Why building with Generative AI is completely different
• (13:50) - Why humans don’t always respond well to suggestions from CoPilot
• (15:36) - Why offline evaluation is so important when building with AI
• (19:14) - Building Copilot: balancing speed with value
• (21:01) - Why “product sense” matter so much
• (21:54) - Tips for prompting CoPilot effectively
• (25:59) - Building Copilot: the early days
• (30:44) - How GitHub measures developer happiness
• (33:20) - Growing up in Cuba and developing a love for teaching (his mom’s profession) and engineering (his dad’s)
• (37:18) - Why Mario founded a school in rural North Carolina
• (39:31) - Systems thinking, and other skills that Mario hopes today’s kids will learn
• (42:16) - Outro

Henrik Werdelin is on an AI-fueled mission to launch thousands of startups a year. 

He is the founder of BARK, which went public, and prehype, a studio that has incubated several unicorns. With Audos, Henrik is building AI agents that can coach founders how he would — if he had infinite time to do so. 

And Audos is not just for the cliche founder looking to launch a unicorn… It’s for entrepreneurs of all stripes. With AI making things easier, Henrik expects to see lots more “DonkeyCorns,” i.e. highly profitable businesses operated by just one or two people. 

“DonkeyCorns party like unicorns, but they grind like mules.”

Check out this episode for lots of practical tips for how you can get more out of AI. Plus, we’ll peer into the weird future we’re building. 

Takeaways from this episode: 

• AI enables new businesses to be created, launched, and tested very quickly. Henrik shares how Audos uses AI to help founders focus on their customers, launch, and get customers
• Henrik talks to his AI agents like they’re people: He gives them names and backstories. By doing so, he finds he has a better partner than a bot or Google search would be. 
• The more creative you are with prompts, the better the AI will be. e.g., Ask for “ten ideas that will definitely get me fired”
• “Customer-founder fit” is the most important ingredient to Henrik 
• Use “signal mining” to prove there is real demand for your product
• “The swipe” proves there is real intent for your product, i.e. get people to pay for it, even if you haven’t built it yet.
• BARK succeeded (it’s gone public) by following its mission (be “Disney for dogs”) not by following its utility (boxes of stuff for pets)
• “Relationship capital” and “humanity” will be more important, as AI continues to excel at technical jobs. 
• Take AI seriously right now. And Henrik says senior leaders need to be using it themselves
• It’s weird out there: We discuss the uncanny valley of talking to AI agents (including those that impersonate your dead spouse) 
• Rock and roll – Henrik tells the story of his career break: As an intern, he pulled an on-air stunt at MTV that he was sure would get him fired, but instead got him a huge promotion.

Henrik is the author of The Acorn Method: How Companies Get Growing Again. And he’s writing a new book, Me, My Customer, and AI. He also co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Prompt, which features the interesting, weird, and uncanny-valley ways people are using AI in their day-to-day lives, as well as practical tips for how you can go beyond “beginner mode” in your own use of AI. 

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early-stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

Key Moments 

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:56) - Henrik’s method for launching startups
• (04:08) - Why “customer-founder fit” is the first thing he looks for and how it manifested at BARK
• (06:43) - How to use “signal mining” to prove there is real demand for your product
• (08:42) - Launching BARK Air, “a totally real airline for dogs”
• (12:28) - Launching Audos and using AI to launch thousands of startups a year
• (17:31) - “DonkeyCorns!” Why we will see more highly profitable companies run by just one or two people
• (21:56) - How Henrik uses AI, why he personifies his agents, and the creative prompts he uses
• (28:16) - The stunt that nearly got Henrik fired at MTV, but instead was his career break
• (31:26) - Why big companies need to take AI seriously right now
• (34:53) - How Henrik advises entrepreneurs looking for their next play
• (37:38) - “Pursue interestingness”
• (38:50) - The uncanny valley of AI embodying people
• (40:16) - Outro

Wonder aims to be a “super app for mealtime”, with people turning to it for everything from delivery to groceries to meal kits and more... It’s a very ambitious food-tech startup founded by Marc Lore, the legendary founder who previously built, scaled, and sold Diapers.com and Jet.com (to Amazon and Walmart, respectively). 

Wonder is rapidly opening stores across the East Coast that, as they put it, feature 30 restaurants in one location. The theory is that that one location can be 30x as profitable as a similarly-sized operation. 

Serving and delivering that many types of food, quickly, is an incredible operational challenge. And on this episode of CRAFTED., Wonder VP of Product Rich Przekop shares how his team has built custom software and data products to forecast demand, prevent waste, and make sure the food you want is ready for you. 

Plus, how Wonder is building for today, but also keeping an eye towards tomorrow… The software Rich and team are building may someday be offered externally to power all manner of food/logistics businesses. 

***

Key Moments:

[2:27] The big vision for Wonder: “a super app for mealtime”

[3:28] What it’s like working with legendary founder Marc Lore

[5:08] How Rich got so into data (and how GenAI is now passing Wonder’s SQL test)

[7:32] The ideal customer experience at Wonder

[10:54] Why Wonder had to build custom software

[13:02] How and why Wonder built a simulator to help it forecast demand, reduce food waste and prevent stockouts

[20:04] How Wonder may someday whitelabel its logistics software and sell it to other companies

[23:23] The culture at Wonder and why “Marc is the cheerleader” and Rich plays the role of “Yes, but also…” 

[26:00] The power of clear, measurable goals

***

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

When Docker restructured, the company went back to its roots: super-serving developers. CTO Justin Cormack says that’s why the company is developer-obsessed, not customer-obsessed: “We really wanted to focus on the fact that it's the developer who loves Docker. It's the developer who is going to be using Docker every day…” 

Over the past decade, Docker exploded in popularity as companies moved to cloud and adopted software containers as they did... but the company struggled as a business and, five years ago, made massive changes: “When we restructured people were like, `Well, I kind of hope this works, but I doubt it will.`” 

Well, it’s working. Docker is now bigger than ever and growing.

On this episode of CRAFTED... We'll discuss developer productivity, how Docker continues to build new products to improve it, and why so many organizations are in an awkward phase, with too many responsibilities being put onto the developer. 

We’ll also look beyond the container to new vectors of growth, including helping companies put GenAI to production. 

Plus, Justin will share tips for developers on how they can better communicate their needs. And what CFO-types can do in return: “the one thing they can do is actually listen to the developers!”

***

Key Moments:

[3:13] Why Docker needed to restructure and refocus and why the turnaround has been a success

[04:52] Why Docker is “developer-obsessed” not “customer-obsessed” 

[6:13] Docker’s explosive growth in its early years: containers, the cloud and microservices

[08:48] Docker's Successful Restructuring and Product Development

[11:22] “Shift Left” and why this trend of putting more responsibility onto developers earlier and earlier in development is great, but also can put too much pressure on developers, who need to be supported

[13:53] How Justin and team prioritize Docker's roadmap 

[16:48] AI: How Docker is helping its client build RAG and other GenAI apps, and the tricky infrastructure needed to support them

[19:38] Developer productivity and the importance of the inner loop

[27:01] Developers love their laptops! And why Windows machines have become so popular

[30:40] How to talk so your CFO will listen and the rise of business-focused engineers

***

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

Software, hardware, and biotechnology are playing an increasingly transformative role in our mental health and wellness. On this episode of CRAFTED., recorded live on the “Next” stage at SXSW, we discuss what investors look for in these new companies and how they separate what’s real — and what’s near-term — from what’s hype. 

On stage with host Dan Blumberg are:

• Amy Kruse, General Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Satori Neuro, and a trained neuroscientist
• Matias Serebrinsky, Co-founder and General Partner at PsyMed Ventures, and the host of Business Trip, which is a great podcast if you want to go even deeper on these topics. Listen at businesstrip.fm 
• Christie Nicholson, Founder of Studio Lumina, and the co-host for this panel

We’ll explore AI-powered tools for mental health, the new area of “enerceuticals” (energy replacing the “pharma”), psychedelics, and why what’s in your gut is so important to your mental state. Hear from investment experts who have a wide view of this growing startup landscape and better understand which new ventures are likely to succeed.

— 

Key Moments:

[03:18] Recent advances in biotech and why advances in data and AI are helping biology become a more “mature” science

[05:30] Why AI is overhyped, but also where it’s not

[09:07] Why psychedelics are overhyped, but also where they’re not

[11:24] What’s real and amazing: brain-computer interfaces, e.g. humans controlling robotic arms with the minds

[13:55] What’s real and amazing: precision psychiatry and neuroscience

[15:42] The emerging field of “enerceuticals” -- using energy instead of drugs, e.g. low intensity focused ultrasound

[17:47] Neuroplasticity: our brains can change!

[23:01] Mental health, the gut-brain axis, and food as medicine

[34:58] The business models of bio tech startups and how to know when a company is making progress on a years-long effort

—

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. Learn more at Docker.com

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where my team and I can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 CRAFTED.fm

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, a multi-billion dollar startup that helps people and companies level up. Through a combination of human coaching and AI, BetterUp is able to offer the kind of executive coaching that used to be reserved for... executives. 

 On this episode of CRAFTED. we dig into how BetterUp ships new products, proves they work, and what's next… 

Key Moments:

[2:23 - 7:27] How BetterUp helps companies and employees level up

[7:27 - 11:15] How BetterUp build products — and why they have more than the typical product trio of product/design/engineering

[11:15 - 14:22] Launching the Group Coaching product, testing it, and scaling it (during the pandemic) 

[14:22 - 17:42] “Kids in the candy store” – how BetterUp is building with GenAI after so many years of building with GOFAI (good old fashioned AI)

[17:42 - 20:38] Challenges as BetterUp has scaled up and what’s next for the company

[20:38 - 22:26] The “whitewater world of work” and what makes Gabriella optimistic about the future

—

The book: Tomorrowmind 

— 
CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. Learn more at Docker.com

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where my team and I can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

—

Diaa El All is the founder and CEO of Soundful, which enables anyone to create brand new music in just a few seconds with AI. And on this episode of CRAFTED., we are literally making music.

We’re also talking about the ethics of using AI to make music. Diaa has been very outspoken about what he sees as the misguided practices of other AI+music companies that train their models by just scraping the web. At Soundful, they’ve taken a different approach: they are painstakingly building their own proprietary data by recording musicians playing one note at a time and then layering the notes to create music that sounds better than if you’d just sampled songs. 

“We've done it. There is a way where technological advancement and working with the rights-holders and protecting them can co-exist together.” 

We discuss:

* Why Diaa stands with the music industry against what he sees as other companies' move fast & break things approach to AI 

* Diaa’s background as a classical musician, DJ, ghost producer, and founder

* How Soundful built its data and how it layers sounds together to make music

* Soundful’s origin story and how it emerged from Diaa’s work with AI and marketing automation

* Why humans are so important when making music 

* Why music theory rules are important to follow – except when they’re not!

* What to expect next… and how incredible AI voice cloning has become

***

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where Dan Blumberg and team advise companies on product, discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

***

Key Moments:

[02:01] Ethical AI in Music Creation: How Soundful builds its AI ethically, avoiding training on copyrighted materials and using proprietary data.

[05:00] Diaa’s journey from Cairo to the Royal Academy of London, and his various roles in the music industry before founding Soundful

[07:02] Soundful’s origin story

[10:10] Soundful's music creation process, including the use of music theory rules and proprietary data sets to generate tracks

[12:08] How Soundful manages the non-deterministic nature of AI to ensure unique, high-quality music outputs for users.

[14:36] How Soundful levels people up and why he’s so excited to level up that great singer who is not yet a great producer

[17:00] The hardest part of building Soundful - working with the music industry and winning their acceptance

[21:55] Predictions for the future, including advancements in voice cloning and the potential for democratizing creative opportunities.

Paige Costello is the the head of AI and co-head of product at Asana and on this episode of CRAFTED. we're exploring what it means to ship products with AI, how AI will change the way work gets done, and how to organize your teams for success in this brave new world.

We explore:

• How the future of work – and communicating about work – is changing
• Why Asana chose to create an “AI org” instead of a less centralized innovation approach
• How Asana ships — and measures the success of — AI-powered features, e.g. SmartStatus, that aim to take the drudgery out of work
• How product management is changing with the rise of AI
• Why running an A/B test is harder when a non-deterministic (i.e. unpredictable by design) GenAI tool is involved
• Why it’s so important to “get out of the building” and some of Paige’s favorite user research moments from doing so
• The latest with “PaigeBot” and what Paige hopes AI can do for her

***

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where Dan Blumberg and team advise companies on product, discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

***

Key Moments:

[02:17] AI-generated status reports: How Asana summarizes a project – or many projects – using AI. And why it needs to do so carefully. 

[05:00] How to organize for innovation: How Asana organizes its teams to integrate AI and the strategies they employ for effective AI implementation.

[09:06] How AI will change the role of product managers and why the stochastic nature of AI will be something we all have to get used to

[14:26] Challenges of prototyping and scaling AI

[16:07] How Asana uses AI internally and how it dogfoods its own products

[18:17] Profound implications of AI + the future of work

[22:20] Will AI really help product managers get out of the building more? Or do we just find new excuses not to? And what Paige finds so powerful about “being in someone’s space”

[25:32] An update on “PaigeBot” and what Paige wishes a bot would do for her

“So if you take any great startup and look backwards, you'll see that 90 percent of their growth came from like 10 percent of the stuff that they tried. So how do you find that 10 percent as quickly as possible?”

Matt Lerner has advised hundreds of startups on how to grow. Now, the CEO of SYSTM has written a book called Growth Levers and How to Find Them where he shares his approach. This episode of CRAFTED. is full of actionable advice on how you can grow your products and companies. Matt will tell us about the mindset shift founders need to make from thinking about their products to thinking about their customers needs. We'll talk about jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) style interviewing and why it's such a powerful approach, but also why at first Matt was put off by some of the overly academic language that often goes with jobs. And we'll talk about how you can get new customers to that aha moment as quickly as possible, so they stick with your product. Plus, lots of real talk about founders and the mistakes they make. 

Welcome to CRAFTED., a show about great products and the people who make them. CRAFTED. brings you stories of founders, makers, and innovators that reveal how they've built game changing products and how you can too.

—

Key Moments:

• [0:00] Intro
• [2:20] 90 percent of growth comes 10 percent of the stuff you try
• [3:53] Over-thinkers, under-thinkers, and delegators: the 3 types of founders and the mistakes they make
• [7:40] Why the pace of learning is so important
• [9:51] Great examples of companies that learn quickly
• [10:52] The “locksmith moment” and why you need to find yours
• [12:45] Jobs-to-be-Done style interviewing and why it’s so effective
• [14:07] How to do a JTBD interview
• [16:05] The mindset shift founders need to make from thinking about their product to thinking about the customers’ needs – and why it’s so hard for them to do so
• [21:24] Growth Sprints and how to set them up for success
• [25:07] Retention and customer activation: still (!) overlooked by most and why it’s so critical
• [29:00] Matt writes a blog post on the spot about how working at an oil refinery taught him about startups
• [31:36] Writing a book is not an agile process! And the fantastic reception for Growth Levers

—

More on Matt Lerner:

• His company: SYSTM
• The book: Growth Levers and How to Find Them

—

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where host Dan Blumberg also advises companies on product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more and sign up for the CRAFTED. newsletter at modernproductminds.com 

On April 1st, 2013, ProdPad promised something revolutionary: “We now take your backlog of ideas, and with highly advanced big data crunching algorithm technology, automagically render a complete and accurate product roadmap. [...] The Auto-Roadmap Tool not only builds itself, but also covers for the hardest part of the Product Manager’s job: Getting complete buy-in from your team.”

Amazing! And product managers wrote in with unbridled excitement itching to get their hands on this incredible tool.

Except… this was obviously an April Fool’s joke, right!? 

Well, fast forward to today and it ain’t a joke! ProdPad is building these automagical abilities right now. Thanks to Generative AI, this absurdist joke has become reality (though not yet the part about magically getting buy-in from your fussy stakeholders... that's in the 2.0 version :) 

On this episode of CRAFTED., Janna Bastow, the founder and CEO of ProdPad, founder of Mind The Product, inventor of the now-next-later roadmap, and an April Fool's prankster you need to keep your eye on describes what a great roadmap is, how AI is freeing up product people to do more meaningful work, and what the future of product management will entail (getting out of the building more!). 

Welcome to CRAFTED., a show about great products and the people who make them. 

Sign up for the CRAFTED. newsletter and explore past episodes at modernproductminds.com

***

CRAFTED. is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium.ai. 

Enjoy this bonus, happy hour edition of CRAFTED., recorded live during SXSW. It’s a very unCRAFTED. CRAFTED. Featuring four innovators on a rooftop in Austin talking about what struck them at this year’s SXSW. Kick back and unwind with Christie Nicholson (Founder of the Studio for Communicating Complexity), Kwaku Aning (Director, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking (CIET) at San Diego Jewish Academy and Founder, Retro Futurism Consulting), James Burdine (Founder and Principal at Bishop Linville Consulting), and CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg.

Topics and tangents include: the use of AI in education and government, the data we unwittingly give platforms (e.g. Apple Vision Pro could detect when we have a great idea bc our eyes dilate when we do), the deconstruction and redistribution of SXSW, explore/exploit and the need to be bored, and much more random stuff.

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds. 

Sign up for the CRAFTED. newsletter and explore past episodes at modernproductminds.com

***
CRAFTED. is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium. ai.

Career trajectories used to be like steamships: full steam ahead. And then they became more like sailboats: lots of tacking. But now… we’re swirling in whitewater. And, as the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman helps people build the skill they need to flourish:

“When you're kayaking in the whitewater. It's hard to get a sense of what could be around the bend, but if you know if what's coming up is a sudden cascade or versus another, you know, set of gentle bumps, or maybe it's a calmer space in the river, it can give you a great advantage.”

On this episode of Crafted, we focus on the five key skill groups that can help you be more successful: Prospection, Resilience, Innovation and creativity, Social support by way of rapid rapport, and Mattering and meaning.

And, good news! These skills can be trained!

Gabriella writes about these skills in Tomorrowmind, which she co-authored with Martin Seligman. And, at BetterUp she builds products that help companies — and their people — build these skills at scale. On an upcoming episode of Crafted, we’ll explore how BetterUp does this using human coaching, backed by artificial intelligence systems. 

Welcome to Crafted, a show about great products and the people who make them. 

Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds. 

Sign up for the Crafted newsletter and explore past episodes at modernproductminds.com

—
Key Moments:

• [00:00 - 01:01] Introduction
• [02:16 - 06:40] From psychiatry to tech
• [06:40 - 09:53] Key skill needed for a "tomorrowmind"
• [09:53 - 13:51] Developing Resilience Skills
• [16:55 - 18:53] Enhancing Perspective and Creativity
• [18:53 - 22:35] Planning and Dynamic Adaptation
• [22:35 - 26:05] The Role of Coaching in Skill Development
• [26:05 - 27:35] Outro and What's Coming in Part Two

—

Here’s the book:

• Tomorrowmind 

—

Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium.ai

Sports, and the way we experience them, is changing. And AI, 5G, 3D, and all the other buzzy acronyms are why. Behshad Behzadi is the CTO and Chief AI Officer of Sportradar and on this episode of CRAFTED., we explore ways sports and technology are intersecting in novel, weird, and amazing ways. 

Sportradar creates immersive experiences and data products for sports fans, players, leagues, and bettors. 

Behshad joined after 17 years at Google where he co-founded Google Assistant, Google Lens and more. He's been building with AI and voice for way longer than most and has lots of practical advice on how to get the most out of AI. 

Takeaways from this episode:

• AI enables incredibly precise levels of personalization — and that’s coming to a sports experience near you
• “GenAI is like a hammer…” but don’t use it like one. Traditional coding is often more effective, and you may want a mix of GenAI and old school code for different parts of the same problem
• You don’t always need the latest greatest GenAI models – save costs by using smaller models when you can
• To build moats, look to your data and customer relationships; less so to your GenAI models
• When adopting GenAI, corporations need good governance and oversight
• Google Assistant, which Behshad helped launch, promised too many things in its earliest versions, leading to user confusion
• Ignore the competition and focus on user needs (not easy when there is a race to dominate a market, as there was with the rise of Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa)
• Behshad says the “ultimate assistant” is coming within the next 20 years
• Behshad says AI will help cure many diseases in the next 20 years

Key Moments:

• (02:42) - Why this (AI) moment is so exciting in sports and beyond
• (04:04) - Personalizing the fan experience
• (06:09) - How GenAI can give you a competitive advantage (and where it won’t)
• (08:05) - How companies can succeed with GenAI, and pitfalls to avoid
• (10:48) - When to use GenAI and when to use old school coding
• (11:59) - midroll
• (13:10) - Adopting GenAI internally for writing code and more
• (16:06) - Building Google Assistant and early AI + voice products
• (18:09) - Why you should ignore the competition, and other hard moments from scaling Google Assistant
• (20:58) - Why Behshad believes “ultimate assistant” will soon be reality and many diseases will be cured thanks to the rise of AI
• (22:32) - Outro

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

“You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis.

Daniel Kimerling has a keen eye for the trends, technologies, and cultural shifts that are going to be big. A decade ago, he took an insight – that developers needed powerful tool so they could embed banking services into their apps – and launched Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup. Today BaaS and "embedded finance" are huge. 

Now, as a VC and the founder of Deciens Capital, Dan is again looking for change:

“From an ego perspective, I love being right. From a financial perspective, I love being right at the right time."

The right team:

"You have to be willing to embrace a level of physical, emotional, financial, psychological, spiritual pain and keep going. Just keep fucking going."

And business models that actually make sense:

"It's not that, like, Generative AI is not cool. As a Dweeb, it's fucking cool as hell. I got it. But then the question is: 'How the fuck are you gonna make a dime?'"

This is a fun episode! Listen in for a masterclass in disruption. Also f-bombs. Lots of f-bombs. More on Crafted than ever before. Yet also mixed  with grace and humility. Dan is a mensch. :)

Key Moments:

[0:00] Introduction

[2:07] How Dan got started in tech, as the very first employee at TechCrunch

[4:58] Founding Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company after meeting the founders of Twilio and Stripe and seeing the API’s and “embedding” were going to be huge

[7:25] “What you kind of come to see is that to some degree everything is a financial plumbing problem.”

[9:12] “You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis.”

[11:37] Founding Deciens Capital

[12:23] The “industrial logic” of most VC firms and how Deciens aims to stay small and serve early stage founders

[15:07] What Dan looks for when making an investment, including grit, variant perspective, and a MacGyver-like adaptability

[18:36] Generative AI: Why VC’s are rushing in, but he’s skeptical about business models. Will all the spoils just go to the open source community + NVIDIA? 

[22:36] What Dan is excited about: the future of VC and building financial service products that people actually love

[24:24] Personalization: “[Big banks] really serve a very median audience. And we have a number of companies [...] that are far outside of that middle lane. And thankfully, because of the power of the internet, the search and distribution costs for those opportunities is way lower than it would have been in a analog era.”

[25:11] How Dan goes out of his way to help people – and how you can learn from his system

[28:50] Outro

[29:27] An F-bomb laced Easter Egg parting gift

Books mentioned:

• "A Brief History of Financial Euphoria" by John Kenneth Galbraith
• "Power Law" by Sebastian Wallaby

About Crafted

Crafted is a show about great products and the people who make them. Hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and public radio host with deep experience not only delivering major software releases, but also as the producer of the best known, and most listened-to, public radio shows. Dan has founded startups and led product releases and growth initiatives at LinkedIn, The New York Times, and as a consultant to fintechs and big banks. Before getting into tech, Dan led the team behind Morning Edition on WNYC, the most listened-to show on the nation’s largest NPR station. Dan produced, edited, reported for, and hosted this and other marquee news shows at WNYC and WBEZ and also frequently reported on national news events for NPR. Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds. 

A highlight reel that will will help you find great episodes in the Crafted show archive, featuring some of the incredible founders and product builders we featured in 2023. You'll hear voices belonging to the founders of Gusto, Lattice, Monte Carlo, Moov, Wevr, PS, as well as from senior leaders at AWS, Redesign Health, Betterment, Flatiron Health, Predibase, and Bauplan, and more! 

And we want to hear from you! We're planning big things this year and want to learn more about what you want to hear. Please take two minutes to take this short survey: https://www.tinyurl.com/craftedsurvey 

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Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can you build your future at artium.ai

We're not building a set of blogs or something like that where the domain is well understood. We're really pushing the forefront of what people are doing with vessels and optimization.

"The effect of global shipping on the climate is hard to overstate," reports The New York Times. "Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — producing roughly as much carbon each year as the aviation industry does."

So... Nautilus Labs uses AI to make maritime vessels more efficient by helping giant cargo ships optimize their routes across the oceans and suggesting when they need maintenance, saving money and reducing carbon emissions in the process.

On this episode of Crafted, former CTO Todd Sundsted describes how they model ships and their routes and push the envelope with AI. He also shares his approach to organizational design and how to align teams to customer problems.

Key Moments:
00:00 - Intro
01:53 - Helping cargo ships be more efficient
04:17 - Getting the data from difficult environments
06:24 - Aha moments
07:37 - Improving Nautilus Labs’ organizational design
12:31 - Aligning teams to the impact they have
15:15 - Outro

** Please take this three-minute survey to help us create more great Crafted episodes. http://tinyurl.com/craftedsurvey **

Last week, on Thursday January 18th at 4:49pm Eastern, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its way to the International Space Station. On board are 4 astronauts from Axiom Space, a private company that’s building a brand new space station. 

To celebrate the successful launch of AX-3, we’re bringing you one of our favorite episodes from the Crafted archives: an interview with Axiom’s Director of In-Space Manufacturing. Keep listening to find out why Axiom is building a commercial space station — and why microgravity is such a special environment for building things like computer chips and for doing biological research that could lead to new cancer treatments.

“When we talk about future cities in space, it seems like they're really far away. The truth is, it's happening right now. We're building those.” That’s the mind-blowing reality that Jana Stoudemire works in everyday at Axiom Space, a leading space infrastructure developer based in Texas. Axiom is building a successor to the International Space Station and developing commercial opportunities in orbit that go way beyond satellites. Central to all this is the unique environment of microgravity, which allows you to do things that just can’t be done on earth.

On this episode, Jana takes us to the final frontier, and shares Axiom's plans for advanced biomedical research, space-made semiconductors that could enable quantum computing, and what this means for future scientific advances. She’ll also get into the challenges of building a state-of-the-art lab that will orbit around the earth, from the equipment and personnel, to where does that exercise bike go?

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. 

Crafted is sponsored by Artium, which helps startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft needed to build great software for years to come. Learn more at ThisIsArtium.com (and let us know you learned about us from the podcast).

“I was a pretty bad people manager and so there was a moment where I decided that this is not going to work and I really need to decide which path I'm gonna go. Am I gonna stay hands on keyboard or am I going to really help build the engineering team and scale the organization?”

Edward Kim is the CTO and co-founder of Gusto, a multi-billion dollar company that helps businesses with payroll, benefits, and human resources. In this episode, we’re talking about scaling up and why Gusto’s focus on quality code and engineering mindset is so critical. Plus, Edward tells us how he learned to be a great manager, how watching his parents struggle to run their small business planted the seed for Gusto, and and what it was like recruiting top talent to work on a “boring” problem like payroll, back when Instagram and social-local-mobile startups were all the rage.

Key Moments:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:50 - Why Edward loves solving problems for small businesses
• 04:20 - Building out version one
• 06:48 - Finding product market fit
• 09:48 - What does Gusto offer today?
• 11:15 - The secret to good code
• 15:49 - Growing as an engineering leader
• 18:44 - What’s next for Edward and Gusto?
• 20:04 - Exploring Generative AI
• 22:09 - Outro

“The last nine months, no matter what we want to talk about, our customers want to talk about one thing, which is Gen AI.”

One year ago, ChatGPT woke the entire world up to the possibilities of Generative AI. Since then, the conversation around AI has not ceased, with constant questions being raised about its safety, accuracy, and potential implications for the tech world.

In this episode, Dan hosts a panel at NYC Tech Week 2023, discussing the evolution and potential of Generative AI with Jacopo Tagliabue of Bauplan, Cat Miller of Flatiron Health, Raghvender Arni of AWS Industries, and Justin Zhao of Predibase. Together, they discuss the journey in taking Generative AI from prototype to production, delving into the need for a stable foundation of best practices in data and software development, how to overcome the challenges of evaluation and performance, and the cruciality of red teaming and guardrails to ensure the viability and usability of AI models.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 02:19 - About the guests
• 12:58 - GOFAI vs GenAI: Should you just be using a classifier?
• 18:54 - AI + health data
• 23:24 - How do you make sure evaluation works?
• 24:57 - The foundations needed to take GenAI to the next level
• 34:22 - Is now the time for experimentation or business models?
• 36:49 - The science fiction of today that will be commonplace tomorrow
• 42:42 - Outro

“Nobody's going to drive as fast on the straightaway if they don't have good brakes because if that's not available, then you can't go fast confidently.” John Mileham is the CTO of Betterment, and he’s also a race car driving instructor. Though they seem like vastly different roles, he has the same focus in both: going fast but doing so safely. Betterment is a digital financial advisor that builds software that can automate your finances… so safety is key. In this episode, John describes how he empowers teams and creates conditions that foster creativity, speed, and security. 

In this episode, John breaks down how his experience on the racetrack has influenced his approach to innovation, drawing on the recent improvements to Betterment’s Cash Reserve product, the difficult transition to implementing GraphQL in the organization, and how performance envelopes are expanded with the confidence of safety.

“The lean startup and MVP model is absolutely the right mindset to have, but that doesn't mean that you have to throw spaghetti at the wall.” Neil Caron, Product and Design Leader at Gartner, is doing something hard: helping a big company to innovate. Gartner is the company many technology buyers turn to for advice when they’re looking to buy mission-critical products. Traditionally, that’s meant reading reports and talking to analysts, but with the new BuySmart software-as-a-service product, they can now collaborate more seamlessly with each other as they go through their checklists and make a decision. 

In this episode, Neil shares more on the challenge of innovating at a legacy corporation, including how to manage relationships with existing clients, pick the right pricing strategy, and the importance of autonomy in an innovation group — and how to go about getting it.

“Being a part of financial services for the last 15 or 20 years, it seemed like we were always putting lipstick on the pig”. Wade Arnold was tired of putting a nice UI on  creaky infrastructure and he saw how insufficient payment systems are for today’s internet-based businesses. So Wade founded Moov, a fintech that's building systems for the way money moves today – and they’re starting at the very bottom of the stack and building their way up. 

On this episode, Wade shares how Moov emerged from an open source project, how its embrace of developer communities has become a competitive advantage, and why he encourages everyone to “respect the craft” of software development.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com and start a conversation at hello@thisisartium.com

* Special note to Money 2020 attendees: say hi to us in Vegas! Email hello@thisisartium.com or connect with host Dan Blumberg via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dblums/ 

“We just experienced these pains of people feeling unsatisfied, they didn't necessarily feel like there were easy opportunities to be listened to by the company.” CEO Jack Altman is determined to help make work meaningful, and founding Lattice is a big part of that goal. Lattice is an employee performance and engagement software company that wants to put people first. The product was inspired by an experience Jack had with another company when he saw that staff feedback was collecting dust, and employees were disengaged.

On this episode, Jack explains how he started Lattice with just a shadow of an idea, and the a-ha moment that clarified the product. He also takes us through Lattice's most important inflection points, his big learnings on finding product market fit, and why he thinks all work should be meaningful.

Jeff Birkeland is the SVP of Product and Platform at Included Health, a company that aims to be the app on your phone that you first think of when you have a healthcare need.

On this episode of CRAFTED., we explore why “the integration itself is the innovation.” 

Included Health has more than 2,000 employees across both technology and clinical care, and its services are used by many top companies and their employees. The goal: create an integrated experience that brings it all together… from insurance to diet to doctors to drugs and more… 

The disjointed nature of healthcare is something Jeff has experienced personally. Such as when he asked his surgeon about food: “ He told me directly like, ‘Hey, the dietician stuff is not my thing…’ Our challenge at Included health is how do we make those connections?”

To make those connections, Jeff relies on skills he learned before he got into product: He used to make documentaries. We'll hear how Jeff applies this power of narrative at Included Health and at Headspace, where he used to lead the consumer product team. 

Takeaways from this episode:

• Often, the “integration itself is the innovation.”
• Consider the “in-between” times: What is your user doing before and after they use your product? What should they do? 
• Personalization: How small product details for you add up to a great product experience
• GenAI: How to build and test new AI-powered experiences
• Speed matters: the quicker you make something, the more your user will want to do it (an old lesson from Google, that also applies at Included and many more things)

Key Moments:

• (02:35) - “Like a movie” — How Jeff applies his storytelling skills to user experience
• (03:58) - Consider the “in-between moments” – What is your user doing before and after they use your app? And how Jeff applied this thinking at Headspace
• (05:42) - “The dietician stuff is not my thing,” said Jeff’s surgeon. Included Health is trying to prevent its members from that sort of disjointed experience
• (08:12) - Lessons from leading the consumer product team at Headspace
• (11:10) - About Included Health and what is surprising Jeff about healthcare innovation
• (14:34) - Personalization: How Included Health is creating personalized experiences to serve members better
• (17:36) - AI and product development: experimenting with using AI to answer members’ questions about their insurance coverage
• (20:55) - Evaluating the AI product and considering whether it’s ready for a wider roll out
• (22:44) - Outro

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

“When we talk about future cities in space, it seems like they're really far away. The truth is, it's happening right now. We're building those.” That’s the mind-blowing reality that Jana Stoudemire works in everyday at Axiom Space, a leading space infrastructure developer based in Texas. Axiom is building a successor to the International Space Station and developing commercial opportunities in orbit that go way beyond satellites. Central to all this is the unique environment of microgravity, which allows you to do things that just can’t be done on Earth.

On this episode, Jana takes us to the final frontier, and shares Axiom's plans for advanced biomedical research, space-made semiconductors that could enable quantum computing, and what this means for future scientific advances. She’ll also get into the challenges of building a state-of-the-art lab that will orbit around Earth, from the equipment and personnel, to where does that exercise bike go?

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

"People using this isn't the thing I'm thinking about. Human beings can tolerate high latency and delays to a certain level. Machines cannot. AI cannot, IoT cannot." 

As Chief Product Officer of Graphiant, Ali Shaikh is building data networks that are flexible, secure, and ready to meet the demands of the next generation of people – and devices. And just as the move to the cloud enabled founders to launch their startups more quickly – because they didn’t have to worry about servers and rackspace – Graphiant’s “as-a-service” network has the same potential: to free founders up to focus on what they really care about, not setting up VPN tunnels and worrying about secure connections. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“This problem was so painful and so meaningful to people that I just couldn't believe a world where a solution to this didn't exist.” When Barr Moses identified the very costly problem of what she coined “data downtime”, she knew she needed to solve it. Barr is the Founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, a data observability platform that’s on a mission to eliminate data downtime, a problem that can cost companies millions of dollars each time there’s an outage and the numbers — and the systems that rely on them — go haywire. And with the growth of AI, data problems are even more important to prevent. 

On this episode, Barr explains how she used the scientific method to home in on the problem to solve and the company to found — she actually launched three companies simultaneously before seeing the most traction with Monte Carlo, and going all in. We also learn about Monte Carlo’s customer-led approach that helped them create an end-to-end solution that leaves no data stone unturned.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“It's not columns and rows, but it's the fact that you could fundamentally increase consumer retention, consumer attention, consumer experience, and that's the fun stuff.” That’s how Sol Rashidi pitched a data and analytics mindset to the world’s biggest companies, back before data was King (and AI became Queen). Sol is the former Chief Analytics Officer at Estée Lauder but she got started in the business of data insights long before it was cool, taking companies from merely collecting and cleaning data to leveraging it in powerful ways. 

On this episode, Sol takes us through her career working with giants like Sony Music, Merck and IBM to develop use cases and strategy around AI.  She also shares how she fell into data in the first place, and what playing rugby on the women’s national team taught her about guiding businesses through the digital age. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“You attract security conscious customers. They push you and ask for more security focused features. You build those, you attract more of those companies.” That’s how Greg Neustaetter helped Egnyte find its niche, providing industrial-grade cloud file storage for compliance-focused clients. Greg has spent 11 years at Egnyte and as VP of Product, he’s helped define and refine their offerings in the face of giant competitors like Google and Microsoft. 

On this episode, Greg explains how Egnyte identified and went all-in on developing their product for two key industries. And hear about how Egnyte fell in love with user-centric design techniques, and why it’s so important for developers to join that user-centric process. We’ll also revisit the 90’s. Greg and Crafted’s host Dan were college roommates who worked together in Silicon Valley just before the bubble burst, so we’ll take a walk through the Valley’s highs and lows. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“Anyone who knows anything about drug development would say it is a slow and painful process”. Cat Miller is CTO at Flatiron Health, a software company that uses technology to “clean up all the gunk in the trials industry”. Flatiron helps researchers develop new cancer treatments by making clinical trials run smarter and faster. They also identify trial data that lead to new treatments, and help doctors manage and improve patient care.

On this episode, Cat breaks down how Flatiron takes piles of data from “hot garbage”  to deep insights that lead to innovative cancer treatments. She also discusses Flatiron’s approach with AI, why she believes there are no wasted skillsets, and how her experience as an actor has helped her steer Flatiron’s team. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“Barbershops have historically been a very cash-dominated business. And shaking that mentality is probably the biggest challenge.” Kush Patel knew that the iconic but old-school world of barbering needed a digital upgrade, so he founded theCut, a barber booking app that helps clients find a barber and then book and pay for their cut. It also helps barbers attract and manage their clients, and the app is positioned to help them grow their services beyond the chair.

On this episode, Kush tells us what inspired him to build theCut with his co-founder Obi Omile, and how they’re pushing past the stubbornly analog world of barbering. He’ll also talk about their challenges getting investors to see the opportunity, and why they built theCut to reflect the culture of the barbershop. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

  “We haven’t invented a new way to work out since the ancient Greeks. With electro muscular stimulation, we're breaking that.” Invention is a big part of everything Bjoern Woltermann did at Katalyst to bring electro muscular stimulation, or EMS, to the US market – and to US homes. EMS workouts have been around for decades, but typically only in a physical therapy context. With Katalyst, you wear a suit that triggers your muscles while you work out, promising the equivalent of a 2-hour workout in only 20 minutes, and with less injury risk than a traditional workout. But to make this suit work at home, Bjoern and his team needed to invent everything from special sensors to custom textiles.

 On this episode, we'll hear how a long-time back problem led Bjoern to discover EMS training in Germany, and realize the untouched opportunity for bringing it to the US. And we’ll go deep to understand how Bjoern and his team created a fascinating mix of hardware, software, sensors, textiles, and content and then stitched it all together.

 This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Working with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Jon Favreau, Nev Spiteri has created some of film and gaming’s most incredible visual sequences. Now the CEO of Wevr has gone all in on building software to enable others to create their own virtual worlds — and to do so seamlessly via the cloud. The goal is to help creators spend more time creating, and less time configuring, updating, and debugging. 

On this episode, we dig into the unique needs that 3D world creators have, why version control is so critical to them, and how the pandemic led Wevr to move fully into cloud-based collaboration. Nev also peers into the future to share how augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, combined with the latest generation of AI, might change our world in “strange and seemingly bizarre ways”. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“Highly complex consumer journeys, lots of entrenched interests, very challenging stakeholder management, and extremely important to your life”. That’s the magic mixture of business interests that Kira Wampler says speaks her love language. Those passions led her to Redesign Health, a company whose mission is to transform healthcare. So far, Redesign Health has incubated, funded and scaled over 50 companies that are taking innovative approaches to cancer care, mental health and more — and they plan to launch 50 more. 

On this episode, Kira takes us through her early career where she was front and center at influential companies like Lyft and Intuit, and how she developed a thesis about tech, health, and wealth that led her to Redesign Health.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

April Dunford is an expert at product positioning. She’s advised hundreds of B2B companies on how they can make their products Obviously Awesome  — that’s also the title of her bestselling book on positioning.

On this episode of CRAFTED., April shares tips on how you can make your product standout and how you can drive more sales — that’s the focus of her latest book, Sales Pitch.

April says great positioning starts when you truly understand the answer to this question: “If you didn't exist, what would a customer do?” 

And the answer may surprise you: “We lose half of our deals in B2B to ‘do nothing!’” 

Do nothing – the status quo – is a fierce competitor and April has identified ways to help customers gain the confidence they need to make a scary purchase decision (e.g. buying a new CRM). Key here: don’t sell to your customer; help them buy. 

April is fun and has a knack for sharing colorful anecdotes and analogies that will stick with you. e.g. Tune in to find out what buying a toilet has to do with B2B SaaS. 

Takeaways from this episode:

• Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something to a defined group of people
• Great positioning starts with understanding the competition. Not what you think the competition is, but what your customers actually evaluate you against. e.g. Is your product cake (dessert) or a muffin (breakfast)? They’re both made of bread and pretty similar, but they’ve got totally different competitors.
• Startups often have great positioning at the outset, but then it slips over time as new competitors copy what you do and your uniqueness gets lost. You need to pay attention to your positioning as the market changes.
• Don’t sell! Help your customers buy. Don’t assume they know how to! Imagine you’re selling a CRM… When was the last time your customer bought one? Ten years ago? If ever. Help them contextualize your product among the others out there.
• Lead with business outcomes! Not features.

Key Moments:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:20) - - Working with founders, being "the positioning expert", and why positioning is so tricky to get right
• (05:22) - - How to make your product "Obviously Awesome"
• (07:18) - - The five elements of great positioning
• (15:59) - - Why "do nothing" is your strongest competitor: 50% of B2B deals are lost to "do nothing"
• (17:43) - - Don't sell: Rather, "help your customers buy" (and what buying a toilet has to do with this)
• (30:16) - - April positions herself: How she grew her personal brand and narrowed in on her solopreneur offering
• (33:42) - - Outro

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications.

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

“Your business applications should be just as intuitive as every other app or website or anything else that you're engaging with in your day-to-day lives”. That’s the product-led approach that Jon Walton took as an engineering leader at Red Bull, where he spent nearly a decade working on the apps that help the energy drink maker run the extreme sports competitions and spectacles it's known for.

On this episode, Jon argues that this product-led philosophy is the way all organizations should manage any technology strategy. He also explains why Red Bull’s special events needed special custom-built software, and how the company improved the way it built software in the first place by embracing principles like lean, agile, and pair programming that transformed the team in ways they never anticipated.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“Their revenue growth is stalling. Their cost of mistakes is going up, and everything is stalling and slowing and getting harder.” For most people that doesn’t sound like a job opportunity with much appeal, but it’s  the point where Tommi Forsstrom usually joins a startup. Tommi is a product management executive who specializes in helping companies navigate “the growth stage,” that adolescent era of startup development where a company has found product-market fit and needs to scale  – and to do that they need to make some hard choices. 

On this episode, Tommi walks us through the awkward years just after a startup becomes a scale-up, and breaks down how he shepherds a company to the next level. Tommi will share his framework with us, how hard it is to “shove rabbits back into hats” and kill products, and the tough choices he made as VP of Product at Teachable. Plus, how he’s building software to help frontline workers as Chief Product Officer at Workstep. We also hear how Tommi approaches career growth, with practical tips for job seekers. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Mentioned on the show: 

- How To Choose a Job Like a Real Product Person, from Tommi’s blog.
https://medium.com/@forssto/how-to-choose-a-job-like-a-real-product-person-a90d59248886

“The number one thing we offer our customers is the feeling of not being in an airport.” PS operates a VIP luxury terminal at LAX, with more airports coming soon. Their travelers enjoy high security, luxurious lounges and private suites, great food, and a ride across the tarmac directly to their first-class seats on their commercial flight. But in order to do that, PS needs to coordinate with 70 different airlines, TSA, customs, and all their service staff to make the experience completely seamless. And that takes the kind of precision that only custom software could manage. As CEO Amina Belouizdad Porter puts it: “We are a just-in-time business, and it takes a really complex orchestra to make it happen.”

In this episode, Amina and Leigh Rodwick, PS’s VP of Technology and Analytics,  describe the feelings they hope to evoke, the complex operations that happen out of customer view, and why they had to build custom software and learn agile software development techniques to power it all.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

There’s turmoil in tech right now, so here’s a special episode for job-seekers looking for their next great gig. 

On this episode of Crafted, Alex Maher, Director of Talent at Artium, shares tips on how to position yourself, how to talk to recruiters, what *not* to put on your resume, and so much more. Plus, she’ll share her philosophy on talent acquisition and why remembering that we’re human is at the center of it all. 

Crafted is a show about great products and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“There was just no way I could say no”. That was how Sonali Zaveri felt about working with Ideas42 Ventures, after learning about the first cohort of entrepreneurs she would advise. Ideas42 Ventures is a venture studio that aims to solve massive social problems by helping founders with lived experience launch companies that address issues like poverty and inequality. The founders are selected based on their potential, their passion, and their lived experience – and unlike other venture studios they don’t necessarily need a tech background, nor even a product idea on day one.

On this episode of Crafted, Design and Operations Lead Sonali Zaveri shares how she coaches these founders, as well as why entrepreneurship is such a “privileged sport” — and what she’s doing about that. We also discuss how Ideas42 Ventures uses behavioral science to design products that make lasting impact and why founders should be embarrassed by their first product.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

For those of you who are brand new to Crafted, this week we’re revisiting our very first episode where we featured experimentation master, Lean Startup Pioneer Andres Glusman:

“It's a crime. It's such a waste of time.” That’s how Andres Glusman feels about so many of the tests product teams run. That’s why the former head of product at Meetup founded DoWhatWorks, a company that enables you to see – and learn from – the A/B tests that other companies are running. Rather than test button color for the umpteenth time, Andres wants you to test something that will really move the needle. 

After more than a decade of running product and strategy at Meetup.com, and a lifetime of being fascinated by experiments, Andres is passionate about helping others learn. In this episode, Andres shares what he’s discovered about testing and human behavior, and why running experiments is critical, but also when it’s not. 

This is Crafted from Artium; a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we build incredible products and recruit high performing teams. Check us out at thisisartium.com. 

How Jon Walker spotted a trend, validated an opportunity, sold his solution before even building it, and created a multi-billion dollar company via the “unfair advantage” of rapid iteration. 

Back in 2007, Jon saw desktop software everywhere… at restaurants, doctors’ offices, the gym…and he realized it was all gonna move to the web. “So what’s the opportunity here?” On this episode of Crafted, we’ll hear how Jon and his co-founder homed in on property management as their target market and validated their solution with just four slides. We’ll also learn why rapid iteration is absolutely essential, why the secret to great talent management lies in lessons from basketball and fishing, and why Jon thinks artificial intelligence is the wave that AppFolio should ride for the next two decades.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Jamiel Sheikh is the founder of three different companies all serving the crypto space: Chainhaus, CBDC Think Tank, and most recently, Instamint, which he says will do for tokens what Stripe did for payments, i.e. make it super easy. In this episode we talk about the “unsexy” problems Instamint is solving for enterprises that want to leverage the blockchain, what it takes to build a great API-first company, and why he only sees demand for crypto solutions growing, despite the recent turmoil in the markets.  Our interview with Jamiel comes from a special Artium event that we hosted at Rise, Created by Barclays, an incubator for fintech startups. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

It’s not every day you meet someone who gets ultra excited by the legislative process, but Yemi Adewunmi finds it inspiring: “Why be an innovator if you're not going to be optimistic?”. And that’s one of the reasons she founded Civic Eagle, a startup that helps policy professionals and lobbyists track and collaborate on bills as they wind through Congress or state legislatures on their way to becoming laws…or dying in committee. Either way, Civic Eagle wants to make that journey more transparent, make it easier for advocates to collaborate, and improve democracy in the process.

On this episode of Crafted: Civic Eagle’s founder and Chief Operating Officer, Yemi Adewunmi tells us how her former career as a policy analyst at the New York state legislature set her on a winding path toward establishing Civic Eagle. And hear how a failed app, and a lot of UX learning helped Yemi and her team arrive at Civic Eagle, and a huge vision for growth.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

This special episode of Crafted was recorded live at Rise, Created by Barclays, an incubator for fintech startups. In this fireside chat, we speak with Ainslie Simmonds, President of PershingX at Bank of New York Mellon, and D. Orlando Keise, head of Banking Foundational Platform at UBS. Ainslie is building a modern wealth management platform and D. Orlando is building a digital bank from the ground up.  We’ll discuss what it takes to innovate at big financial institutions and hear their advice for fintech startup founders.

On this episode of Crafted: Ainslie and D. Orlando discuss their time at startups, big banks, and “startups inside big banks.” Both are building very ambitious products at very big, very old banks — and we discuss how they’ve challenged the status quo. We also dig into why the data layer and foundational platform on which new products are built are so critical if you want to innovate. Plus, the two share advice for fintech founders who are on a mission to democratize finance, as well as what to know when working with — or after you get acquired by — a big company. 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Making media is hard. Distributing it to the right audience even more so. GenAI can help. 

Matt Monahan is the president of Arc XP at the Washington Post. On this episode, we're digging into the core technology of any media company: the content management system (CMS), why they’re so hard to build right and how new GenAI tools can reduce the toil required for journalists to get their stories to the right audience. 

Arc XP is not only the CMS used by the Washington Post, but it’s also used by many other publishers, broadcasters, and companies with stories to tell. Matt shares more on the challenge of commercializing and white-listing an internal tool for others to use. It’s a tantalizing idea – turn that cost center into a profit center! — but it’s not for the faint of heart. 

Plus, lessons from Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, including how the Post uses key Amazon practices, such as the “six page memo” and “one- and two-way doors.” 

Key Moments: 

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:25) - From print to digital: hard product & organizational changes
• (04:17) - Why the CMS is where it all comes together
• (06:27) - Commercializing an internal tool: selling Arc XP to other publishers
• (10:07) - AWS and the impact of Jeff Bezos on the Washington Post
• (11:30) - The famous six-page memo and how the Post benefits from it
• (14:06) - GenAI: New features Matt is building to reduce toil for journalists
• (19:42) - How to pick the right model and fine tune it
• (22:21) - Matt’s a pilot! What flying has taught him about running a business
• (23:30) - Being nimble: Why there are more “one way doors” than you think
• (25:04) - Outro

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com 

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

When a recruiter from Till first reached out to Johnny Ray Austin, he didn’t hesitate: “The answer was no. Flat out”. But it turns out Johnny Ray couldn’t have been more wrong about the startup, and what he’d interpreted as a potentially exploitative loan scheme is actually a life-changing new platform that helps renters stay in their homes.

On this episode of Crafted, Till’s Chief Technology Officer, Johnny Ray Austin talks about his initial hesitation and what motivated him to jump on board. You'll also hear how Till iterated on its lending product to give renters confidence that Till would in fact pay their rent for them after offering them a line of credit, as well as where Till is similar to and different from buy-now-pay-later services like Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

What do you get when you combine 3D cameras mounted on construction workers’ hard hats + visual recognition technology + artificial intelligence? You get OpenSpace, a fascinating startup that’s using new technologies to reduce costs and inefficiencies in the construction industry. OpenSpace enables builders to track progress remotely, without having to visit construction sites to examine every little detail. It was a critical tool during the pandemic lockdowns and adoption has only kept growing since. 

Today on Crafted: OpenSpace founder and CEO Jeevan Kalanithi shares his journey from computer art and games to drones, 3D cameras and AI. Plus, why he and his team of scientists and engineers had to literally walk in circles to solve complex problems like “indoor navigation in a GPS denied environment.” 

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“It's a crime. It's such a waste of time.” That’s how Andres Glusman feels about so many of the tests product teams run. That’s why the former head of product at Meetup founded DoWhatWorks, a company that enables you to see – and learn from – the A/B tests that other companies are running. Rather than test button color for the umpteenth time, Andres wants you to test something that will really move the needle. 

After more than a decade of running product and strategy at Meetup.com, and a lifetime of being fascinated by experiments, Andres is passionate about helping others learn. In this episode, Andres shares what he’s discovered about testing and human behavior, and why running experiments is critical, but also when it’s not. 

This is Crafted from Artium; a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we build incredible products and recruit high performing teams. Check us out at thisisartium.com. 

“Are you making something that is solving a real problem for people?” That’s the question on Chris Ladd’s mind whenever he’s tempted to design a new app feature. Chris’s iOS app ChordBank has been downloaded millions of times; it gives guitar players tools to expand on and improve their craft. With a chord library, lessons and games that use monophonic and polyphonic pitch detection, the app helps players hone their skills and become better players.

Chris built the first version of ChordBank 10 years ago, back when he was working as a freelance journalist while getting into programming.  With years of experience as an independent iOS developer under his belt and experience in product teams at The New York Times, Chris has honed his craft and built ChordBank into his full time job. 

This is Crafted from Artium; a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we build incredible products and recruit high performing teams. Check us out at thisisartium.com.