TikTok has officially crossed 200 million monthly active users in the US — but the real story is what they've built underneath the surface.

In this episode, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, sits down with David Kaufman, Vice President of Product at TikTok, to go deep on the platform's transformation into a full end-to-end commerce engine. David breaks down how TikTok is using AI to automate everything from creative generation to affiliate-based promotion — so merchants can upload a catalog and let the platform handle the rest.

If you want to understand where social commerce is heading, this one is essential listening.

What you'll learn:

• Why removing steps from the purchase funnel is the single biggest growth lever for modern product teams.
• How TikTok's generative AI tools allow merchants to produce high-performing video creative at scale without a production team.
• The shift from spontaneous live streams to scheduled commercial events driving $1M per hour in sales.
• How TikTok balances feed, commerce, search, and messaging as four distinct monetization pillars.

Key takeaways:

• The most successful products in the AI era put the user directly at the point of transaction.
• Organic creator content consistently outperforms traditional high-production advertising.
• A long-tail creator ecosystem can promote a 100,000-item catalog automatically through affiliate-based commission.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: David Kaufman

Social Links:

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

AI is collapsing the silos between design and engineering. In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, sits down with Ed Bayes (Design Lead, OpenAI) and Matt Colyer (Product Director, Figma) to discuss their groundbreaking integration that enables a seamless round-trip workflow from code to canvas.

Matt Colyer walks us through a step-by-step demo of the new code to canvas and right to Figma capabilities. You’ll see exactly how OpenAI’s Codex and Figma’s Plugin API allow builders to move fluidly between development and design environments, using AI agents to update design systems and iterate faster than ever before.

What you'll learn:

• Step-by-step demo: Moving from a code component in Codex to a live Figma design.
• How the round-trip workflow eliminates lossy handoffs between designers and devs.
• Strategies for using AI agents to update design libraries autonomously.
• The impact of Model Context Protocol (MCP) on product team interoperability.

Key takeaways:

• Velocity as a Moat: How AI-native tools are accelerating the speed of prototyping.
• The Evolving PM Role: Why curiosity is now more critical than technical hurdles.
• Human Judgment: Why AI increases the premium on high-level design taste.

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guests: Ed Bayes and Matt Colyer

Social Links:

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

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO at Product School, sits down with Diya Jolly, CPTO at Xero, the global accounting platform trusted by over 4 million customers. Diya shares how Xero is redefining B2B software by building JAX, an agentic AI platform that intelligently manages specialized sub-agents to streamline business operations.

What you'll learn:

• How Xero built an agentic AI platform that orchestrates multiple agents across payroll, payments, and bank reconciliation workflows.
• The strategy for implementing strict guardrails to ensure accuracy in highly regulated, AI-driven accounting processes.
• How to design a global product that scales common services while adapting to hyper-local tax and payment requirements.
• The two-way door framework for accelerating product decisions and course-correcting with imperfect data.

Key takeaways:

• Why the future of SaaS interfaces is conversational, transitioning users away from static dashboards into review and insight roles.
• The strategic advantage of combining product and technology leadership into a single CPTO role to drive tighter cross-functional alignment.
• Why deeply serving the SMB market requires specialized product design that balances consumer-grade simplicity with enterprise-grade workflow depth.

Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Diya Jolly

Social Links:

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

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

What you'll learn:

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

Key Takeaways:

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

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

Social Links:

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

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

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

What you’ll learn:

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

Social Links:

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

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

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

What you’ll learn:

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

Key takeaways:

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

Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Chris Geoghegan

Social Links:

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

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO at Product School, interviews Tim Simmons, Chief Product Officer at Walmart International, the retail giant serving 255 million customers weekly across 18 countries. Tim is leading a massive transformation to move from decentralized tech stacks to global platforms that empower local innovation.

Tim explains why complexity is actually a competitive advantage when training AI. He dives deep into Agentic AI and the concept of Orchestrators—systems that manage workflows between agents to automate tasks like user story generation with 88% accuracy. He also shares the strategy behind the Walmart Translation Platform (WTP), which has cut translation costs by 99% while increasing speed and trust.

What you'll learn:

• The Orchestrator Strategy: How to build AI systems where project manager agents coordinate tasks for maximum efficiency.
• Global vs. Local: A framework for building core platforms that scale while allowing for hyper-local customization.
• The ROI of AI: How Walmart tracks adoption and accuracy, not just productivity.
• Human in the Loop: Why keeping humans involved in AI workflows actually makes the models smarter over time.
  
  

Key takeaways:

• Complexity is Data: The more you expose AI to your organization's complexity, the more resilient and accurate it becomes.
• Trust Through Nuance: Successful localization isn't just word-for-word translation; it's about capturing intent to build customer trust.
• Platform Discipline: Moving from bespoke builds to multi-tenant codebases is essential for scaling innovation globally.

Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Tim Simmons

Social Links:

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

In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO & Founder at Product School, interviews Aparna Sinha, SVP of Product at Vercel, the cloud platform recently valued at $9.3 billion following a $300 million Series F. Aparna joins us to discuss how Vercel is powering the next generation of AI-native applications.

Drawing from her experience at Google Kubernetes and Pear VC, Aparna reveals how Vercel empowers Teams of One to ship faster than ever. She explores the cultural shift required to build in the AI era—moving from rigid planning to rapid experimentation and iterating to greatness.

What you'll learn:

• How Vercel’s Team of One philosophy maximizes developer leverage.
• Why shipping imperfect products early is crucial for AI strategy.
• The mechanics of Hybrid Pricing to balance AI costs and value.
• How to use internal dogfooding to accelerate product quality.

Key takeaways:

• Speed is Survival: In the AI era, waiting for perfection means falling behind.
• Agency over Hierarchy: Small, autonomous teams outperform large structures.
• Price for Value: Align AI pricing with user outcomes, not just compute costs.

Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Aparna Sinha

Social Links:

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