Product Rebels

Why do so many product transformations fail? Because leaders treat product like a science when it's mostly art.

Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin sit down with Chris Herring, Head of Product at Stride, the edtech company serving K-12 students through virtual public schools. Chris has been building AI products for over a decade — well before it was fashionable — including StoryStudio and MathBee, the math game that helped kids find out math doesn't suck.

From refusing to imitate what worked elsewhere, to piloting change with four teams before scaling to forty, to why trust is the currency that buys you permission to rebel, Chris shows what it takes to drive transformation from the inside.

What does it actually look like to run a one-day sprint cycle? To have agents building product overnight? To compress months of work into days — and still ship things that matter?
Kris Kaneta, Chief Product & Innovation Officer at Norstella — one of fast company's most innovative companies of 2025 — is doing it. And in this episode, he shares how with hosts Heather Samarin and Vidya Dinamani.
From the premium on clarity in an AI-led pdlc, to the difference between building to learn and building to earn, to why ai is exposing — not hiding — weak product thinking, Kris gives one of the most operationally grounded views of AI-first product leadership we've heard.

What happens when product leaders stop talking about AI theory and start sharing what’s actually working?
In this special Product Rebels episode, Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin unpack insights from four AI roundtables with CPOs, VPs, and product leaders. 
They explore AI slop, ROI challenges, role anxiety, rapid prototyping, and why judgment, customer insight, and product fundamentals matter more than ever in an AI-driven world. The future of product management may be changing, but its core purpose remains the same.

What does it take to turn a struggling edtech platform into a mission-driven product powerhouse — in under a year? 
Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin sit down with Jared Harless, Chief Product and Technology Officer at BookNook, as he talks about his early days bootstrapping digital products inside a billion-dollar publishing company, to leading a turnaround that grew revenue 25% year over year and pulled customer retention from 27% to 70%...but the work is far from over. 

Jared gets real about the kind of conviction it takes to build before you have permission — and how going straight to the market before writing a line of code is still the most powerful move a product leader can make.

Hey there Product Rebels! If you're a product leader right now, chances are someone in your org has asked you some version of "what's our AI strategy?" in the last month. And chances are, the answer is still murky. We're hearing this from product leaders constantly — there's pressure to ship AI features, but not a lot of clarity on how to move from boardroom excitement to actual product impact.

That's why we're resurfacing this conversation with Ravi Mehta. His Inspire, Validate, Structure, and Ship framework is one of the most practical takes we've heard on turning AI ambition into real outcomes. If anything, it's more relevant now than when we first aired it. Enjoy the re-listen.