How to get your whole team excited about AI (and actually using it) | Brian Greenbaum (product designer at Pendo)

Brian Greenbaum is a Senior Staff Product Designer at Pendo who led a company-wide AI transformation after a personal epiphany while on paternity leave. After experiencing the power of AI coding tools firsthand, he created a structured approach to help his entire product organization adopt AI. In this episode, Brian shares his complete playbook for driving AI adoption across teams, measuring success, and navigating the organizational challenges that come with new technology adoption. What you’ll learn: The exact Slack message Brian sent while on paternity leave that kickstarted his company’s AI transformationHow to structure both synchronous and asynchronous AI learning opportunities for maximum adoptionThe two-pronged approach that dramatically increased AI tool usage across teamsWhy becoming your company’s AI champion is one of the best career moves you can make right nowHow to measure AI adoption success with sentiment surveys and clear metricsThe critical role of creating a “golden path” for AI tool usage with legal, security, and finance teams— Brought to you by: Google Gemini https://ai.dev/—Your everyday AI assistant Lovable https://lovable.dev/—Build apps by simply chatting with AI — In this episode, we cover: (00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE) Introduction to Brian Greenbaum (01:38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=98s) Brian’s paternity leave epiphany that sparked an AI initiative (05:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=300s) Sending the message that launched a transformation (12:25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=745s) The two-pronged approach: synchronous and asynchronous learning (17:29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=1049s) Encouraging experimentation and creative exploration (18:41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=1121s) How AI enables designers to move beyond MVP thinking (22:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=1320s) Quick summary of the two-pronged approach (24:43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=1483s) Measuring AI adoption (33:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=2028s) Creating a centralized AI knowledge center (35:58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=2158s) Building an MCP server to demonstrate AI’s potential (44:08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=2648s) Why technical understanding is crucial for non-technical roles (46:01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaG70VotukE&t=2761s) Final thoughts — Tools referenced: • Cursor: https://cursor.com/ • Bolt.new: https://bolt.new/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/ • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ — Other references: • Pendo: https://www.pendo.io/ • Confluence: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence • Slack: https://slack.com/ — Where to find Brian Greenbaum: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangreenbaum/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I had tried Cursor for the first time and what I was able to create just blew me away. I sent a message to my manager, my manager's manager, the CPO, and then a few other folks that I knew were really interested in AI. And I was like, listen, I had this really profound experience. And I think we really need to up level the skill of our entire product organization, not just designers, but also PMs. We need to become more familiar with this technology. We need to understand how we can use it. This is actually the message that I sent while I was on paternity leave. That definitely got my leaders really fired up. I didn't know exactly how this was going to go. All I knew was that I needed to get more folks paying attention to this AI stuff.

• 0:31Claire Vo?

  If you are the first to raise your hand that says, you know what? I want to figure out how our team can use AI. I'm going to lead this organization. It's such a unique leadership opportunity to show cross functional broad impact on teams.

• 0:48Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clarovo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Brian Greenbaum at Pendo, and he's going to show us not only how he uses AI in his own product work, but a step by step plan for getting your product and design teams adopting AI as well. Let's get to it.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hey everyone, Shreeta here from Google DeepMind. The Gemini 2.5 family of models is now generally available. 2.5 Pro, our most advanced model, is great for reasoning over complex tasks. 2.5 Flash finds the sweet spot between performance and price. And 2.5 Flashlight is ideal for low latency, high volume tasks. Start building in Google AI Studio at ai.dev.

• 1:40Claire Vo?

  Brian, thanks for joining us on How I AI. Happy to have you.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so excited to be here.

• 1:45Claire Vo?

  Well, what I am excited about in our conversation is in a lot of our How I AI episodes, we've shown specific ways that you can use specific tools to build or do things with AI. And you're going to help us take a step back and say, you know, let's say you have all these tools and you want to start using them. How do you get a full team or a full organization, a full company actually adopting AI? And so this is a how I get everybody else to use AI episode. So I would love to start with what I call the inception phase, which we all have gone through or are all in the process of trying to get our team to go through,

• 2:29Claire Vo?

  which is when you get people excited and sort of jumpstart the energy around AI. And I think you approached this in a really interesting way. So I'd love you to walk us through what you did at Pendo.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So to take you back, it's the end of last year. So last July, I had my daughter Meyer, my daughter Meyer was born. You can kind of see the nursery in my background with this is sort of shared office nursery. And I was on paternity leave at the end of last year. And I'm sort of like a tech geek. I've been following AI for a while. Like my day job is a designer at Pendo, but you know, I've always sort of been into tech. And so I've been following AI very closely. I've also had some experience like building side projects and things like that. And I think it was back in November, Cursor came out, or maybe it was a little bit earlier than that. But Cursor, I had tried Cursor for the same, for the first time. And what I was able to create just blew me away.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  So I had like a side project, I did this hobby app in my, in my mind about a music player where I can play albums by scanning a QR code on, on sort of like a piece of paper. I was very jealous of people who had record players. I don't have space for a record player in New York. And they get to choose music by sort of flipping through, through albums. And I like having, you know, unlimited access to music via Spotify, but I sort of missed that sort of like tactile experience. So I was like, well, what if I create these sort of like laminated cards? And I have this way of just being able to play the albums that are on that. So I had this idea of like, what if I can create sort of a mobile app where I can scan like a QR code? Or I could recognize the album cover and I can print these album covers out and just be limited in that way. And I, I had no idea how to do that, like on my own. Like I'm not an active developer.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  I can't sit down and write that application. And I pulled up Cursor and like, within a couple of hours, I had a working prototype. And like, that just blew me away. I was creating QR codes, I was creating PDS. I was like doing all this like really, really, really cool stuff. And you know, like I said, my day job is a product designer and I immediately understood that like, okay, this is really cool. It's a sort of side project. It's really fun, but I could use this to build interactive prototypes. I consider myself pretty proficient with Figma, especially when it comes to prototyping, but I understand the limitations of using Figma for prototyping. A lot of what I do at Pendo is sort of working on features that are analytics based. And so when you're creating mockups and prototypes that are data driven, it's

• 4:48Speaker 00

  really hard to communicate what the, you know, how these things are actually going to work with real data. So having a prototype that is code based, that is working with even just fake data and interacting sort of in a more dynamic way is really useful. So I was like, wow, I think I could really use this at Pendo. So I had the, you know, even though I am on paternity leave, you know, I had this idea and I was like, I couldn't contain myself, you know, I wasn't going to come back to work until the beginning of January. So in December, I wrote a whole bunch of folks at Pendo, I still had access to my Slack. And so I wrote, you know, I sent a message to my manager, my manager's manager, the CPO, and then a few other folks that I knew were really, really interested in AI. And I was like, listen, I had this like really profound experience. And I think, you know, we really

• 5:32Speaker 00

  need to up level the skill of our entire product organization, not just designers, but also PMs. We need to become more familiar with this technology. We need to understand how we can use it. I had already understood that like, there's no playbook for how to learn this stuff. There's no classes you can take. There's no book you can read. And the technology is evolving so fast that the only way to really know how to apply it is become very familiar with how it works, to kind of stay current with all the latest technologies and the tools, and just sort of like see a bunch of examples. And like selfishly, like I wanted to spend more of my time at work doing these things, but I also wanted to help my colleagues and my company just be more successful because I saw a clear path to that. And just getting more, more of my peers, more of my colleagues,

• 6:16Speaker 00

  like doing the same thing and sharing their experiences, I know would help me learn and I think would just sort of like, you know, rise all the boats. And so this is sort of an example here, not example, this is actually the message I pulled it up that I sent while I was on paternity leave, just to kind of give you an example of what something like this looks like. And I wrote this like pretty long message. I mean, for folks that are not watching this, you know, I just kind of said TLDR in a similar fashion to, you know, there's an, there was an engineering focused sort of group that had been around for at least a year, but nothing really focused on PMs and designers. I was like, I'd like to lead a group like that before a cross-functional, cross-functional product team with designers, PMs, and et cetera,

• 6:58Speaker 00

  with two goals. Pendo's product team can leverage the cutting edge of AI tools to get more done in fewer hours, less resources, improve decision-making, and communicate and validate ideas more effectively. And then two, because Pendo is also sort of servicing a lot of product organizations that are going through similar transformation to help position Pendo as a thought leader in this space, because I knew it was just going to be really important. And then I went through like a longer version of sort of like my, my experience of like building this app and, and why I thought it was important. And, you know, I'm really fortunate to be part of an organization that supports sort of initiatives like this. And so I, you know, that definitely got my, my leaders like really fired up. In fact, the CPO was like, hey,

• 7:41Speaker 00

  can you come to like all hands next Monday and talk about this, this concept? And I was like, I'm on paternity, like can't do that yet. But I will start as soon as I come back. And so that, that's sort of, that's sort of what happened. So that was a catalyst for this idea. And I gotta say, like, I'm, I'm the kind of person that, you know, sometimes I can be like type A and like really like think things through. But I also know that sort of committing to something or just like forcing myself to like throw myself into a situation without knowing like how it's going to work out can also result in something really interesting. So I didn't know exactly how this was going to go. All I knew was that I need to get more folks paying

• 8:21Speaker 00

  attention to this AI stuff. And I also need to create time in people's calendar where everyone can just like focus on it and play or maybe like hear a presentation on, on something new.

• 8:34Claire Vo?

  So I have to call out a couple of things here that I think are really important. One, for anybody trying to, you know, give a justification, if you, if you need it, for investing extra time, resources and energy into this AI transformation in your organization. I love that you call out actually the two things that really matter. They're very similar things to how I called out the value of AI transformation at Launch Darkly, which was, one, our team's got to know how to use this stuff. Like, we've just got to know how to use these tools, get more done, be more efficient, just use the best of the best. The second one, though, I think is really interesting, and there's still a lot of opportunity here.

• 9:16Claire Vo?

  You know, you're on this podcast, which is, there's this opportunity for leading organizations to position themselves as thought leaders in how you get stuff done with AI in your vertical. And so for us, it was like, we have to be great AI engineers because we need to, you know, be great engineers. Generally, this is the next phase of how software engineering is going to get done. We need to be thought leaders in this space. And very similarly for you on the product side, I think it's just really important that you can create platforms for your company to be experts in this space if you lean in early into these technologies. You know, the other thing I want to call out is, you know, I try to tell people this all the time. This is like promo making work.

• 10:01Claire Vo?

  And what I mean is like, this is the kind of initiative that doesn't come around that often as an opportunity. And if you were the first to raise your hand, like if you were the first designer that says, you know what, I want to figure out how our team can use AI. I'm going to lead this organization. It's such a unique leadership opportunity to show cross-functional broad impact on teams. And like, there's only going to be one or two of you that get to be the leader of it. So I'm like really encouraging people to be like you, raise your hand early to take on the initiative for the organization. One, because I think it's the right thing to do for the team. But two, it's really great from a personal career perspective.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And like, yeah, I wasn't, I wasn't gonna focus on that.

• 10:45Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But I will, but like what you're saying is absolutely a hundred percent true. So like this, this sort of initiative has opened so many doors. I will get into it in a moment, but it's opened so many doors internally within the organization. Like I'm speaking with you. There's no way I think I would be speaking on such a high profile podcast if I didn't start working on this and sort of build up a sort of the, the body of work that I have over the last nine months. I get to work on some really cool AI projects. I have folks throughout the organization that are not even in product and, and, and design, folks I didn't even know reaching out to me and sort of like looking to me as a thought leader. And that wasn't my intent, but it's absolutely true. It's like there, there are opportunities across all organizations right now, regardless of your level.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a senior staff. But I'm an IC. I mean, I'm just a product designer, like, but I'm having an influence way beyond my, my scope. And I think regardless of where you are, like if you have the initiative and the energy, and it does take a little bit of time, like there is some nights and weekends that like I kind of put into it. But I also love this stuff. Like I was kind of doing it anyway. And so absolutely it is, is a career builder, builder.

• 11:53Claire Vo?

  Yeah. And then, you know, maybe my last reflection is, do you know how many people I know that have gone on parental leave and in between rocking their newborn have been shipping stuff with like, like cursor, like every single parent I know, this just might be my, my peer cohort. Everyone I know has been texting me from parental leave being like, Claire, I've been vibe coding with my baby and I am so into it. So if you have a, if you have somebody on parental leave right now, it's very likely they're going to come back AI pilled for sure, because that is what I have seen consistently with, with some of my friends. Okay. So let's actually get into this message, kick things off, but then you actually have to functionally make this happen. And you sort of had like a two-pronged approach to two things that were really effective

• 12:38Claire Vo?

  in getting this going in your organization. So what were those two things?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So the two things, so I'm just kind of bringing up here in case it's helpful. So this was sort of the first announcement I made within the organization. I had come back in January. This is sort of like our private channel of the entire product organization. So within Pendo, the product team are PMs, designers, writers, and a few other folks. And so I was like, hey, I'm starting this initiative. And in my mind, I was thinking that there's sort of a two-pronged approach. There's an asynchronous and asynchronous. One thing that I was very familiar with, like just in my own life, but also talking to other people, is that you'll typically hear something like, yeah, that AI stuff, like, I know it's important,

• 13:22Speaker 00

  but I just don't have the time. Like, I don't have the time to like, watch all the videos and, you know, vibe code in Lovable or whatever it is, right? And the crazy thing is that like, if you don't make the time for it, you're never going to learn it. And at some point, you're going to get behind, right? And so it was really important for not just there to be a place within Slack and encourage people to share on Slack asynchronously, to do it at their own pace, but also to create time in people's calendars so that they can come and focus on like, whatever the topic is. And also, within that session, it's not just about a presentation. It's also like, it's really important for that presentation or that session to be interactive. So let me give you an example of that. So this was a kickoff, as well as an exercise about building apps.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Just to sort of give you an insight into how I started this off. I was like, hey, AI is getting better, it's getting faster, and it's evolving how software is planned, designed, and built. And this was really meant to speak to not just us as builders, but also sort of the product that Pendo was building. And right around that time, Andrew Ng had a really thoughtful blog post about how he was thinking about how PMs need to position themselves sort of in the AI, in this AI future. And AI is typically sort of in the space of sort of engineering and technical stuff. And you know, he was positioning AIs as perhaps being, or at least engineers being better positioned to sort of like take advantage of all this stuff because they are technical.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  But he was saying it was really important for PMs and I would also put designers in that camp as well to become proficient. And so these were the sort of five things that he was, he really wanted to focus on technical proficiency, just iterating on the development, like using AI in a sort of iterative capacity. Being very proficient with data, skill in managing ambiguity and his ongoing learning. So like that was really sort of the emphasis I wanted to drive. And so again, the structure of sort of like, or at least the goal, sorry, the goals of the, the product AI was around to up level and modernize the skillset of our, of our product people. To improve our comprehension and literacy and then because our customers are also builders to empathize and assist with them as well.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And I wasn't sure if this technique again was going to work, but this was how I was thinking about approaching it, just being more hands on, getting our hands dirty, radical, many to many sharing. Being intentional, creating the space and then identifying the patterns that worked and then sort of turn those into reusable patterns. So in this opening session, like I was saying, like, it's really important to have an interactive session. And I'm not going to go through the slides of like how I talked about code building tools and the different, you know, the, the various types and some things that I had built. But there was a section that was at least, I think 10, 15 minutes where I was like, all right, everyone, you know, go to bolt new. That was the app that we chose to use at the time and create an account if you haven't created an account. And then everyone go to Bolt and copy and paste this. So this was just a prompt that I had created.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  It wasn't hyper optimized. It was about creating a to do list, the most basic, like little mini SaaS app that you could possibly build. And I had everyone type this in and then there was like a little enhanced prompt thing that I wanted everyone to use just to sort of see how like this, this app could sort of take a very basic thing and, and turn it into a more sophisticated thing and then let it rip and hit go. And I would say I wasn't expecting this when I did this the first time, but the thing that really stood out, because it was sort of like obvious to me that this is, this is what would happen. But the, some of the feedback I got was like, wow, like we all typed in the same thing. We all clicked on the enhance prompt button and we all got different results. So like, this was just sort of an example of like, these were all the to do list applications that the app created after running that, that query.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  And I think in, in a third of the cases, like Bolt just came back and said, nope, like, like, like. Error, whatever. And then like, so we immediately got into sort of the whole like, oh, okay, don't worry. Like if you get in there, just nail the fix it, blah, blah, blah. And everyone sort of like got through it after two or three rounds. So that is like, it was great to experience that as a team and not only just to like, do it and see how it worked, but also to see the diversity of like, how like these applications are built and how GenAI is being used. And then the other thing I had people do in the last like 10, 15 minutes is experiment on their own. And I told people just to do crazy stuff. Like, we're not doing this for any, like, we're not really billing at the do list. And the AI will do its best to do as you say. So you can give it

• 17:42Speaker 00

  like the most wacky instructions, right? Like, you know, make it, you know, add a retro 8-bit pixel art theme, you know, introduce a dark motif, make it look like Myspace from 2007. And so that was sort of like an interesting thing, too. So like, people sort of like went nuts. They shared some things. Like, I think there's a few examples here of like, people saying, oh, you know, I tried, yeah, here, here, this is what UI will look like in 20200. Here's my Tumblr style, you know, to do list. And like, this was intentional to sort of like, make it fun. These are designers, but there's also PMs. And like, we all know, sort of like, the, there's a line between sort of like, professional stuff and personal stuff. But like,

• 18:25Speaker 00

  what I really wanted people to experience is that this can be fun and just think like, to broaden their minds about how they can apply this technology.

• 18:32Claire Vo?

  One thing I want to call out as a meta benefit to this slide that you showed, and maybe we could go back to it of like, now go wild or optimize it, is I think as designers and product managers in companies, and you can tell me if you have a different experience, but we have just gotten beaten by the scope creep stick so frequently that we have actually lost our muscle for like, asking for the magic thing. We always start with the MVP. We always start with like, what is the bare minimum thing I can ship to meet the user requirements that I know engineering can do? And like, we've lost this ability to imagine like, what if it did this? And what if it did that? And it could be interactive, or there could be voice.

• 19:18Claire Vo?

  And what I like about AI is, one, it makes those magic things a lot easier to build, you know, more efficient to build. But two, like, it's gonna let designers and product managers return to the craft of building the awesome product as opposed to like the viable product, which is so, like, if you reflect on it, it's so sad that we have put on a pedestal, like, minimum viability as just like such a low bar. And now our bar can just be so much higher for what we build. But you have to like reignite this muscle of like, how to even think about what those things could be. So I love the idea that you, you know, put these,

• 20:02Claire Vo?

  these iterations in categories like visual iterations, interactive iterations, entertaining or gamification iterations. And then like media again is something that's really interesting that you can do with AI. I know as a designer, like, how many times have you been like, oh, an illustration would be amazing here, but no one wants to spend the time to like draw a custom icon or a photo would be here, but like, we don't have any stock photo budget for this project. So I'm just gonna like erase that and put white space. And so I just think like, that piece is so underrated for AI is like getting out of getting us out of MVP mode.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I got actually a really cool example of that as well. So like, you know, that was the sessions, right? But then there's also the channel. And so, um, you know, there's people are constantly sharing things, links to articles, experiments that they've tried. I mean, that was the whole intent of it, right? Is just to sort of have a space where people can share things. And I think there's an example in here where, ah, yes, here it is. So Mark, you know, he's a, he's a product designer. And I think this is right on the time that Mid Journey launched the ability to do animations or video. And he was like, wouldn't it be cool to have, you know, sort of in this intro screen, these little animated characters that sit there and just like wave at you, right?

• 21:12Claire Vo?

  It's so cute!

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Exactly, right?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And it wasn't that hard. I mean, like, I think he iterated on a couple of prompts like this. This is not in the product. It's not in the product yet, but I mean, he was able to create an asset that not that hard to drop in if you have the right spot for it. And like, like you said before, it was, oh, man, like really cool to have an illustration or an animation, but I gotta go talk to a professional or I gotta go spend like nights and weekends working on it. It's like not worth the effort. And now we can bring a little more life into our applications.

• 21:43Claire Vo?

  And that life, of course, turns into like what I just did. We're just like, oh, my God, I love it. Which is just like customer connection to your brand, to your product, a little bit of sense of like this team actually really cares about the craft and is going to continue to invest in this product experience, all that, all the great stuff. And then I just want to call out for folks that maybe missed this as part of the transition. So the two kind of major pieces you put in were these sessions, these product and AI sessions, and you showed us the kickoff deck of what that looked like, both the why, and then like, let's actually get into it. Let's do it together. And then the second piece, that's the sync piece. And you do those weekly, right?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  We do them biweekly. I mean, we could probably do them weekly, but we've done them biweekly.

• 22:26Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I put in a, we put in a similar thing. We call them like AI power hours on Friday. And it was like every week we would do that. And then the second thing is the async channel, which like, if you do not have it, you should definitely have it, where folks are just sharing. I like this bullet point that you had in your slide that was like radical peer-to-peer share. I forget what it said, but it was such a good phrase. Yeah, radical many-to-many sharing. And so one of the things that I think organizations often suffer from during this AI transformation is information hoarding and like secret AI. And I think it happens for two reasons. Secret AI can happen because people aren't sure

• 23:08Claire Vo?

  what they can use, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. And so they like, kind of pretend they're not using AI, or they use their like Gmail, Gmail chat, GPT account because they don't want to get in trouble, but they're going to use it anyway. And so there's like secrecy because people don't know the golden path of using AI. And then there's like, Information and skills hoarding right now, which is like the dark side of being an AI agent or an AI change agent, which is people are like, well, I'm the only one that knows how to do this. So I'm going to stand out if I'm like extra good on these things or just get my work done faster, whatever. And so this like build in public, many to many sharing is so important for a healthy

• 23:50Claire Vo?

  culture around AI transformation. I cannot emphasize this, this one enough.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 23:55Claire Vo?

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• 24:34Claire Vo?

  now's the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev. You implemented this back in January, back from, from leave where, can you believe it? The year is like almost over. We're like, we're like there. It's unbelievable.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  I know.

• 24:55Claire Vo?

  And, and you know, how did you actually measure? Did any of this matter, right? Like, did we do this? And was it fun? And or did people actually adopt this? And how did you, how did you get there?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I think there's like, there's several ways I can answer that question. The first is like, you know, I, I didn't intend to have to implement a company-wide transformation, right? Like I want, I need to start somewhere, or at least I wanted to really focus on my craft and the people that are around me. So that was product design, a little bit of engineering, right? And so product AI is intentionally focused on the area around creating products, using AI to, to design, product management, engineering, that sort of thing. It wasn't intended to sort of like branch out to, you know, how does revenue sell better? Or how does finance do whatever finance does better, right? Um, the channel, so like it really, it was really important for the channel to be

• 25:52Speaker 00

  public. We have like 200 plus people on the channel now. That is way more than the product organization. So the thing is like, even if you're sort of focusing on a functional area, there's aspects of that functional area that bleeds outside of the organization. Um, so just to kind of give you a perspective on like the sessions that we ran, right? So that we started back in January, we were doing it every two weeks. And you can kind of see sort of like some of the, the different topics. It wasn't just all about vibe coding. It's about prompting. It's about, you know, how do you take customer feedback and sort of make sense of it? Um, there are sessions here on just like diving into just Gemini. I mean, like we have accessed a whole bunch of Google, features from Google that are AI related and they're spread out throughout their entire ecosystem. So it was like, hey, what's, what are all the things that we can do to sort of take advantage of that? And

• 26:37Speaker 00

  that was one where I intentionally made it not just about product and design. Cause like, you know, the, the finance people and the revenue people could definitely take advantage of things like deep research within Gemini or the AI function within, within Sheets. So sometimes like it makes sense to sort of like really promote these things outside. But again, it was like, you know, you kind of want to make sure that you stay within your group. And then separately, there was an initiative, an OKR in the first quarter of, of this year. Our quarters begin in February. So I had started this. Yeah. What's like, it's, it's so weird.

• 27:12Claire Vo?

  That's, that's good old enterprise, enterprise sales fiscal year right there.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. It, it really confuses me because like we're in fiscal year 2026. I'm like, I thought it was still 2025.

• 27:24Claire Vo?

  And it's October? What's happening?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Um, so yeah, we're like a little like one month off. So our quarters begin in, in, uh, in February. So I had started this and I think because, uh, you know, to your, to your point earlier about like how this, this, uh, is also a good career move. It adds a lot of visibility, I think, to you if you try to take the initiative. Like I had just started this a couple of weeks earlier, but I was invited to be part of a cross-functional group that was responsible for a company-wide OKR to improve AI leverage within the organization. And so I can show you some of the things that we did, but like, I think the most important thing that we did was just measuring, right?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Just measuring sort of like, what is the, and we called it a sentiment survey because like, we didn't really know what people's or like my colleagues' feelings were about AI, right? Like, because you know, you might feel like AI is taking your job or AI is creating slob. Or you might feel that like AI is such like a cool, fun, like incredibly transformational technology that, you know, is going to solve cancer, right? Like, I don't know what the sentiment is. We weren't really, you know, you're not, you were never really hiring for this skill or this attitude, right? And so you have a group of folks and you know, you're thinking about instituting a transformation on how they work and the technology they use. And so it was really important, I think, for us to get a temperature read on like how people felt about AI.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  But we also wanted to know other dimensions as well. Are they aware of the, like, for instance, are they familiar with our usage policy, right? Like, there's a lot of shadow IT happening, just like you said, like people are using their Gmail, their personal ChatGPT accounts to do professional work. And they're not sure, it's like, is that cheating? Is that allowed? Or even like, what kind of data am I allowed to put into ChatGPT? Can I put like customer transcripts in there? Like, I don't, I don't know what the answer is. And some people are just doing it because they know it's going to be helpful. And some people are not doing it because they're worried that, you know, that's not, that's not cool. And the other thing too is like, they don't know what tools are available because, yeah, I mean, like you have Salesforce, you have Gmail, but you don't like, at the point, at that time, we didn't have company-wide licenses for ChatGPT, right? So like, no one knows what, what is actually available to them.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  And so what I'm showing here is like, the beginning of the quarter. So like, the idea was we would do some things within the quarter, but in the beginning of the quarter, we'd take this baseline and we asked these five questions. We also got some some qual feedback as well. So it kind of gave us a little an idea sort of like why things were trending in a certain way. And then one thing that we had, we noticed and you're kind of looking at sort of like the trend of what happened from the beginning of the quarter to the end of the quarter. There was an increase along all of these measurements and the biggest ones were around this usage policy and which tools do I have available to me? I think the biggest gap was here because we didn't spend any time with it. So there was a lot of work done in that quarter just by making people aware of what they can do and how they can request software.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  So here's just a screenshot of an internal

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Confluence document we call the AI Knowledge Center. And in this document is all the information that an employee needs to know about which AI tools they have available to them. So like if you were to scroll down, you'd get this like alphabetized table of all the products that have been approved to be used within our organization for security reasons, for for legal reasons. I mean, the thing is that like AI is a vector for doing some really bad stuff. And even though you want to move fast and you want to use all of these really cool tools, you don't want to put your company and your customers' data at risk. And so it's really important that, you know, you work closely with your security, your IT department, your finance department, your legal department.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  And like, again, I was very fortunate to be in an organization where like those folks, which sometimes can feel like friction, a barrier, like they, I think they recognize that like this was also really important and sort of like prioritized. You know, still doing all the solid work, but like adding my prioritize sort of like the enabling us to sort of like not just use these tools, but experiment with different ones. Like I found myself for like a month, like every week I was submitting these like zip requests for a new software that I wanted to to try out. And it would only take maybe like a week for me to sort of get the the okay. And you can kind of see like it was really important not just to see which applications I have access to and how how that application could be used.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  But what kind of data can I share within an application as well as if I want to get access to it? Like, what are ways that I can I can get to that? And so when I, you know, I go back to this slide, you know, that was that was one of the the tactical things we were able to get done in a single quarter. That really made a huge difference sort of in this in this metric of awareness of our policy and tools.

• 32:12Claire Vo?

  I want to just call this out for the leaders on the team that are, or the leaders in the audience that are listening. This is the first thing I tell them to do is I say, define the golden path to using AI. And it takes three pieces. It takes finance and procurement. It takes legal and it takes security. And what I tell them is it's really not going to benefit the acceleration of your team to say, you will go heads down and figure out how you can get chat GPT and cursor and you'll get your three little, little tools and we'll let you know what they are. You actually need what you called out, which is a very fast path to experimenting with reasonable tools to identify which ones are going to

• 32:55Claire Vo?

  work for your team. And that rapid experimentation is really, really important. You can't go do a big like multi-month evaluation of one code editing tool. Cause as you said, they're changing so rapidly. And so I love this documented place of like, here's the tool, here's the status, here's the data you can put in and the data you can't put in. Here's how you get a license. Here's how you get help. Um, it's just very, very, very useful. And, and if you can get this done, then it all starts to snowball from there because people have a place and a path to go down. So I, this is probably like not the most exciting screen share we've seen. Like it's, it's a table and a conference talk, but like,

• 33:37Claire Vo?

  I just want everybody to pause, screenshot this. If you do not have this in your org, like you need it, need it today. Cause this is going to be the thing that changes how you work. I love this.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, and like, once you kind of get that ball rolling, like, you, you know, there, there's a separate channel too. Like, I think it's called like the AI knowledge center. It's meant to be sort of like the product AI channel, but more like broad based. And every once in a while, someone will be like, hey, can I use granola for this? So an outside of IT, you know, someone who is just familiar with this with this process would just like, hey, go check out the thing, you know, yeah, you can use it, but you have to get approval, yada, yada, yada. And so like, once you sort of get the ball rolling, you have really good documentation, you just sort of reemphasize, this is where you go, this is the process. And on the on the flip side, I mean, I'm not in legal, security, IT, that sort of thing. But like, when those groups, that that group, those groups are responsive to an organization

• 34:32Speaker 00

  that wants to experiment and try this stuff, then the the flywheel just just keeps going. And, you know, like I said, in the beginning of the year, there was a lot of like confusion about what I can do and whatever. And now, I wouldn't say it's all gone, but like, it is nowhere near the top list, the top of our list of things that like we are concerned about when it comes to AI transformation.

• 34:52Claire Vo?

  Well, I love this. You know, just to recap, you've shown us how you become a change agent, you know, sort of incept your organization into taking this seriously as an initiative, how you use synchronous meetings and asynchronous Slack channels to drive this as a consistent practice over time. And then you use OKRs to actually measure, does any of this matter? And you're showing that, like, if you put these simple things in place, you can actually inflect those measures, which, you know, just in the looking at the sentiment, I like that last question that you had on the sentiment survey, which is like, I think this can have a positive impact on our employees. And that went up. And that is a huge win for for a company, because a lot of people are feeling fear about their careers, uncertainty, doubt.

• 35:36Claire Vo?

  And so the fact that you can show, you can do these very simple things, and inflect that sentiment very positively in your employee population is also fabulous. So, Brian, this was great. Thank you for showing us. Again, like, I could not write a better playbook for getting AI adoption in a team. This is what I've done. I you, it works. Let's do this. Let's repeat this and stamp it out in our our own teams. So let's get to some lightning round questions, and then we'll get you back to all your fun AI projects. The first question I have is, okay, you showed us like, you're incepting people and you're, you know, managing your stakeholders and all that kind of stuff. What is your favorite thing you've built with AI over the last year for for work?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  I've built a lot of really cool things. The one that I'm most proud of, but it's it's kind of geeky, is that I built my own MCP server for Pinto.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  So back, maybe back in the spring, whatever, when MCP was becoming really hot, folks have been talking about MCP and like how it could be applied to Pendo. And what I clearly saw was after using tools like deep research, that is essentially like an agent that can, you know, basically run a bunch of web queries over and over and over again to sort of build up sort of a research document. I had spent, you know, I've been in tech for a while. I'm a designer now, but I've also spent time as a PM and I've done a lot of growth work. And one of the things that is common within growth is you're constantly monitoring like dashboards of conversion rates and retention and blah, blah, blah. And every once in a while, a number will like dip or will dive, right?

• 37:10Speaker 00

  And then you're, you're off and you're spending like the entire week trying to understand like, what is it like? Do we have like an issue? Do we have a bug? Like, is there something going on, you know, in one of our regions? You know, like if you do a year-over-year comparison, like maybe a holiday fell, you know, last year and not this year. And so like, that's why these, and usually it's, it's like some common sense thing. But like if someone above you sort of sees this and they're just like, wait a minute, like fire drill, like we gotta go figure it all out. And that like just eats up your whole week doing like a lot of like iterative research, right? Looking at the data from different angles. And I'm like, this could be like, like a deep research like query, but having access to like our data, right? Or usage data could be a killer.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  And like MCP is a technology that can leverage that. If I can give the AI tools to run these queries and then like use its intelligence to like, look at the data and be like, oh, what about looking at it by region? Let's look at it a year-over-year. Let's look at it, blah, blah. And so that was sort of like the idea that I had of connecting like, okay, how, this is how MCP could be useful for our customers, right? Because we also, right, we're a product analytics provider. And so I had this conversation with my colleagues and they're just like, I don't know if, you know, because we have like a bespoke querying language. It's not SQL, so it takes, you know, AI doesn't know how to write those queries. But like, I thought I had a way of doing it that, that could sort of overcome that.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  And so over a couple of nights, I basically just leveraged the MCP documentation, giving it to Cursor. I have no idea how my, I built an MCP server. I have no idea actually how it works, but I understand like. Right? It's like

• 38:46Claire Vo?

  Hold on, I'm laughing. I'm laughing. Everybody close your ears. I legitimately approached MCP servers as true sorcery. Sorcery. Before I built one, I was so, I don't, there's, there's some branding issue that, that the MCP platform and framework has. Because it seems like sorcery. So I was with you until I actually built one and like, you know, wrote the code. And then I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Get it a little bit.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  There's like a lot of elements that make it like really hard to like model context protocol. Like what the hell do those words mean?

• 39:23Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Like it doesn't actually speak to what.

• 39:25Claire Vo?

  Even the naming, it's just, okay, so MCP framework, caretakers, you might as well call it magic context protocol for, for all we know.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. What, one of my most popular sessions, like, so you know, it's not just me doing the sessions, there are probably other people will do them. But like one of my most popular one, one was called WTF is MCP? And I just spent like a whole hour telling people what MCP was. And afterwards they're like, oh, I got it now. It's kind of like web search, but like more tools. And I'm like, yeah.

• 39:56Claire Vo?

  Kind of.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  But anyway, so I, I, I built this thing and like, I have like, so you know, my wife also still works in technology, but she's in marketing and I'm sitting like next to her. And you know how it is, like you have a baby and like, you know, your, your nights are a little bit slower. And so you have some slack time, just kind of like hang out. And she's watching TV and I'm sitting there on the laptop, like working on this MCP server. And I got it to do a thing, right? I got it to like, you know, I wrote a query, a prompt within Claude and it talked to my MCP server and it ran a thing and it returned data back. And I was just like, you have no idea how, how credible this is. And she's like, I don't know what MCU is. Like what is an MCU? I'm like, it's not MCU, it's MCP, god damn.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  So I recorded, so I recorded a demo of me using it. And this isn't the exact one, but this is something very similar, which was, um, I, so I have the, my own MCP server that I hooked up. And I was, I was just using the public APIs, right? So like I have test accounts for Pendo. I didn't have any special access and all the dev platform, I was just able to like this on top of the Actually, any customer can do this. And so I had this M C P server that can do things like just grab really basic stuff like how many pages, which pages are the top pages, how often they accessed, you know, what are things, you know, what, what does this visitor do and that visitor do? So I was like, can you create a beautiful dashboard that shows me which pages, features and guides were the most used over the last 30 days?

• 41:17Speaker 00

  And I think the key thing was that I'm combining accessing the data and having it create a dashboard. So I won't kind of go through all the things that I did. I made a bunch of tool calls. That's not really important, but the important thing was at the end, I had it put the data into this artifact. I'm, I'm sitting here in Claude. And it's not, I mean, I wouldn't ship this, but just visualizing the connection between taking Pendo data, which now, you know, only exists within Pendo, or you can also export it. And there's other ways of getting access to it. But making it accessible on the level where someone could just type in a thing like, tell me who, what the top pages are, and then show me a dashboard, really like changed people's minds.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  And with over the next like couple of months, like I'm now chatting with the CTO, the CTO is creating other versions, M C P. And, you know, he's, so he's creating, we're iterating, creating, uh, starting to like productional, productionize some of these elements. I mean, what I've done here, like they just kind of moved on. It wasn't, the code that I wrote or vibe coded was not important. What was, what was important was like, I was able to demonstrate the value of this somewhat, you know, hard opaque technology to folks that like didn't, maybe didn't see it in the same way. And that has now actually, that has like significantly impacted our roadmap. So like, we're working on a lot of agents within Pendo

• 42:41Speaker 00

  that are leveraging sort of M C P, but you know, behind the scenes and there's other things that we're planning to do with M C P and we might've gotten there anyway. But that, uh, that definitely sort of accelerated our timeline for that.

• 42:53Claire Vo?

  Well, well, congratulations for, for cracking through that. And I think what you said is exactly right, which is like, the code that you wrote is not important. Like people get so wrapped around the axle on the quality of like quote unquote vibe coded stuff, not the issue. The issue is until you can internally display value.

• 43:16Claire Vo?

  It is really hard to get anything done in a product organization. And sometimes you can internally display value by saying a customer wants this, like very easy. Sales comes, I got like a top quarter making deal. Customer wants that. Okay, like we love it. But something that's a little bit more nebulous, something that has a little bit more of an intangible value. Like, I think we could use this new technology or this new framework MCPs to give our customers a better experience of our product. Like, it just doesn't click until you can touch it. And so the more you can use these tools to let your peers sort of like touch your ideas. I think the more, as you said, you can like impact the roadmap, which is what I hear all the time from designers, engineers, product managers. Like, I'm tired of the roadmap being given to me.

• 44:01Claire Vo?

  How do I like impact it? And this tool, these, these tools are definitely a way, way of doing that.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would say one, just one tip around this, which I think is really important to emphasize is that, you know, you, you might sit sort of like, you know, you might be designer or PM. I think it's really important for everyone to understand how this technology works. Like, I think you gotta get a little more technical. You gotta understand how LLMs are working. You have to understand what like what an agent is. You don't have to be able to code these things. You don't have to be an ML engineer. But if you are a creative person or someone who's sort of in the solution space and is trying to think about like what, what were the different ways that I can apply AI to this, this problem? You won't arrive at anything really interesting unless you understand the underlying technology.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  It's like an architect, like architects, yeah, they, they design like pretty buildings, but they also understand how plumbing works and what, and the electronics work, right? Like, they're, they're not like the electricians and the plumbers, right? But like in order to build a functional building that stands up and, and is functional, right? Like, you gotta have power sockets, you gotta have room for the pipes, like all that stuff is important. I think the same thing applies to PMs and designers. And I think if you're an engineer, I think it's also useful to understand like the business side, the customer side, the, you know, like to really empathize with the issue, the, the problems that your customers have. So that it, you know, like what we're all looking for is basically how do you sort of connect the dots between the technologies that we have available to us to solve customer problems?

• 45:31Claire Vo?

  Ah, I could not hype you up more because I have been screaming from the rooftops. This is the era of the hard skill. Like, you need the hard skills. To take advantage of this stuff, I didn't call it out earlier, but I saw one of your sessions was like intro to HTML and CSS. Like, that is actually going to be the unlock for your designers, because if you can read CSS, a whole world has opened up to you with these vibe coding tools. And so, yes, you need to know how the stuff actually, actually works. Okay, so Brian, last question, this has been so great, but gotta have your, your strategy here. When AI is not listening, when that MCP is not being vibe-coded correctly by Cursor,

• 46:14Claire Vo?

  what is your go-to tactic? How do you get it unblocked? Do you yell?

• 46:20Speaker 00

  You know, I don't want to say that I don't yell, but I do yell sometimes. The, the other thing that I do too, which I think is also really helpful, is I say, okay, you're not, you're not quite getting it. Like, think, think about a different way of approaching this, right? Like, I'm trying to nudge it to like, it may be it's sort of like locked into a certain sort of groove, and I'm trying to, to make it think a little more broadly. I don't know if that actually helps, but I've, I've found that like, sometimes that's useful. So like, if I'm not yelling, it's just like, okay, you try this a million times, think about five other different ways that you can solve this problem and, and go for it.

• 46:55Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I think that's probably more effective than my "nooo" that I do when it's not working. Well, Brian, this has been awesome. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you can find me on, on LinkedIn. I try to post when I can. And yeah, I mean, if you're a sort of, if you're a product builder, or you know, you're interested in working for a, a company that is sort of embracing AI, you should check out Pendo.

• 47:22Claire Vo?

  Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.