Too often, product managers work as human middleware between their teams and tools, burning out great people with administrative friction instead of building energising high-performance cultures. Life is short—you need to get your time back.

In this episode, Ross Webb (who built product teams at Amazon serving 80,000+ IT professionals) explores how AI transforms team leadership by streamlining management processes, reducing PM stress, and enabling sustainable high performance.

What You'll Learn:

• Why top product leaders think like part-time recruiters and become "talent factories"
• How actively seeking to be wrong makes you a better, more effective leader
• The balance between decision-making authority and collaborative experimentation
• How to drive high performance whilst preventing team burnout and maintaining wellbeing
• How AI can automate performance tracking, workload balancing, and communication coordination

Featured Guests:

• Jordan Burton - Talent development expert on the "talent factory" mindset and ecosystem building
• Harrison Baker - Leadership specialist on curiosity, questioning, and situational reading
• Annika Schmid - Decision-making strategist on reversible vs irreversible choices and rapid experimentation
• Kris Jones - Performance management expert on sustainable high performance and burnout prevention

Key Takeaways:

• High-performance teams aren't about finding perfect people—they're about creating systems for excellence
• The shift from "smartest person in the room" to "surround myself with incredible talent" defines leadership
• Speed of learning often trumps perfection of planning in most product decisions
• AI can eliminate the administrative burden that burns out talented team members

Sponsored by FlowFocus AI - The agentic AI system that connects your entire product stack (Jira, Amplitude, PostHog, roadmapping tools, competitive intelligence) and saves product managers 5-10 hours per week. Because life is too short to be human middleware.