Inside An AI Acquisition: How Yana Welinder Built & Sold Kraftful To Amplitude

What really breaks when a company scales and why do proven playbooks suddenly stop working? In this podcast hosted by Boston New Technology CPO Shweta Agrawal, Apollo.io CPO Bela Stepanova speaks on what it takes to scale from $40M to $200M ARR and beyond. Drawing from her experience scaling multiple high-growth companies, Bella unpacks the mindset shifts, product strategy changes, and organizational decisions required to navigate hypergrowth without losing focus, quality, or customer trust.

How do you build an AI product that delivers real value long before AI becomes a buzzword? In this podcast hosted by Products That Count CEO Hoda Mehr, Amplitude Head of AI and former Kraftful Founder Yana Welinder speaks on building AI-native products, staying relentlessly focused on real customer problems, and navigating the journey from startup to acquisition. Drawing from her experience taking Kraftful from early experimentation with large language models to being acquired by Amplitude, Yana shares practical lessons on product focus, founder-led growth, and what it truly takes to scale AI inside a large organization.

What if the most important part of product management has nothing to do with roadmaps, features, or technology? In this podcast hosted by Rachel Owens, Meta Product Leader Rick Sanchez speaks on why clarity is the most critical responsibility of a product manager. Drawing from a career spanning media, gaming, consulting, and AI-driven products, the conversation explores how great product leaders create alignment, unlock creative execution, and navigate complex problem spaces without relying on rigid frameworks.

How do you move from shipping features to building a product vision that actually drives growth? In this podcast hosted by Huntress Director of Product Nisarg Desai, American Express Vice President of Product Management Jose Quesada shares how he approaches product vision and strategy for one of the world's most scaled B2C platforms. Jose breaks down the difference between vision and strategy, how to ground ambitious north stars in execution, and what it takes to turn product thinking into a durable growth engine.

How do you turn messy, unstructured healthcare data into real-time intelligence that actually improves care? In this podcast hosted by Mphasis Vice President of Products Chenny Solaiyappan, Datycs CEO Dr. Srini Rao shares how his career spanning AI at IBM, global telecom infrastructure, and healthcare data engineering led him to tackle one of healthcare's hardest problems: making unstructured clinical data usable at scale. The conversation explores interoperability, NLP versus GenAI in regulated environments, and why real progress in value-based care depends on transforming clinical notes into actionable, standards-based data.

How do you decarbonize the world's most emissions-intensive industries at the speed climate science demands? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Calectra CEO & Co-Founder Pauliina Meskanen to discuss decarbonizing heavy industries' manufacturing processes with thermal batteries to store high temperature heat, the role of customer discovery to building and scaling a product, and the importance of choosing the right partners and building relationships with trust and value creation. 

How do you scale generative AI in healthcare without sacrificing trust, transparency, or governance? In this podcast hosted by Mphasis Vice President of Products Chenny Solaiyappan, Cognizant Senior Director Elliot Papadakis shares how Cognizant is building and operationalizing an AI gateway that sits at the center of its responsible AI strategy. Elliot discusses embedding generative AI into payer workflows, designing human-in-the-loop guardrails, and using AI orchestration to unlock productivity gains across complex healthcare systems while keeping accountability and patient impact front and center.

What does it take to create an AI product that becomes part of someone's workflow for good? In this podcast hosted by Products That Count CEO Hoda Mehr, Grammarly/Superhuman Chief Product Officer Noam Lovinsky breaks down the company's bold shift from a writing assistant to a multi-product ecosystem spanning agents, email, documents, and more. He shares the product frameworks, organizational structures, and leadership philosophies behind this transformation, offering a candid look at what it means to build deeply retentive AI products at scale.

How do product leaders think big enough to compete in an AI-native world? In this podcast hosted by Sid Shaik, Walmart U.S. former Chief Product Officer John Alferness joins us again and speaks on scaling AI at retail and enterprise scale. He breaks down how CPOs can separate core AI capabilities from applications, choose the right moonshots, and use AI to unlock personalization, efficiency, and growth in low-margin businesses.

What does it take to think bigger when your products already operate at massive scale? In this podcast hosted by Sid Shaik, Walmart U.S. former Chief Product Officer John Alferness breaks down how product leaders can push beyond incremental gains to unlock true step-change growth. He explores the mental models behind moonshots, the discipline required to manage risk at scale, and why AI is accelerating the pace of change for every product organization.