CPO Rising Series: Perk CPO on Why Now Is Product’s Biggest Moment

What happens to product leadership when anyone can create a product in minutes? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Axiom Law CPO Katrina Benjamin, Perk CPO Nikita Miller will be speaking on why this might be the biggest moment in product leadership history. Nikita shares how roles across product, design, and engineering are converging in exciting ways, why the best AI is invisible to users, and what urgency and conviction really look like in a company that’s growing fast.

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Show Notes:

1. Roles across product, design, and engineering are blurring in a way Nikita finds genuinely exciting. PMs are becoming builders, engineers are becoming more product-minded, and designers are builders, and that convergence is a huge opportunity for everyone in software.
2. The best companies aren’t product-led or sales-led, they’re problem-led. When every function is unified around customer problems from different vantage points, the result is better decisions and a stronger product.
3. Marketing and sales partners bring urgency to problems that product teams tend to see on a longer horizon. The two perspectives converge and complement each other, and prioritizing by the magnitude of the pain point is what keeps everyone focused on what actually matters.
4. AI is changing not just what you can prototype but how fast you can do it. Something that used to take a week or two can now be done before lunch, and the pace of change is so rapid that what’s true today is already different from what was true three or six months ago.
5. High-agency product managers are thriving in the AI era. If you’re someone who finds a way to get things done no matter what, this moment is unprecedented because the tools now give you far more capacity to act than ever before.
6. As a leader, there’s a real responsibility to help teams up the AI learning curve. Making space to explore, experiment, and workshop isn’t optional; it’s part of the job now.
7. The strongest product managers aren’t just using AI tools individually, they’re reworking entire team workflows. That organizational lift, not just personal productivity gains, is where the real leverage comes from.
8. Product leadership is having a moment. In a world where creating features and products has become cheap and accessible to anyone, the people who can identify real problems, ship solutions fast, and scale them into a sustainable business are more valuable than ever.
9. The future of Nikita’s industry is an end-to-end operating system for corporate spend covering travel, procurement, and events combined. There’s enormous value in that space that’s currently either unseen or being lost to manual, fragmented processes.
10. No matter how advanced the technology gets, Nikita is still bullish on great people and teams. The magic of people building, creating, and imagining together is something she believes remains irreplaceable, even if those teams look different than they used to.
11. AI tools are now making it easier and faster to solve immediate problems, which frees up human attention for longer-term bets that used to get crowded out. That shift in where people spend their mental energy is a real and underappreciated advantage.
12. Rebuilding something is no longer the scary option it once was. Because it’s easier, faster, and cheaper than before, teams can now make trade-offs that simply weren’t viable in the past.
13. New CPOs can’t afford to spend their entire first quarter just listening. Given how fast everything is changing, picking a few things to act on quickly and showing impact early is just as important as understanding the lay of the land.
14. The core mandate of a CPO hasn’t changed with AI: galvanize an organization to solve the right problems for the right users at the right time. What AI has done is give product leaders better tools to figure out what “right” actually means.
15. The best AI in a product is invisible. Nikita doesn’t want users to notice that AI helped them; she wants them to feel that a problem they had was meaningfully solved, full stop.
16. Perk uses an AI assistant that calls ahead and handles hotel logistics so customers arrive to a seamless check-in experience. The point isn’t that AI did something clever; it’s that a frustrating part of the travel experience simply disappears.
17. AI voice agents that proactively handle travel disruptions, plus AI-driven receipt matching in expense management, are examples of Nikita’s philosophy in practice. It’s not a feature to promote; it’s infrastructure that makes the product just work better.
18. Product leadership shows up in outcomes, both business and user outcomes. Nikita always comes back to the same question: are we building novel solutions to real problems that customers can actually understand and use?
19. Driving urgency and clarity of direction is where the CPO role really excels. Having conviction about where to go and why, and galvanizing a team around that, is the consistent core of the job regardless of what technology is doing around it.
20. Nikita travels everywhere with a physical collection of Chekhov short stories and reads them instead of tech content. She says it reminds her she’s doing okay because she’s not living in a Chekhov story, and it keeps her connected to the real world.