CPO Rising Series: Why Opportunity Cost Is Still the Only Thing That Matters

What does a former touring DJ who accidentally built one of the internet’s first MP3 stores have to say about product leadership? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Intuit SVP of Product Wyatt Jenkins will be speaking on why managing opportunity cost is the heart and soul of product management, why the PM who doesn’t make their engineering team twice as good shouldn’t be there at all, and why the systems of record layer will survive the so-called SaaS apocalypse. He also shares how he uses Claude to become a deep vertical expert on a dog walk.

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Show Notes:

1. Product management is the discipline of managing opportunity cost, and that does not change regardless of how fast you can build. Every yes is a no to something else. Every feature built is a feature not built. In a world of high-speed AI development, that calculus does not disappear — it becomes more important, because the speed of building no longer constrains how much gets built. Judgment does.
2. A great product strategy is defined more by what it says no to than what it says yes to. When Wyatt looks at a product strategy, the list of nos should be longer than the list of yeses. Building fast does not change the total cost of ownership — you still have to ship with enterprise-grade security, permissions, pricing, and go-to-market. Speed of build is one variable. Everything else still takes the time it takes.
3. The PM who doesn’t make their engineering team twice as fast or twice as good is not needed. Just let the engineers do it. Product management is a force multiplier role or it is nothing. A great product manager applied to a strong team of engineers and designers can triple the output of that group. An average product manager can hold them back. It is not a nine-to-five job, and it is not for the faint of heart.
4. Every product manager needs three things: the ability to tell a compelling story about the future, grit and determination to absorb a thousand nos, and the ability to inspire a team to do the best work of their lives. Wyatt says he can figure out in five minutes whether a candidate has all three. The interview question he reaches for: tell me a story about when you convinced a CEO to change their mind about a product direction.
5. Leaders are the clarity people. A crystal-clear vision, delivered with conviction even when you do not have complete information, is the first job of a product leader. The second is building the team that will make that vision happen. Everything else is underneath those two things. If you can do both well, you are in the top five percent.
6. Go from idea to prototype first. Then document. The written narrative approach to product — writing to clarify thinking — still has value for the writer. But vibe coding an app also provides clarity of thought. If you ask the AI a stupid question, you get a stupid app. Prompting is its own discipline for sharpening thinking, and the prototype-first path compresses the feedback loop with customers in ways that documentation cannot.
7. The product visionary does not have to be the product manager. Wyatt asks not who the product manager is on a team but who the product visionary is — and he does not care what function it is. Sometimes it is an engineering leader. Sometimes it is a designer. Sometimes it is a PM. The title is less important than whether someone has put in the time with customers and with the technology to know clearly where the product needs to go.
8. Technology takes another leap. People still move at the speed of people. The UI layer is a wild west where anything could happen. The systems of record layer — payroll, org charts, financial regulation, compliance, permissions — is still built around how humans work, and humans are not going to move five times faster just because software can. That gap is where most AI predictions go wrong.
9. The SaaS apocalypse is real and overstated at the same time. Some customers will build their own tools because it is now easy enough to do so. And also, these organizations have flows and structures and systems that are simply not going to be replaced. Both things are true. The pendulum has swung hard toward “everything will be replaced” and it will swing back when people remember how hard organizational change actually is.
10. You have to lead by example, and you cannot fake it. In every new role, Wyatt has come in on day one, gotten in front of a major customer escalation, and stood up a working prototype in 24 hours. Not to show off — to show his team how it is done and give them something to rally around. You cannot lead a product team in 2026 without being a practitioner. The team can tell the difference between someone who does it and someone who talks about it.
11. Using Claude to become a vertical expert on a dog walk is a legitimate onboarding strategy. Wyatt has had 90-minute deep-dive conversations with Claude about value-based medicine, healthcare billing changes, and industry trends while learning the mid-market verticals he will build for at Intuit. Two years ago, that level of market understanding would have taken months. Now it takes a walk.
12. AI tools give you the average answer across very large data sets. That is the history lesson, not the bleeding edge. The most confident-sounding AI responses are often the most average. What the internet has written a lot about, the LLM knows well. What the small percentage of innovators at the frontier are thinking, it may miss entirely. Knowing how to probe for the outlier perspective — and catch the model when it is averaging — is a skill that separates sophisticated AI users from credulous ones.
13. Meaningful outcomes are relative to the size of the company you are in. At a $17 billion revenue company, $100 million is not interesting. The CPO has to calibrate what matters to the scale of the organization and cut noise on everything else. Raising the game one level every time — always asking what outcome is actually meaningful here — is the discipline that drives product alpha at every stage.
14. Total cost of ownership is always bigger than the build. The build is the easy part. What happens after — pricing, market positioning, security, compliance, customer support, organizational change management — is the hard part, and it does not get faster just because the build got faster. Product leaders who celebrate the speed of development without accounting for the total cost of delivering something sustainably are measuring the wrong thing.
15. Curiosity and conviction are the two traits that matter most in product leaders right now. Skills change by the week — prototyping tools, prompting techniques, discovery methods. Traits do not. A product leader who genuinely tinkers, who plays with new tools not because they have to but because they want to, and who can state what they believe with clarity even before they have validated it — that is the profile that holds up across every shift in the technology landscape.
16. The product manager’s job is to unlock the vision, not to own it. Product leadership has always been about building the conditions under which a great team does its best work. AI has not changed that. It has just raised the bar for what “making the team twice as good” means, because now the baseline of what engineers and designers can do on their own has gone up significantly.
17. Discovery techniques are a tool belt, not a checklist. A/B testing, customer-driven discovery, design sprints, card sorting, reference customer patterns — a great product leader has mastery of all of them and knows which one to reach for depending on the hypothesis. The skill is not knowing the techniques. The skill is knowing which technique gives you the fastest and most reliable signal for the specific thing you are trying to validate.
18. The products that will build on top of systems of record — connecting Cowork agents to Salesforce, Intuit, and core enterprise systems — are the most exciting unsolved problem in the market right now. The cross-platform agent that can instantiate in one tool and take action in another across enterprise systems does not fully work yet. When it does, it changes what is possible in enterprise software more than anything that has come before it.
19. Building an identity as a practitioner rather than a pundit is a choice worth making. Wyatt stopped writing publicly about product management around 2011 and decided to just build. The track record that followed — Shutterstock, Procore, Intuit — speaks in a way that a blog catalog never could. In a field full of people who talk about building, the people who are actually doing it are still rare, and still obvious.
20. The question “what is worth getting out of bed for?” is the real product strategy test at scale. At every company, the opportunity cost question eventually resolves into: which of these outcomes is actually meaningful given where we are, what is just noise, and what would I regret not having pursued? That editorial judgment — exercised consistently, across hundreds of decisions — is the accumulated output of everything product leadership is.