Tonal CPO on building the world’s largest kinetic dataset

Jonathan Shottan began his career at the intersection of data and scale, working at Pinterest as the company was expanding internationally, and at Facebook before that, where he learned how data could drive business growth. He is now the Chief Product and Content Officer at Tonal, an intelligent gym that sits on your wall and builds strength through a magnetic resistance motor that collects physiological data 50 times per second across 300 different arm articulations. That data, accumulated across a large and growing user base, is now the world’s largest kinetic dataset, the only one with enough fidelity to enable predictive health outcomes at scale. Jonathan was selected as a finalist for the 2026 CPO Awards, and in this episode of CPO Rising series, host and Products That Count Resident Chief Product Officer Jay Patel sits down with him to talk about what it actually takes to build a product with sub-1% monthly churn and over $100M in ARR, how he thinks about boulders versus pebbles when deciding what to build, and why he believes saying no is most of his job.

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Show Notes:

1. Jonathan’s career has one consistent through line: putting himself where success was most likely to happen. He has chosen companies with established value propositions and clear horizontal scale opportunities, including time in ad tech, Facebook, and Pinterest before landing at Tonal. If he is good at any one thing, he says, it is choosing great people and big problems at the right moment.
2. Tonal is an intelligent gym that mounts on your wall and uses a magnetic resistance motor to create weight between five and 250 pounds. The motor collects data on every rep, every articulation, every pull, 50 times per second. That data, accumulated across Tonal’s user base over time, now constitutes the world’s largest kinetic dataset, the only one with enough fidelity across enough of a population to generate predictive outcomes about human physiological health.
3. The long-term vision for Tonal goes well beyond consumer fitness. Jonathan sees the kinetic dataset as the foundation for physical therapy, post-surgical rehabilitation, and other commercial applications where deep physiological understanding can inform outcomes. The machine on the wall is the current expression of a larger mission: to inform, predict, and improve human physiological outcomes.
4. The CPO role has changed, Jonathan argues, from setting strategic guardrails and stepping back to something more osmotic, where the CPO moves fluidly across altitudes within the organization. The CPO today is less a limiter on scope and more a limiter on speed, much more involved in the early ideation phase than in past eras, particularly as AI accelerates the pace of development.
5. Jonathan believes everyone in product, from the most junior PM to the CPO, has to think of themselves as a builder first. AI is a great mimic, he says, but it still does not know what the words mean. The role of product is to define the guardrails, plant the flagpole on specific outcomes, and build systems through AI that allow for fast iterative development while protecting those outcomes.
6. The framework Jonathan uses to balance short-term execution and long-term investment is a three-year vision translated into a one-year operating plan, broken into quarterly goals, and then into sprint-level planning with teams. The three-year vision is the hardest part to hold, but it is the thing that makes everything else less political. When everyone knows where the company is going, decisions about resources stop being about teams and start being about outcomes.
7. His top piece of advice for first-time CPOs: over-index on the three-year north star. Most organizations swirl because they lack fidelity at that level. CPOs who walk in and immediately ask to see all the problems are solving the wrong thing first. The job is to align on where the company wants to be, then work backwards to what success looks like along the way.
8. A strong CPO drives cultural acceleration by giving people something to believe in over the long run. When individuals understand and emotionally invest in a long-term outcome, they stay, they give more, and they interpret the inevitable down cycles as temporary rather than directional. Jonathan sees this as the CPO’s biggest cultural contribution.
9. Jonathan’s team used Claude to process thousands of orphaned Jira tickets accumulated over seven years of a backlog. The tool automatically categorized, closed where appropriate, and flagged tickets with potential failure modes. In roughly two days, the engineering team cleared through what would have taken months manually and uncovered areas of risk that had been sitting quietly in the dark.
10. He structures prioritization around boulders and pebbles. Boulders are the big strategic bets that take about a year to generate signal and should be tied to the most important business objective. Pebbles are the smaller, faster-moving work that teams can run largely independently. The mistake most organizations make is adding another boulder when the first one is not generating signal fast enough, instead of giving it the time it needs.
11. Saying no is most of Jonathan’s job. It serves two functions: pushing off well-meaning ideas that would intersect with the team’s current focus, and protecting the team from pursuing things that sound impactful but would spread resources too thin. For a hardware company where a new trainer takes two years and double-digit millions to bring to market, preserving optionality is not just strategy. It is survival.
12. Tonal is running a scrappy early-stage healthcare pilot that has produced strong enough results that Jonathan is preparing to pour resources into it as the company’s next major boulder. Healthcare represents an S-curve of growth separate from consumer fitness, applying the kinetic dataset to physical therapy and rehabilitation markets where the data’s predictive power has real clinical value.
13. The best PMs Jonathan has hired share a few traits. They are questioners who devote themselves to deeply understanding a problem before moving toward solutions. They tend to be polymaths with multiple areas of genuine interest. And they have what he describes as a glass-half-empty quality, though he later refines this to unsatisfied: they hold a high bar and are never quite content with what exists.
14. Jonathan’s signature PM interview question has three parts: ask the candidate about a product they love, then ask what they would improve, then ask why they think the PM at that company has not fixed that problem yet. The last question is the one that matters. The best candidates can immediately step into someone else’s perspective, consider the constraints and trade-offs that PM was navigating, and articulate why a reasonable person might have made a different call.
15. Taste, Jonathan argues, is a function of perspective. As AI handles more of the building, the product leader’s job becomes more about taste, but taste is not some ineffable quality. It is the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously: your own, the customer’s, the other PM’s, the business’s. The PMs who cannot do that are the ones who find problems without understanding why they exist.
16. Tonal’s value proposition rests on three things working together: the data science and progressive algorithms, the hardware itself, and the content. All three contribute to a sub-1% monthly churn rate and over $100M in ARR. Jonathan does not yet know with certainty which of the three matters most to retention, and he is honest about that uncertainty.
17. Content’s role at Tonal, Jonathan argues, is immersion and anthropomorphization. It turns the machine from a piece of equipment into a partner. Users describe Tonal in terms that usually apply to coaches or trainers, not devices. That relationship is not built by the hardware or the algorithms alone. It is built by the human content layer that sits on top of both, and it is why he believes content is the leading value proposition, not a secondary one.
18. Studies are beginning to show that most people want AI to inform them, not guide them. Jonathan sees this as validation of the content strategy: the human layer gives users trust in the product and a sense of relationship that AI-generated guidance alone cannot replicate. He does not think this will always be true, but for now it shapes how he thinks about the role of content in the product experience.
19. One of the most important lessons from Jonathan’s time at Pinterest came from watching activation rates decline as the company expanded internationally. New users in markets with low product awareness looked nothing like the earliest Pinterest cohorts, and the product had evolved far from what drove long-term habituation in those original users. The fix was stripping everything back to the one action that predicted long-term engagement: saving a pin. Growth taught him to think reductively, to ask not what metric to move, but what is the right metric to move.
20. Customer value always trumps monetization, and companies that prioritize one at the expense of the other eventually have to navigate that tension. He sees it as one of the most universal trade-offs in product, and the lesson he carries from growth work is to start with value and let monetization follow, not the reverse.