Episode 243: Embracing Visual Collaboration in the Age of AI with Elaina O’Mahoney

Summary

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Product Thinking Podcast Summary

Episode 243: Embracing Visual Collaboration in the Age of AI with Elaina O’Mahoney
Host: Melissa Perri
Guest: Elaina O’Mahoney, Chief Product Officer at Mural
Date: September 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the evolving landscape of product management in a world increasingly shaped by remote work, visual collaboration, and AI-driven tools. Melissa Perri speaks with Elaina O’Mahoney, Chief Product Officer at Mural, about how visual collaboration has become integral to product teams, the challenges and opportunities of incorporating AI, and practical strategies for product leadership, operations, and cross-functional alignment. Their conversation explores not just the impact of tools like Mural, but also the fundamental principles that anchor effective product organizations—outcomes, customer value, and metrics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Elaina’s Background and Joining Mural

• Career Highlights (02:28-03:07):
  • Elaina has a deep background in B2B product leadership, spanning startups to public companies.
  • The draw to Mural was “leveraging a tool that's really purpose built for this moment in time where organizations are changing and shifting how they bring products to market.” (Elaina, 02:37)

2. The Evolution and Endurance of Mural

• Genesis of Mural (04:21-05:00):
  • Mural was born out of a need for visual storyboarding in game development, which translated well to remote visual collaboration.
  • Its popularity soared during COVID due to accelerated remote adoption.
• Longevity in the Market (05:00-06:35):
  • Mural remains vital because of its ease of use and adaptability to in-person, hybrid, and remote teams.
  • "They're like living artifacts that don't have to die." (Elaina, 06:35) on how digital whiteboards replace the need to preserve physical boards.

3. Changing Nature of Collaboration and the Role of Visual Tools

• Faster, Clearer Collaboration (07:13-08:13):
  • Visual tools “shortcut some of those really long cycles” previously dominated by text and ambiguity.
  • "There's this collective aha moment in the product development lifecycle that actually shortcuts some of those really long cycles that you would say, 'what would you mean by this word? What do you mean by sales funnel?' And when you can just visually show something, people get to that decision making faster." (Elaina, 07:13)
• AI as a Facilitator, Not a Replacement (08:13-09:57):
  • Mural’s vision is that AI should amplify, not override, human collaboration.
  • AI can support introverts, nudge participation, and act as a “facilitator” in group settings, lowering the barrier to high-quality workshops and decision-making.

4. Product Strategy Fundamentals

• Three-Part Product Strategy (10:12-10:57):
  • 1. Business goals and core metrics.
  • 2. Deep understanding of both buyers and end-users.
  • 3. Organizational “product craft.”

    “All three of those things, when you bring them together, you can actually come out with a product strategy and a direction to steer the ship.” (Elaina, 10:57)

5. Empowering Creativity and Team Autonomy

• Rituals & Feedback Loops (11:15-12:14):
  • Ongoing customer contact, product reviews, and outcome-oriented metrics form the foundation for creativity and innovation.
  • Product managers are given latitude to experiment towards clearly defined outcomes.
• Safety and Ownership (14:04-15:43):
  • Leaders must provide “boundaries and constraints” via product strategy, then trust teams to propose solutions.
  • “Giving them the boundaries and constraints by which to make decisions... then showing how that lathers up to those metrics.” (Elaina, 15:03)

6. Metrics and Measuring Product Success

• Quantitative & Qualitative Balance (15:43-16:26):
  • Revenue, adoption, user growth—paired with customer satisfaction, NPS, testimonials, and sales insights.

7. Building Bridges with Go-to-Market Teams

• Sales as Partners, not Enemies (16:40-17:29):
  • "They are on the front line," so product must embed with sales through regular check-ins, pairing, and shared knowledge.
  • Regular meetings and “champions programs” help create closed feedback loops.

8. AI Hype: Practical vs. “Checkbox” Adoption

• AI Features Must Deliver Value (19:21-20:23):
  • Feature parity (“AI-enabled”) won’t win deals—the outcome and “fit for purpose” use that demonstrably helps users matter most.
• Conveying Value Propositions Across Teams (20:23-23:13):
  • Early and constant cross-functional collaboration between product, product marketing, and sales to create seamless messaging.
  • Mural uses its own tool to enable rapid prototyping and gather quick feedback on positioning and customer needs.

9. Navigating Enterprise Adoption of AI

• Balancing Innovation with Compliance (24:50-25:53):
  • Security and compliance are central for enterprise AI adoption.
  • Building trust through clear data policies, certifications, and peer proof points helps de-risk adoption.

10. Product Operations: The Backbone of Scaling

• Product Ops as Strategy Enabler (27:47-28:27):
  • Product operations help leaders to avoid “two jobs at once”—driving operational rigor and tool stack choices, including the value of visual tools like Mural itself.
• Future of Product Ops (28:37-29:35):
  • As AI and automation increase, product operations will further integrate, potentially obviating separate tools (roadmapping, analytics) through more seamless workflows and unified collaboration.

11. Back to Basics for Transformation

• Focusing on Fundamentals (29:48-30:28):
  • Amidst new technologies, organizations should ground transformation in “outcomes, customers, and metrics.”
  • "If you're not looking at any of those, you're just going to be building features for feature's sake." (Elaina, 29:48)

12. Personal Reflections and Trends

• Advice to Younger Self (30:34-30:59):
  • Be confident. “Have strong opinions, loosely held.”
• Favorite Trend:
  • The ability to quickly prototype and communicate through visuals—even as a non-designer.
• Emerging Product Leadership Challenge (31:46-32:29):
  • Today’s leaders must be both strategic and tactical, balancing vision with hands-on learning—especially as tools and technologies change rapidly.

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Notable Quotes

• On visual collaboration’s endurance:
  “They're like living artifacts that don't have to die.” (Elaina O’Mahoney, 06:35)

• On moving fast with clarity:
  “There's this collective aha moment in the product development lifecycle that actually shortcuts some of those really long cycles...” (Elaina O’Mahoney, 07:13)

• On AI’s real value:
  “It can't just be AI for AI's sake, but it is actually fit for purpose and it's doing something that maybe you couldn't do before or it's speeding up part of their jobs to be done.” (Elaina O’Mahoney, 19:21)

• Advice to her younger self:
  “Be more confident. It took me a very long time to find my voice when I was a younger PM of should I speak up now? ... Have strong opinions, loosely held.” (Elaina O’Mahoney, 30:39)

• On product transformation:
  “Go back to some of the fundamentals of outcomes, customers and metrics, because if you're not looking at any of those, you're just going to be building features for feature's sake.” (Elaina O’Mahoney, 29:48)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Opening & Introduction: 00:00–02:15
• Elaina’s career path to Mural: 02:28–03:14
• Mural’s origins & COVID growth: 04:21–05:21
• Why Mural stuck vs. competitors: 05:00–06:35
• Impact of visual collaboration tools: 07:13–08:13
• AI’s role in collaborative work: 08:13–09:57
• Defining product strategy principles: 10:12–10:57
• Product ops, team rituals, and autonomy: 11:15–15:43
• Cross-functional with sales & GTM: 16:40–18:39, 20:23–23:13
• Enterprise AI adoption & compliance: 24:50–26:33
• Product operations & future trends: 27:47–29:35
• Transformation advice—focus on fundamentals: 29:48–30:28
• Advice to younger self & emerging trends: 30:34–32:29

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Flow and Tone

The conversation is practical, thoughtful, and candid—balancing industry insight with approachable, sometimes humorous anecdotes about sticky notes, whiteboards, and the joys (and pain) of growing product teams. Elaina brings a reflective, systems-thinking perspective, repeatedly emphasizing the human-centric side of technology—even as AI transforms the landscape.

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This summary encapsulates the full depth and spirit of the episode, offering actionable insights for product leaders and practitioners navigating the intersection of visual collaboration and AI.

Transcript

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

How are we operationally going to build products, bring them to market, which will define that product operations? Where do we shortcut things? Do we need a separate product roadmapping tool anymore? Do we need a separate process for analytics? Do we need a separate team? Are we just now able to vibe code analytics? All of that I think will define where product operation goes next. But knowing where you can shortcut what tools that are important, it goes all back to knowing your workflow now and then what can you change to help you ensure that you are making the most efficient time? I think they should really go back to some of the fundamentals of outcomes, customers and metrics, because if you're not looking at any of those, you're just going to be building features for feature's sake. It's funny how we can move forward in time, change how we build things, but also anchor ourselves into some of the things we know that are super important to making a business successful, which is always having an outcome driven metric that is anchored in a customer and a customer value and then anything you build on top, whether it's AI as part of your toolkit or non AI, but not forgetting any of those anchors.

[Melissa Perry]

Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Alaina o', Mahoney, the Chief Product Officer at Mural, one of the most widely used tools for visual collaboration. Alaina is a dynamic product leader known for her innovative customer first approach and her expertise in leading high performing teams across various types of organizations. Her insights into working with modern product teams is what we'll dive into today. Welcome Elena.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

It's nice to be here, Melissa.

[Melissa Perry]

I'm excited to chat with you. I think Mural is a is one of those products that so many of our product manager listeners are really familiar with. So excited to see what you guys are up to.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, it's been a fun ride so far.

[Melissa Perry]

So you just started in at mural in February 2025 this year. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your career highlights that led you up to working here?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, Absolutely. I have been in product for a while and usually I've been in mostly B2B organizations where ranging from startups to public companies. And when this opportunity fell in my lap, it was really also about leveraging a tool that's really purpose built for this moment in time where organizations are changing and shifting how they bring products to market and also getting to dive into a tool I get to use myself. That was almost more fun than anything else.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah, I would love that too. I'm sure you're like sitting there going, oh, I really wish it would do this or it would do that. And you can, you can actually do it.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yes.

[Melissa Perry]

So when you think about the different organizational settings that you've worked at, how do you think that's shaped your approach to product leadership and what are you bringing into Mural with that?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. So you get to see the natural tensions that exist when you're at a startup versus when you're at a scale up or on public organization. So if you think about how speed versus scale you think about generalists versus narrowest or what ones where it's like risky versus risk averse you as a product leader, now that you've seen that gamut can bring some of those insights and determine what sort of strategies are fit for purpose, where the organization is headed. So that's where it really becomes fun. Because sometimes I want to be that startup person at a scale up. Sometimes I'm like, well, it's time to scale. And knowing those different varieties really make product leadership fun.

[Melissa Perry]

So when you came into Mural, we had just gotten off this five year rollercoaster like post Covid. I think it went nuts during COVID as we all had to move online. Can you tell us a little bit about the product and the company and what it looked like at that time?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, the product was really born out of three founders who have a background in gaming and they really wanted a place to collaborate, a visual storyboard to create a game. And so in that visual element, it was really easy to make decisions fast because you could really see what would be coming next. And I think that's why it took off in Covid, because virtually you can be anywhere in the world, you can see a visual element, you can align on the way that it's communicating and then make those critiques decisions in faster cycles. And I think that's why during COVID it really took off and gained traction.

[Melissa Perry]

And one, a lot of these products that took off during COVID they're like dead now. But Mural has stuck around integral to some people's processes in product management in other domains as well. Can you tell us a little bit about why you think Mural had such lasting power and how you've seen that world of collaboration and visual collaboration, especially remotely change over time?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, I think because you can easily adopt the tool, it's very easy to use. You log in, you can create your elements, you can start from somewhere blank, or you can start with ready made items such as a template or bringing in your own information. And then really it's about that interaction that you can have human to human, whether you are still remote, as many organizations still work remote or hybrid or in person. What we've seen since that shift is people have returned to office, people have also continued to work remote. And having a tool that can be leveraged in any one of those three environments still rings true.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah, I did a workshop about a month ago and we were using post it sticky notes and somebody went, oh, we should have just done this in Mural from the start. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go just take this and put it.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Back in Mural after this.

[Melissa Perry]

We could have just put this on the screen and it made. It was such. It's so interesting because you think about like how tangible things are in person, but the speed at which you can actually collaborate and which you can update things. And it lives in a visual collaboration tool like Mural. Online, I think is so important as stuff changes and rapidly updates and it becomes shareable in a way that we've never had before. These types of tools.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I don't know if you can remember of how many times we had to take pictures of whiteboards or had to put big block letters that said do not erase on these whiteboards. And now you can have these tools that actually can carry you through the iteration of a product development cycle. And they're like living artifacts that don't have to die.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah. Which is so amazing. It's so nice not to have a janitor come and erase your board at night. You went home from the office.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Right.

[Melissa Perry]

So with, with the way that teams, especially product teams are working, how have you been seeing them use Mural? How have you seen it change, like the way that people collaborate and what is it allowing them to do now?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. I think in this wave of AI, visuals actually mean so much more than they did previously. Us as product managers, we would start everything with writing, deep writing. Everybody said writing is the way to get clarity of thought. And now that we have so many visual tools, there's this collective aha. Moment in the product development lifecycle that actually shortcuts some of those really long cycles that you would say, what would you mean by this word? What do you mean by sales funnel? And when you can just visually show something, people get to that decision making faster. So that's where Mural really can help shortcut items. It's also when you want to put AI in any of your customer journeys, you actually have to start with knowing your customer journey in the beginning before you can actually embed AI in any part of it. So mapping that out visually to know where are the most key moments that you can actually speed up your cycles is really important and relevant.

[Melissa Perry]

Today with AI, I think there's a bunch of people who think we're going to automate everything away. Right. And they're going to lose a lot of this, like, human touch. Or it'll just be a bunch of agents out there just doing everything. A tool like Mural is extremely human centric. Right. Because we're collaborating ourselves. How do you think about baking AI into your tool or how people would be using your tool in this age of AI here with that human factor?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. I see a lot of leverage and usage in AI as this one player game. It is a human. We're working with a prompt and a prompt box, or we're building an AI agent and then we're bringing it to somewhere else. And then whenever we bring it to somewhere else, then we do human to human collaboration. We do an editing cycle. We have to move it back. Mural historically has been this human collaborative place, while AI has been to the side. But really we're looking at it. You need to do it all within one place collectively, where there are multiple humans that are collaborating along with AI. So it even builds up those cycles even quicker and can pull out themes from people that in a workshop, somebody may be an introvert and they don't want to talk and AI is nudging them of. I know you have an idea. Do you want to put a sticky here on the board? Or it can be. I'm not a master facilitator. I actually don't know how to keep an entire room of executives on track to get to the goal. An AI facilitator can actually help with that. So you gain an ability not having to learn a skill over years.

[Melissa Perry]

That's really cool. I like how you're thinking about baking that in and it becomes core to the mission of helping humans collaborate better. But it's not just taking away the.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Collaboration and it's not also just Automating your job away.

[Melissa Perry]

Yes, exactly. When you're thinking about setting your product strategy at Mural and for your team, what are the principles that you really look at and how do you think about crafting and creating like a great product strategy? What's your philosophy on that?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I look at a couple of things. I always think of things in threes. Maybe because I used to be a cook and you would always decorate a plate in threes. But really, really it's about where is your business trying to go? What are your business metrics that are most important? Where have you flourished, where are you lagging? And then about your customers. Do you know your customers and your users? And sometimes they can be very differently. In the B2B world, whoever's buying the product may not be the one that's actually using the product. Do you know both? And then lastly, how good is your product craft within your organization and where you have to go? And all three of those things, when you bring them together, you can actually, actually come out with a product strategy and a direction to steer the ship.

[Melissa Perry]

When you're thinking about encouraging your team to be creative, you've set this product strategy, you set this direction on where do you go? How do you like tactically encourage them to come up with ideas in line with that product strategy and also make sure that it comes back to those customer needs.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think that's where a lot of the rhythm of the business, your rituals as a product leader really are important for setting that foundation for your teams to come up with the problems to solve and the solutions on how to solve them. So my approach, I think, Melissa, you have this in your book Escaping the Build Trap where really when you're setting those outcomes for them, they have really that quant metric to then latch onto. And when they do those rituals of like meeting customers, watching them, watching users, and then you're creating that environment so that they can bring those ideas to life, they can also propose them. You have product reviews where people can then analyze, critique, but it gives them the breathing room to actually bring their creative ideas with that immediate feedback loop of you're on the right direction or just the leadership nudges to point them in an alternate direction if it's not working.

[Melissa Perry]

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[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think the first most important thing is retros. There's been many organizations that I've been in, in my career where retros were like a flash in the pan. Maybe we'd do it annually, maybe every once in a while, but for me, that is very important. Knowing where you've been, what you did well, what you can improve on will give you that story arc of how you do it better. So I think that's first and foremost foundationally. Second, it's really those product reviews that gives people the forum where you're showing their outcome metric and then they're bringing what they've actually experimented with, what worked well, what didn't work well, and it gives them that avenue to keep going rather than just These are the 10 features we're going to ship within the next month, which doesn't really help people. Are you building the right thing? How do you know if it's the right thing? How do you iterate on this product? Are your customers needs being met and does that lather up to your business metrics?

[Melissa Perry]

What you're describing here too, it sounds like you've given your product managers basically this freedom to go explore whatever's going to help them get there. Right? You've got these outcomes you want to achieve. Go just figure out what's going to get there. I'm not like babysitting your experiments, babysitting like all of these pieces. I find that in so many organizations there are leaders that are basically like craving that. They're like, I want that. But they're creating this environment where the product managers won't go do that. Some of it is like personal. That person just doesn't have the initiative to go do it right. But a lot of time too, it comes back down to the environment. How do you create that, like, safety of I can go own My product. Right. What do you have to do from like a leadership perspective, a communication perspective and how I guess to work with your peers as well so they're not just come and bombard them. Right. To create that net where your product managers are like, I am going to own this, I'm going to step up, I'm going to go do these experiments and then I'm going to come back and say this is the way that we should go.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. I think the first thing is crafting that product strategy so it's giving them the boundaries and constraints by which to make decisions. So, so if we've identified which industries are we playing, what type of companies are we going to go after? What are our key differentiators that we want to attack? What do we want to be when we grow up? And that gives them that narrower focus. And then next also it's those iterative feedback loops from what they're bringing you to the table and then showing how that lathers up to those metrics in order for them to know these are the right creative solutions that we're bringing to the table.

[Melissa Perry]

And with those metrics, how do you measure product success? What are you looking at there?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I'm looking that lather up. Are we growing revenue in the right area? Are our features being adopted? I am a yin yang quant and qual. So any of those quant metrics that equal those business outcomes that leadership has hopefully aligned on, whether that's revenue growing user base, whether growing into new markets and then qual, are we getting feedback, whether it's nps, customer interviews, testimonials, even sales, Are they telling us that they can sell this product, that it's resonating and both of those together we know that we're going in the right direction.

[Melissa Perry]

Sales is such a hot topic over with product management. I think all of go to market teams and how they work with product managers is a friction point, let's say for people. How do you enable your product managers and your product teams to work better with those go to market teams?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

One stop seeing them as maybe the enemy. There is always that famous thing where are they selling something where they told our customer they're going to cure cancer and we don't even work at a healthcare organization. And I think my young self would definitely see them as oh my God, what are they going to say? But really they're there on the front line. So as a product person, how do you embed yourself into the sales process? You should be an ally with them. You can Go to sales meetings, go to chair sides with them, go to the quarterly account planning that you're doing with your customers. Because when you work actually as a payer or within that sales team, you'll get the right information and insight. And in those sessions, just as you would if you were to do an interview by yourself, how do you set.

[Melissa Perry]

Up that communication with your sales team? Are you doing like monthly meetings or you talked about like they can go pair but what's the kind of cadence and how do you get the feedback and how did you operationalize that?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think the first thing is you partner with your CRO or your sales leader. You are their advocate. The two of you have to have a regular cadence and alignment. So I meet with our sales leader at least once a week. His name is Bill. He's wonderful. And the two of us have that same philosophy where product gets involved. He has also created wonderful feedback loops. So every single month he's created a champions program where his sales team will tell us like one loss deal analysis will highlight certain customers or certain leads and then we can go along on any of their in person activities. We have also aligned on budget on how to do it. So it has to be at the top where you've created that both alignment that this is something that you both care about and then in that rhythm on a monthly cadence, that feedback loop.

[Melissa Perry]

So you're all aligned to unlike the business goals at the top. So you all have the shared goals there and then it goes down for your individual areas.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Absolutely. If we had different goals and different needs, I think we would hit that tension point all the way down the organization.

[Melissa Perry]

One of the biggest issues I see, when there's friction, there is like everybody has a different goal and none of them are aligned.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Right.

[Melissa Perry]

So I love to hear that with the sales team too. There is, I've heard this from so many companies where they say that they're getting all this pressure from sales to basically have an AI product or stick AI in their product. Right. All the customers want AI. How do you dive into that and how have you been working with your sales team when it comes to these new AI features and this, this new world that we're looking at to make sure that you're in sync and it's not just throwing stuff out there to have a branded AI product?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. I think that knowing that even if you have a check the box exercise of my product has AI enabled that quickly won't actually close the deal. Maybe you could get to the next stage in the funnel but unless it has value and you can prove that value, not many sales organizations are actually going to close that deal. So having a deep understanding both of who that customer is, what they need, and where AI should actually be injected into your product, or I know the buzzword is like AI native and all of us that are pre AI organizations are going AI native but really foundational. What does that mean in your product where AI really adds that additional value so that your end user has a shortened time or ROI argument for your product? And that's really what it comes down to. It can't just be AI for AI's sake, but it is actually fit for purpose and it's doing something that maybe you couldn't do before or it's speeding up part of their jobs to be done.

[Melissa Perry]

This is making me think a lot about value proposition work and how we communicate it to customers. And I've seen so many different companies do it in all different ways. Right. Sometimes the go to market team owns the value proposition. Communication and product's been very disconnected, which I don't agree with. But sometimes it's product that owns it and then they bring it over and then marketing polishes on it. How do you find working on that value proposition? Figuring out how to reach not how to reach customers, but how to explain it to customers works well between your teams with the go to market and with product.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah. And maybe it starts with the definition of what is go to market. Melissa, how would you define it? Because it can be defined in many different ways.

[Melissa Perry]

It's true. Typically when I think about go to market teams, I think very much probably in the standard like sales marketing, product marketing type functions. I haven't seen product management fall under that. It's typically on the other side. But those are the ones that I've seen on that side.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, it's this assembly line right where it's product goes and builds something. And then here, product marketing, we built this thing, now go do your job. And then here pricing and packaging. Now price it. Now here sales enablement. Go decide how we're actually going to bring a value in a proposition to a customer for lead gen. And rather than this whole chain like a factory, it really is. Can we get embedded in the GTM team. Can we start this from the very beginning where we maybe as product managers also have a product marketing hat on or we're bringing product marketing along with us. We from the very beginning. So you don't have this rigid wait, what did you build? Why does it solve that problem? Who's the user. It just is a natural progression and it's actually quicker to get to market that way.

[Melissa Perry]

So how do you kick that off with go to market teams? What's your. I imagine you guys use Mural for some of this. How are you saying this is where we start and what's your touch points along the way to make sure that you're both in sync?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, there's the first one where product marketing. I've owned this organization in the past. Currently I don't. But they are a natural extension of our team. So they're invited into any ritual that we have. So they're there from the very beginning when we're analyzing metrics, when we're deciding what problems to solve, when we're looking at the solutions from the very inception or a poc. And then the second one is ensuring that we're thinking about it from that beginning and it's that constant evolution. So even in the build process we are then working on marketing along at the same time. Or we're bringing a salesperson where we've created this pod that says sales gets early feedback in this. They're already thinking about how they're going to pitch this to either current customers or net new customers.

[Melissa Perry]

How are you communicating with sales on those early things that you're still experimenting on? You're still trying to figure out if you're going to build it, what's the communication to them and how do you involve them so that they're not so out of the loop. But they're also not pre selling stuff too early.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think that's where actually our visual collaboration tools work really well. So we can really spin up what something will look like within our tool pretty quickly. And then if we get immediate feedback for sales, they can tell us this won't work or this will work because and then we can quickly iterate along that line. I can say pretty safely at Mural because we serve more enterprise customers, we don't have sales reps that will think too quickly to sell something because we sell to the enterprise organization. They're actually the ones that are poking the most holes in our solutions to represent actually enterprise customers the best.

[Melissa Perry]

Looking to level up your product management career, I started Product Institute to help you do just that. Trusted by over 15,000 students and Fortune 500 companies worldwide, our seven courses cover everything from product foundations to advanced product strategy. Right now you can get our bundle of all courses for 40% off with code LEARN2025. Go to productinstitute.com to learn more about our options for individuals and teams. That's really interesting. And you've worked at a variety of different companies. How do you think like selling into the enterprise, especially with all these AI tools, right. All this new AI stuff, how do you balance that with the need for the safety in the enterprise? And sometimes they move a little slower. What are you looking at to balance like your innovation versus the needs of the enterprise and like meeting them where they are?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, I think it's about knowing exactly what sort of security compliance is important for that organization to say, yes, I believe in this AI feature functionality or I believe in this tool overall. And usually the people that are blessing the compliance and the security are not the end users. And the end users are like, can this do more? So ensuring that you have satisfied both of those. And that's why we choose sort of the LLMs we do. We are part of the EU AI pact because we do believe in that safety. Being sure that you can manage the. It's not risky, but it can leverage as much innovation as possible.

[Melissa Perry]

I feel like there's so many enterprises and I've read a lot of contracts lately where they're just like, you can't use any AI tools, right? It'll like come out there. How do you think about managing risk of the AI getting through to them that this is actually helpful, what value proposition has resonated with them and how do you think about standing that up?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Really it's about will you be training on my data? That seems to be the biggest conversation in some of these contracts and making sure those T's and C's where we are not training on your data, your data is very secure. And then showing them how like organizations, even governments which are probably the most risk averse, how other organizations that are like them or other governments are actually leveraging this in a very safe and secure way. When you can see another organization that has the same regulation as you leveraging that innovation that gives you that aha moment of oh, I can safely and securely adopt this.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah, that's a really good point there. And with that it sounds like you and your product team have to be involved in those sales conversations earlier when it comes to these new features. What's like your role in talking to them and to explaining them versus what the sales team does.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think we have. That's where we've built like this AI governance board. And I know that sounds like very red tape and very big, but it's actually a small amount of us because AI changes so fast. There's different models. I think there's probably three models that just came out this week today. Right. So then how can we innovate and test and then what is the thorough process that we will go through in order to know that it meets musters with our most secure clients and the ones that are more risk averse? And then we ensure that all of the information that can be available is readily available during the sales cycle and during the contracting cycle because this is actually where it can really slow down.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah, that's really cool. A lot of the governance that we're talking about and the tools and stuff comes back to product operations. When you're thinking about product operations at Mural and also what you've seen out there with other organizations, what do you see people doing really well and what do you see people not doing so well?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think that's where you also wrote a book on this Product operations. I've had a product operations team for several years now and it is been amazing. It's been a one person team, a five person team throughout my several years of doing this. And without that team I think that operational arm would be up to the leader, me or VPs. And that's like having two jobs all at once. So ensuring that you know which tool stack you're going to apply to, which part of the process, knowing when to scale it. But having that visual collaboration tool like a mural being part of that prod ops toolkit has been really helpful.

[Melissa Perry]

What do you think is going to change with product operations over time? Where do you see this landscape going? Mural is like one of those tools that would be in the stack. How do you think it's going to evolve?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think that's where it's the next one of it has to follow how the Agile process management or how product development overall. I don't even know if I could use the word agile anymore. Is that still in vogue or is that.

[Melissa Perry]

Well, I don't know. People are dropping it from a lot of stuff. I think the philosophy of Agile is still there, but I think more of.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

The scrum stuff is exactly, exactly. It's how are we operationally going to build products, bring them to market, which will define that product operations? Where do we shortcut things? Do we need a separate, separate product roadmapping tool anymore? Do we need a separate process for analytics? Do we need a separate team? Are we just now able to vibe code analytics? All of that I think will define where product operation goes next. But knowing where you can shortcut what tools that are important, it Goes all back to knowing your workflow now and then what can you change to help you ensure that you are making the most efficient time?

[Melissa Perry]

For companies that are in this transformation phase, right, they're trying to adopt AI, but they're also trying to change their entire product development model at the same time. Where do you think they should be focusing and where do you think they should really start?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think they should really go back to some of the fundamentals of outcomes, customers and metrics, because if you're not looking at any of those, you're just going to be building features for feature's sake. It's funny how we can move forward in time, change how we build things, but also anchor ourselves into some of the things we know that are super important to making a business successful, which is always having an outcome driven metric that is anchored in a customer and a customer value. And then anything you build on top, whether it's AI as part of your toolkit or non AI, but not forgetting.

[Melissa Perry]

Any of those anchors rooted in the first principles mindset.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Right, Right.

[Melissa Perry]

So, Alena, when you reflect on your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

I think I would say be more confident. It took me a very long time to find my voice when I was a younger PM of should I speak up now? Should I not? How do I do this? And really making sure you have strong opinions. Loosely held is the phrase that I have eventually come to find as a leader.

[Melissa Perry]

I like that one. And what trends are you most excited about in product management?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

What trends am I? I am loving the fact that I do get to prototype very quickly. It is. I am not a designer by trade and I have never pretended to be one, but I am very excited to just show additional visuals on top of everything else for people to go, okay, I totally understand what you're talking about.

[Melissa Perry]

I love that. I feel like there's nothing better than just being able to be like, here's what I'm trying to think through. And all these vibe coding things allow you to do that?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Yeah, absolutely. And so does Mural.

[Melissa Perry]

Yeah. Which is amazing. And as you look into the future, what do you envision as a next big challenge for product leaders beyond this AI thing?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

It's deciding what type of leader that you actually want to be. In this moment, I see a lot of product leaders going through this identity shift player, coach, back to also being an individual contributor at the same time. So we are expected to do both. And so for us it's when do we go back to IC mode to show and do because everybody is learning and adopting these tools while also leading a team. So I'm excited to see where that takes us because some of us who haven't been able to get knee deep in stories and building, it's fun, but we also have to rise up and above it and still think of strategy as well.

[Melissa Perry]

It's a good point. I feel with all the stuff changing so much, you have to actually understand it yourself and the only way to do that is to dig in and apply and start to play with it. So I like that. I think that that's going to be a challenge, like how do we make sure that we're still strategic but we're not getting bogged down into the tactical, but we still understand things.

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

Absolutely.

[Melissa Perry]

I love that. Thank you so much, Alina for being on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you in Mural, where can they go?

[Alaina O'Mahoney]

They can go to Mural Co. That is our website. You can sign up for a free account and enjoy it. I'm also on LinkedIn and you can find me at eomahonyurle.

[Melissa Perry]

Co. Amazing. And we will put all of those links on our show [e-mail] thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back later this week with another Dear Melissa and then another amazing guest next Wednesday. Make sure that you like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And send me any of your questions for Dear Melissa to dearmelissa. Com. We'll see you next time. Thank you.