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Every product leader has to make them: the high-stakes decisions that define outcomes, shape careers, and don't come with easy answers.
The Hard Calls podcast, hosted by Trisha Price, features candid conversations with product and tech leaders about the pivotal decisions that drive great products and the pressure that comes with it. From conflicting priorities and unclear success metrics to aligning teams and navigating executive expectations, you will hear compelling stories and best practices that drive business outcomes and help you make the Hard Calls.
Real decisions. Real stakes. Real leadership.
Presented by Pendo
Learn more at pendo.io/
Follow Trisha Price on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-price-3063081/
Trisha Price: Hi everyone.
I have an exclusive discount for
Hard Calls listeners to Pendomonium,
Pendo's Product Festival happening
March 24th through 26th, 2026
in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Listen in at the halfway point
today to get this special
discount to the product festival.
Bringing today's top leaders
in product, AI, and software.
Welcome back to Hard Calls.
I'm Trisha Price.
It's the first week of a New Year, and
if you're like me, you are looking at
everything, your roadmap, your team, your
strategy, and you're realizing something.
The hard calls you're facing
are a lot bigger than deciding
what feature to build.
It might be determining if you have the
right people with you on the journey,
which products you need to feed, which
ones to starve, even if they're making
money because maybe they don't serve
the long-term future and strategy.
You are thinking about ensuring
your team is truly optimized using
AI and different tools, and you're
thinking about that agentic AI feature
you just shipped and whether it's
performing and how its quality is.
Over the last few months, I've had
incredible conversations with product
leaders from across the globe from
companies like JPMorgan Payments,
ADP, Morgan Stanley at Work, Vantaca,
nCino, FactSet, and a couple of the
best product coaches in the industry.
In this episode, we're
bringing it all together.
We're breaking down the hard
calls and what's behind them, the
people, our investments, and the
times where we bet everything.
So whether you're navigating AI adoption,
restructuring your team for scale, or
just trying to figure out what to say
no to this year, this is the perfect
episode to get you ready for 2026.
Let's dive in.
Let's start with the calls
that keep us up at night.
The people, no spreadsheet can
make these decisions for you.
Sometimes it's about the culture.
Sometimes it's about scale.
Sometimes it's about performance,
but it's always about protecting
the company's potential.
First up, Jodi McDermott
three-time CPO and board advisor.
Jodi explains the most dangerous person
to have on your team, that high performer
who destroys culture from the inside.
Jodi McDermott: I can think of a couple of
hard calls particularly that have fallen
into both of those categories with people.
If you've ever had somebody in
your organization that maybe
was a really high performer,
but they weren't a cultural fit.
Yes.
And maybe they ruffled a lot
of feathers and it wasn't one
time, but it was continuous.
There's been times I've had to make
a really hard call to move a high
performer out because I knew it was
pulling down the rest of the team.
Yeah.
And, sometimes it's hard
to even see it's happening.
Because people are afraid to
say something and, and you have
to be watching out for that.
To be able to protect, you know,
the totality of the team, right?
Trisha Price: Protecting the
team sometimes means making the
decision to let someone go whom
you genuinely like and respect.
Jessica Soroky, a prod-ops leader,
shared a hard call about a team
member who was doing everything right.
Well, culturally, but he
wasn't the A player that the
company needed to drive growth.
Jessica Soroky: We had a team member
who was absolutely trying their best.
They were incredibly positive.
They had like the, if I could
recreate their personality and the
professionalism and the willingness to
try, I would do it a million times over.
Unfortunately, even at their best for
what we needed at the time we had to
step back and be willing to look at
is this truly the best of the best?
Is this the elite team member
that we need right now to do
everything we're trying to achieve?
And the hard call, there was no, no,
like great human being, amazing person.
Worked really hard, tried really hard.
But they just weren't what
we needed to that A-player.
So, we had to make the really
difficult call to have to part ways
with that person to be able to create
space for somebody who was better
suited for our needs at the time.
And while it's on a product specific call,
I think it really did change because.
I respect that human being, but the
person they brought in has, has made
some game changing moves for our
team and for Pendo and all of that.
So at the end of the day, I know
it was the right call, but it was
definitely not easy in the moment.
Trisha Price: One thing I learned
from working with startups and large
corporations is that the skillset
to start a company is different
than scaling one for growth.
During the episode with my longtime
mentor, Pierre Naudé at nCino, we
discussed the brutal reality of scaling
an organization and the hard conversations
you must have with the people who helped
you start the company when they can
no longer contribute to its growth.
Pierre Naudé: So I want you to think,
I know you start thinking about
product choices, technology tools.
Do you embrace AI?
You know, is it in the cloud?
Is it platforms?
The real issue is your organization
with success will grow tremendously.
And how do you scale both the structure?
The people management and the
ability to manage hundreds of people
versus in the beginning, you're
a band of brothers or sisters.
You're all together, you're
building this little company.
You're so excited because you
want your first ten customers.
Well, the same people who ran
that business on day one are
not the same people who's gonna
run it when it goes public.
And I would tell you, if I come back
to hard calls, some of the hardest
calls is to tell those people that.
The scale has outgrowing their ability
to manage and judgment, because what
we get paid for in the end is judgment.
Okay?
And so then you have to find different
positions in the company for them and
bring people in that can do that scale.
I think that is a critical element of
management as well as product management.
Trisha Price: The second type of hard
call we discussed on this show is
what I refer to as the "stop" call.
With the rapid advancement of AI
capabilities and tools, there's a lot of
pressure to move fast, but as leaders, we
have to know when to hit pause in order
to protect trust, to protect outcomes,
and sometimes to protect our own teams
from shipping something that isn't ready.
Peter Bailey from JPMorgan
Payments face this head on.
He had a launch ready
for the Federal Reserve.
High stakes, high visibility, but
the data vendor just wasn't right.
Here's why he risked his brand
new job to stop the project.
Peter Bailey: There's always
one that really jumps out to me.
It was shortly after I joined JPMorgan.
I was hired to be the global
head of product for our
wholesale credit risk group.
And, shortly before I joined, we had
received some constructive, if not
critical feedback from the Federal
Reserve about our CCAR submissions,
and we had received feedback specific
to the way that we were providing
information in our reporting.
And, we're at risk of not
being able to execute our plan.
And so when I was hired,
this was the problem I was
given and to go and fix that.
And what we realized, almost immediately
was that a lot of the information that
we were providing to the Fed had to
do with our customers' financial data.
It was the vast majority of the
information that we were providing,
and we had a pretty broken way of
collecting it and reporting it across
all of our different lines of business,
across our investment bank, commercial
bank, private bank, business bank.
All of these different teams were
doing it differently, and ultimately
by the time it got to the fed.
We were not showing up
well and the Fed knew that.
And, it was raising concerns on
our ability to manage risk and
the information we were reporting.
And one of the things we quickly realized
was that, we have a lot of public clients,
publicly traded entities, and a lot of
this financial data is publicly available.
So let's bring it into a new platform and
we can structure it and ensure that we're
delivering this information consistently.
And as we were approaching that launch,
one of the things that really started
to, to become apparent to me and was
just not sitting well, is that the
vendor we had chosen to provide the
data really just was not the right fit.
And no matter how hard we tried.
It was becoming more and more
apparent that we had made the wrong
decision in terms of how we were
bringing this data into our ecosystem.
And so we had a decision to make.
Do we launch and meet this target, and I
think we still would've been able to show
significant strides from where we were.
Or do we look at it and say, we've this is
not the right time, this is not the right.
Product and we need to take a little
bit more time and go back to the, to the
drawing board so you know, the decision.
Do you launch something that, everybody's
excited about, but you know, is not ready?
Or do you hold the line and
potentially risk disappointment?
Put your job on the line even
though it's the right thing to do.
Trisha Price: That theme of trust is
critical, especially with incorporating
AI into your systems and your products.
ADP is responsible for paying one in six
people in the United States, and when
Naomi Le Riviere and her team are ready
to ship a fully automated AI agent.
She stopped it.
The product was ready.
It was fast, it was innovated, it drove
outcomes, but clients weren't ready.
Naomi Lariviere: So, you know, I oversee
our client facing AI program at ADP.
It's called ADP Assist.
And again, this is another initiative
where it's build once, deploy
it across our entire ecosystem.
And we've been working on agentic
AI and in the space of payroll and
sometimes in the space of payroll.
You know, and with this technology, we
wanna go as fast as humanly possible.
And there's so many wonderful things
you can do with it, you know, from,
you know, just task automation to like
actually doing the entire process for you.
And that's actually this
initiative had that goal.
We are just gonna do everything for you.
You don't need to worry and the hard
call for us is as we started to talk
to our clients and we were showing them
early concepts of what we wanted to do,
and you know, we were iterating on it.
What we realized is that our
innovation was colliding with the
trust that our clients had in us.
We service over 1.1 million clients.
We pay one in six people
in the United States.
That's a lot of people.
When you say you can't get things wrong.
Imagine getting a paycheck
that's not right, right?
Like that is not a good scenario for us.
It's not a good scenario for our clients.
So you know, when you are doing things
that may erode the trust of your user.
You might wanna reconsider
what you're doing.
So we actually, as we talked to the
clients, we're like, okay, well if
we wanted to get to that, they're
like, well, that's a really great
thing in the farer in the future.
you know, like, how can we get you
on that trust building journey?
So, you know, what we learned is, yes,
speed matters, but trust compounds.
Trisha Price: Sometimes the stop call
isn't about bad data or broken technology.
It's about revenue and the
cost of doing business.
Board and product advisor.
Jodi McDermott backs this up with
her story of when she made a very
unpopular decision to end a product
built for a single customer.
Was it making money?
Maybe, but she explains why
that money wasn't good revenue.
Jodi McDermott: We had acquired
a company that had a product that
they were building for one customer.
So it was a product they had contracted
to build this product and everybody
felt like they were close to the
finish line, close to the finish line.
And every quarter that would go by,
we just needed one more quarter.
One more quarter.
And I had a few executives on, you
know, my peers that were going,
what are we doing over here?
Why are we spending money on this?
But, when you, when you, especially
when you acquire a company, you
have a new customer coming in.
You, you're trying to be a promise keeper.
Right, like product, you're
trying to be promise keeper
as much as you possibly can.
And that was one that was a really
hard call that that, you know, we
finally made the decision that we
were gonna go negotiate to get out
of this agreement and that we had to
say no and we had to stop because we
didn't see profitability done online.
At one point we did, and then it
just kept dwindling and dwindling.
And especially when you are working in
private equity and you have a timeline
for how you're spending those R&D dollars.
You just can't be deploying it where
you're not gonna get the return.
And that was a really, really hard call.
And I would say that that was, that
was probably one that I was, it was
definitely influenced on, it was there,
you know, it was discussion with my
CEO and my CFO and, and others and
how we were gonna manage the customer.
But that was a hard one.
As a product officer of having to go
and tell a customer, no, we can't keep
going and we can't keep doing this.
Trisha Price: That I'm so glad you
shared that because sun setting
products or disappointing a particular
customer is probably one of the hardest.
Things we do as CPOs.
But I mean, you and I both know,
even if you finished the product
products are never finished, right?
Yeah.
And so it's like even if you
met the needs of that particular
customer and got live there would've
been asks for forever for that.
And so you know, making that difficult
decision not to do a one-off for
a customer, but to try to invest
those R&D dollars where you can get.
A multiple where everybody's using it is
obviously always the right choice, but
that doesn't mean it's the easy choice.
Jodi McDermott: Well, it comes
down to what's good revenue, right?
Yeah.
So even if, so, you know, somebody
put on the table at that time, well,
well, what if we keep building it and
we just have a dedicated development
team that does the work and we just
carve it off and set it over here?
Okay, well, but it's never,
it's never gonna grow to be a 10
million, $20 million product, right?
You're never gonna get that
enterprise value multiple off of it.
It's this one thing over here, so.
Is it good revenue?
It's not good revenue.
Trisha Price: Mark Mitchell from Morgan
Stanley at work explains the discipline
of walking away from a massive client
when the custom work required just doesn't
balance out with the needs of the company.
Mark Mitchell: I think, you know,
I think there's a, so as I was
thinking about this, there's a couple
different answers to this, but I think.
What I would say is one of the hardest
things for our business and for my role
almost, you know, probably once a year,
is we engage in a sales conversation
with a really large client of ours.
And what we ultimately figure out after,
you know, sort of getting into that sales
conversation with this prospect is that
we may not be a great fit for each other.
You know, whether that's sort
of on their side or on our side,
or maybe a little bit of both.
And it's this really tough decision that
you have to like, sort of ultimately
come to, to realize as excited as
we are and as long as we've worked
on this thing, there just may not be
sort of a go forward path here for us.
And it's super difficult and
always, always sort of, a hard
kind of call to ultimately make.
Trisha Price: I'm so glad you talked about
that, and I know that's gonna probably
weave through various conversations that
we have today and man, that takes such
discipline to be able to acknowledge
that and I'm glad you brought that up,
because all of us as product leaders,
there's always pressure for revenue.
There's always pressure for customer
happiness, and that's just such a
hard and difficult decision to make.
Mark Mitchell: Yeah.
When you look, you know, when you
look at those situations and it's,
you know, it's kind of, it's kind
of the, you know, again, it's, it's
more of an exaggerated version of
what we sort of do every day, right?
It's, you look at the situation and
you say the effort that we're going
to have to sort of put out, right?
Whether that's cost or, you know,
development time or product, team
time, whatever, however you wanna sort
of think of it, is gonna be huge, you
know in this situation, let's just say.
And then, you know, you sort of start
to pencil out, okay, so how does that
look over the longer term for revenue
and for this and for that, and all
the different dynamic parts of kind
of like how these things fit together.
And you know, sadly, sometimes you just
come to this conclusion that it just
doesn't really, it doesn't really pencil,
you know, and the the sort of upstream
swim to sort of build the things that
this particular client's gonna need.
Find ways to sort of do that, that
in a way that they add value to
other customers and other clients.
Like, like that story just doesn't, it
ultimately just doesn't tell, you know?
Trisha Price: Registrations for
Pendomonium 2026 are now open.
We are bringing together the most
inspiring minds in product and leadership
who will challenge your thinking on
everything from product-led growth
to the future of product to gaining
value from your AI investments.
It is likely you'll even run into
some of our guests from hard calls.
The product festival is
designed to spark curiosity.
Create conversation and build community
while spotlighting the newest tech.
For software experience leaders, I
would like to invite you to join me in
Raleigh, North Carolina from March 24th
to 26th with an exclusive 30% discount.
When you use the code hardcalls30,
that's hard calls all lowercase,
and the numbers three zero.
Get your discounted ticket
at pendo.io/Pendomonium.
See you there.
Finally we have the "go" calls.
The moments where you look at the
market, your customer feedback, or
even your own career, and realize
you have to pivot even if it hurts.
Noa Ginsberg: We try to bring more
speed to decision making here, but
yeah, you have to pull it forward.
You have to make a hard call.
You have to make it clear to
people too, what the call is.
And I think recognizing where you
are, whether it's a people call
or if it's a priorities call.
I think knowing where you
are is always important.
In order to get where you wanna
go, you have to know where you're
starting, and that's something
that we've, we think about a lot.
We have a lot of good tooling in place.
And you mentioned, you
know, instinct versus data.
I really think our gut feel as you
gain experience is a bunch of data
that's just sort of in your own LLM, in
your mind of what you should do what.
You've seen this before, you start
to have some pattern recognition.
But always relying on gut checking
that not only with the data, but with
other experts, other stakeholders with
our customers within our own teams.
Always validating that.
So like trust your gut, but verify
I think is very important and using
all those tools at your disposal.
So you do make the best decision.
Ben Currin: To kind of maybe zoom out.
Like what's a big, memorable hard
call in the last, last year or so?
I think deciding on a direction of what
it means to have an AI strategy was
a really, and is a really hard call.
It's also, I mean, it, it's hard.
It's the most important and probably
best thing that we've done over the last
several years, but that's hard to say.
Hey, we've all been, and
this isn't just Vantaca.
We've all been spending all of our
time and energy building software for
humans for years and years and years.
And then to think about what does it mean
to enable humans to delegate all that
work to AI and like what all is kind of
a sunk cost of what you've built so far.
And is that okay and is it not okay.
And do you wanna hold on tight to it?
So, I mean.
That that kind of big thing
is, is probably the hard call.
And for us it was, you know, this is
undeniably the future and it's, it is
gonna be a great future and there's gonna
be bumps along the way, but we have to
jump all the way in the pool and not
be afraid of, you know, how many sunk
costs there are or what we have to go
back and re-litigate In terms of things
we've kind of held on tightly to before.
Trisha Price: But you don't always
have resources or power when you
know it's time to make a go call.
And that to me is one of the
toughest positions to be in.
Pendo's CEO Todd Olson shared a
story from early in his career about
creating a hill to stand on, building
a product with no budget, no team, but
knowing that customers would want it
and it would be good for the company.
Todd Olson: I'm gonna go back to
one pre Pendo, 'cause I think it
was one of like the sort of like.
Interesting hard calls I made.
I was, so this is at Rally Software just
prior to Pendo, you know, this is maybe
two to three years before I started Pendo.
I was I saw this opportunity to
build this add-on product and I
was not the head of product there.
I had no power, no control,
no resources to do it.
I was in product marketing and but I
had this opportunity and I saw this
product . Actually some customer built
some open source product using our APIs.
And it was like, wow, all of
our customers could use this.
I mean, we talk about product market fit.
When you have a customer build an add-on
to your product that uses your data,
you're like, okay, I know I want that.
So I convinced a bunch of people to
hire some consultants to take this open
source product and start productizing
it with customers over the next
three to six months that outsource
team grew and grew and grew into.
It was like honestly kind of a
full fledged engineering team.
To the point where finally the CFO kind
of woke up and is like, what's going on?
We have like, is this like some slush
fund that you're like directing funds to?
And that ended up becoming, a portfolio
management add-on to our agile project
management solution, which you know,
the company ultimately sold to Computer
Associates, which was in that space.
But it was, I think it was that not
letting title, not letting role...
I eventually took over
product shortly thereafter.
So then I actually had that ability
to move the whole, like move a bunch
of engineering resources onto it.
We pulled it in house, but I think just
not letting things get in your way.
Yeah.
I think that's how you make hard calls and
like having conviction around something.
So, so yeah, I'd say that's it.
Trisha Price: Not all "go" calls discussed
on the podcast were work related.
Sometimes the "go" calls personal.
Gabrielle Bufrem was a successful
product VP at a high growth startup.
She had it all, but she wasn't
falling in love with the work anymore.
Gabi walks us through the conversation
she had with Marty Cagan that
convinced her to bet on herself and
go out on her own as a product coach.
Gabrielle Bufrem: I vividly remember
being having left my last startup.
People were like, you're crazy.
The market is not good.
You have a great road at a great company.
They're doing super well.
And I was like, yeah, but
I need something different.
Like, I know that it's time.
And I remember talking to many CEOs at
that time, and they're all really great.
Like a lot of them, I was like,
whoa, this is like great business.
I can see the returns.
I would work for this person, all of that.
But still, I like wasn't falling in love.
And it was one conversation I had with
Marty because any big decisions, I
think, like I looked for my mentors
and I told him, I was like, yeah,
I'm just like not falling in love.
He told me, yeah, because
you wanna be a coach.
Like you've told me this.
And like, I think I gave him 20
reasons, Trisha, why I wasn't
gonna do it or why I wasn't ready.
I was like, maybe it's this, maybe
it's that, maybe it's this other thing.
And I think he like crushed them all
in like the bare like 10 minutes that
he was just like, no, because of this.
No, because of that.
And then he was like, anything else?
I was like, no.
But I, I really do think it's taking
the plunge from doing something that I
knew I was good at, which was, running
product and being a product leader to
then stepping into a new role of helping
other product leaders do their job
really well and learning marketing and
learning what sales is, and learning
how to operate as a solopreneur and
not have a team around me anymore,
and really taking that plunge and.
I think that it, it felt like a hard
call because it was the unknown, but it
also felt really right, which I think
is kind of the magic of product and
making product decisions in general.
It was like the art and the science.
It's like I, I knew what had to be
true for me to do it, and that was the
science part, but I also knew, in my
gut that it was the right instinct.
Trisha Price: And speaking of Marty Cagan.
We'll close this section with a
very important lesson from the
legendary product coach Marty Cagan.
A "go" call isn't just about
shipping, it's about absorption.
Marty shared how he learned the hard way
while at eBay that just because you built
it doesn't mean users can digest it.
Marty Cagan: We had just acquired PayPal.
And the hardest part for people on early
eBay was just paying for something.
They were literally sending
checks through the mail.
I mean, a lot of people were born after
what I'm describing, so it was a long
time ago, but it was you know, this idea
of integrating a real payment solution.
There was some crummy ones
before, but this was good.
Was something that we were really
excited about and it was one of
those rare eBay's, a marketplace.
So there's buyers, sellers, and then eBay.
It was one of the rare win win-wins.
Buyers wanted it.
Sellers wanted it.
We wanted it.
It was just a great win, and we tested
the hell out of it because this was a big
change to the workflow to list something,
a big change to buy something we did.
We tested the hell out of it.
We did all the practices that,
you know, you try to advocate.
Because of other mistakes earlier you
learn that are really important to do.
And we did it.
And I remember, 'cause we got in
this, right before we launched,
we had a, we all sat down with
the CEO and said, are we ready?
And I'm like, we're ready.
This is gonna be, this
is, we're so excited.
The community knows about it.
They're excited about it.
The people that tried it loved it.
Anyway, we launched it.
It was a disaster.
And it was a disaster.
It's one of those things, whenever you
launch something big, you're kind of
looking at the data because it's normal
that there's a little bit of a dip because
it's basically people are learning how it
now works and then that's normal, but you
expect it to go up again and get better.
And it wasn't.
And I'm like, finally, oh my God.
I know, I know what happened.
We screwed up.
I screwed up.
And this was a lesson that
I've got so many scars.
I share this with so many companies
even today, that it's not enough
that people love your product.
It's not enough.
They also have to be able to digest it.
And what was going on was, even
though these buyers and sellers
were screaming for this solution.
That doesn't mean they were
screaming to change how they work.
Trisha Price: The anatomy of a
hard call isn't just about it
being tough or flipping a coin.
To make the hard calls, you
need the right data and tools
to have clarity on a situation.
The right data helps you make.
Better, more informed decisions by
providing visibility into the situation.
Whether it involves a team member, a
product, or a strategic decision making
the hard call is uncomfortable, but
with the right insights in hand, you
can make the calls that are best for
you, your team, and your customers.
As we kick off this year, I wanna
challenge you look for areas both
professionally and personally,
where you know a change is needed.
Be brave.
Make the decision and I know
that I truly believe that no
decision is also a decision.
I'm Trisha Price.
Thanks for joining me here
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