Product and Cake

In 2019, every investor wanted a climate slide in your pitch deck. Then came the war, rising interest rates and fading VC money, and sustainability slid down the priority list. Corentine leads product at Sweep, a sustainability intelligence platform that collects, harmonizes and makes sense of companies' sustainability data, so they can report, comply and act on it. Sweep was founded in 2020. Its customers account for around 2% of global emissions.

Ghonche and Paul talk with Corentine about how the pitch changed from values to financial losses and ROI, what AI does for sustainability teams and what it costs, and why a platform that feeds auditors needs reliability, traceability and transparency more than speed.

We also get into the PM's job when execution is almost free. Corentine's answer is owning the why, cutting the noise, and paying the alignment tax. When everyone has an AI sparring partner and a thousand opinions, who brings the team to one story? Ghonche adds where he draws the line: AI challenges his ideas, but the ideation stays with him.

And we talk about imposter syndrome: theatre classes, DJing in Berlin, why Corentine would hire the person who doubts, Ghonche's "Jack" trick, and the story of "bicycle face". We end on how to keep hope with a problem as big as climate change.

Mentioned:
- The High-Impact Professional's Playbook by Devon Fritz (book recommended by Corentine): https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/book
- Sweep x Capgemini, "Sustainability in Action 2026: Global Report" (1,000 business leaders interviewed): https://www.sweep.net/reports/sustainability-in-action-2026-global-report
- Reshma Saujani at Smith College's 2023 Commencement: "Imposter Syndrome is Modern-Day Bicycle Face" (the story Ghonche tells): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMRcWj_GKxY

Follow Corentine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corentine-piette/
Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast

PostHog (https://posthog.com) has a marketing team of five people. The engineering org they serve is thirty teams across sixteen products. From the outside it looks like a plan. Joe Black, who leads that marketing team, says the inside is mostly chaos — and that's the part he likes.

Ghonche and Paul talk with Joe about treating marketing as code: every campaign and every proposal lives in GitHub as an issue, an RFC or a pull request. On day one he was asked to ship a blog post as a PR — at that point his GitHub experience was downloading a video game mod. Five years later he can't imagine working any other way.

We also get into what PostHog publishes: the handbook, the strategy, the compensation bands, and Joe's own 360 feedback, sitting in a public repo for anyone to read. Where does that start to hurt? And what should a young startup copy from it — and what definitely not?

Plus: hiring for a high ceiling instead of a high floor, the paid Super Day, why feedback should always be heard but not always followed, the billboard campaign Joe argued against and lost, the repositioning toward self-driving software, and what he thinks creative teams should keep their hands on when anything can be generated.

Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemartinwords/
Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast

When ChatGPT was released, everyone said we'd lose our jobs to AI in three months. This is year four, and this episode looks at what actually changed.

For once, I'm not hosting, I'm the guest, sitting across from Luis Rieke on the first ever live recording of his podcast Digitalconomics (https://digitalconomics.com), in front of an audience in Berlin.

We talk about why headcount stopped being the metric that mattered, why an average product is now the easiest thing to build and the fastest way to get ignored, and what engineers should actually focus on next. Hint: it's not a new tool.

Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast

AI is getting blamed for a wave of layoffs across tech — but is that actually true? Our guest Jack Godau, a fractional CTO who steps into organizations when something has fundamentally broken down, doesn't buy it. If AI can genuinely make a team ten times more effective, he argues, firing people instead of putting that to use makes no sense.

Ghonche and Paul talk with Jack about what's really driving the layoffs, why calling someone a "product engineer" doesn't automatically give them product skills, and how a five-person team ended up owning two hundred repositories and eighty-nine microservices that nobody understood anymore.

We also dig into vision, values and culture as a company scales, why hackathons only work with real leadership buy-in, and whether product and tech should ever merge into a single CPTO role — or whether that's the wrong idea entirely.

Follow Jack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-godau/
Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast

Everyone said Google missed the AI train — too big, too slow. Ben Trollope has a front-row seat that says otherwise. As a Customer Engineer at Google, he's the technical sidekick who joins the call when startups across Germany, Switzerland and the Nordics want AI in their product.

In this episode, Ghonche and Paul dig into what Ben actually sees behind the hype: everyone can build now, almost nobody can maintain. Why AI tokens feel as subsidized as Uber rides in 2019 — and what happens when the true cost of iteration kicks in. Why vibe coding produces SUS — single-use software — and why that might even be fine. And a passionate case for hiring juniors again: you're not a senior if there's no junior.

Plus: how Google really works from the inside — no fixed processes, no pyramid, just slime-mold intelligence and "I know a guy" — and what founders can learn from culture that happens by accident.

Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-trollope/
Follow Product and Cake: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-and-cake-podcast