Announcing the 2025 Product 50 Award winners!

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Announcing the 2025 Product 50 Award winners!

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More In an increasingly uncertain global market, product and growth leaders have a greater effect than ever on a company’s success, impacting not only business growth, but making business transformation possible. Amplitude’s Product 50 Awards were launched […]

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In an increasingly uncertain global market, product and growth leaders have a greater effect than ever on a company’s success, impacting not only business growth, but making business transformation possible. Amplitude’s Product 50 Awards were launched as a way to recognize and celebrate product and growth leaders globally whose innovation and creativity are shaking up their companies, disrupting their industries and changing the world.

Selecting the Product 50

Now in its third year, the Product 50 call for nominees garnered nearly 600 nominations across ten categories, and the final list of nominees and winners represents nine countries across four continents.

From each of the ten categories, leaders were selected by a panel of industry judges:

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer, Amplitude
Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer, G2
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO, Product School
Adrienne Tan, Co-founder & CEO, Brainmates
Timo Dechau, Founder, Deepskydata

The judges based their evaluation on commitment to innovation, business impact, social impact and influence on fellow product leaders and their industry.

Congratulations to all the finalists and winners! Read on to learn who they are — and learn more about the Product 50 at amplitude.com/product50.

Introducing the 2025 Product 50 Award winners

Best data-driven product leader

Colin Hili, head of product at Jumbo Interactive

Colin Hili is a strategic product leader specializing in B2B2C, with 10+ years of experience driving scalable growth, innovation and customer engagement. With data-driven strategies like cohort analysis to optimize pricing and engagement, Hili generated a substantial new recurring revenue stream for Jumbo Interactive while reinforcing customer loyalty, and is forecasted to add 8-10 million ARR within the first year of operation. His Splash for Good initiative not only raised over $1M for charitable causes but also added another $1M to the business.

“Start small — focus on a few leading metrics, and turn the numbers into insights by connecting them to actual user behavior and business outcomes,” Hili says. “Keep your ego in check; data should challenge your assumptions (this is a good thing!).”

Finalists

Nikhil Agrawal, product and engineering lead, Quillbot
Pallavi Gupta, principal product manager, Bing and AI, Microsoft
Barbara Gomes, group product manager, iFood
Sai Vuppalapati, staff product manager, discover and AI, Tubi

Best digital transformation leader

Janani Narayanan, senior director, head of product data cloud, AI and automation, Salesforce

Janani Narayanan has two decades of experience in enterprise product management, engineering, strategy, and operations, with leadership roles at companies like Google and Salesforce. Under her leadership, Salesforce Data Cloud became the fastest-growing product in the company’s history, with a 130% YOY growth in paid customers, processing over 30 trillion transactions monthly and unifying 100 billion records daily. Janani is deeply committed to fostering diversity and inclusion, and empowering women in STEM, coaching and mentoring countless individuals to prepare them for high-profile opportunities.

“As product leaders, we must recognize that AI-led transformation is not just an option – it’s an imperative,” Narayanan says. “The emergence of digital labor and the agentic revolution is redefining how businesses operate. It’s not just about keeping up; it’s about leading the charge and positioning your company as a forward-thinking, agile market leader.”

Finalists

Courtney Machi , VP of product and engineering, Andela
James Bromley, CPO and CTO, Haven Holidays
Michael Chorey , senior product manager, AI and innovation, Wendy’sRohit Taneja, senior product manager, Choice Hotels International

Best growth leader

Eleanor Lightbody, CEO, Luminance

Eleanor led a $75 million Series C funding round in 2025 for Luminance, and she now oversees the company’s continued global expansion. She was named in Management Today’s “35 Women under 35” and Financial Times’ “Ones to Watch” list, and serves on Luminance’s Board of Directors. Her strategic vision has led to a 5x increase in ARR over two years and an increase of over 100% in global corporate customers in 2024. She leads by example, cultivating an executive team with over 50% female representation – and initiatives like the Women at Luminance series and Women in Law dinner seminars provide mentorship and forge meaningful connections for women across industries.

“The best growth leaders don’t chase every opportunity – they put blinders on and focus relentlessly on the metrics that truly matter to their business, stakeholders, and customers,” Lightbody says. “When you filter out the noise and commit to what moves the needle, sustainable growth follows.”

Finalists

Brian Harbin, founder and broker, Domain Brokerage
Elizabeth Samara-Rubio, chief business officer, SiMa.ai
Rachel Tsao, director of product management, Pure Storage
Viktoria Kharlamova, independent growth advisor and ex-Miro

Best product design leader

Harrison Wheeler, director of product design, LinkedIn

Harrison Wheeler leads teams at LinkedIn to help them reach their highest potential. His research insights have led to investment opportunities, helped fund projects that have been at the top of user request lists, and inspired new growth initiatives and product innovation. He co-founded Black by Design, an internal community group aimed at building a network for Black designers, and establishes a pipeline for emerging talent. He also directs mentorship programs for emerging cross-functional product leaders, and hosts the Technically Speaking podcast, downloaded in over 100 countries, to share insights and inspire global innovation with guests from underrepresented backgrounds.

“Leadership takes courage, especially during times of uncertainty and change,” he says. “By stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing new challenges, you not only build resilience but also inspire others to confidently navigate the unknown.”

Finalists

Eli Fischer, head of product design and research, AvidXchange
Jeff Nicholson, senior VP of UX, Entrata
Mark Garcia, chief creative officer, Majestyk
Will Trogdon, former senior designer for the Seattle Kraken, current director of marketing and brand at Seattle FWC 2026

Best product industry influencer

Pooja Sund, engineering finance leader, Microsoft

Sund is responsible for the growth of multiple internal and external-facing products and portals powered by a formidable array of technologies. She’s been recognized as a Women in Tech Global Leader 2023, Silicon Leaders magazine’s 2023 Top Ten Most Inspiring Women in Tech, and the highest award for leadership in 2018 through Dale Carnegie’s “Advanced Leadership Program.” Pooja is also a board member at Pacific Northwest University and co-leads the Women at Microsoft ERG. Pooja has won several awards for her work as a product leader both at Microsoft and at industry conferences.

Her seven simple steps for product leaders: “Find your niche, create valuable content consistently, engage with the community, leverage multiple platforms, keep learning about industry trends, be authentic, and build your personal brand to keep shining.”

Finalists

Mark Palmer, AI and data industry advisor, Warburg Pincus
Nesrine Changuel, independent product coach and advocate
Teresa Huang, product leader and coach, Bupa
Vladislav Voroninski, CEO, Helm.ai

Best Product Leader, Large Company (1,000+ employees)

Rajesh Ranjan, AI product, Meta

At Meta, Ranjan has built AI and LLM-driven recommendation systems, boosting engagement goals by over 100% and directly improving user retention and monetization. He’s transformed AI into a core technology across departments, opening up rapid AI adoption and experimentation as well as automated decision-making, all of which has reduced time-to-market for AI-powered innovations. He was honored with the Excellence Award by Conglomerate Magazine for his contributions to AI product management. Consistently demonstrating a strong commitment to fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in the tech industry, he’s the author of five research papers on responsible AI and LLMs. He has also spearheaded initiatives to enhance the relevance of recommendation systems to ensure they’re inclusive of a broad range of user backgrounds and preferences.

“Build products that push boundaries — solving real-world challenges with precision and lasting impact,” he says. “Prioritize what truly matters, balancing bold innovation with dependable execution. Lead with a clear and unwavering vision while championing ethical AI. Cultivate a feedback-driven culture, empowering teams to deliver scalable solutions that shape the future.”

Finalists

Andrew Davidson, SVP products, MongoDB
Neha Bansal, head of product, Meta
Lewis Evans, chief product and technology, consumer, Nine Entertainment Co.
Tim Simmons, senior VP and chief product officer, Walmart International

Best Product Leader, Midsize Company (100-1,000 employees)

Erin DeCesare, CTO, ezCater

DeCesare led the development of ezCater’s AI-driven Smart Ordering feature, which boosts revenue for restaurant partners and has directly impacted ezCater’s platform growth, with new customers like P&G, CBRE, Verizon, H&M and ABInbev. She’s made a significant social impact at ezCater by fostering an inclusive and empowering workplace, as well as bringing diverse perspectives to the product development process with her unification of the product, design, analytics and technology teams. She champions AI literacy by investing in employee upskilling, fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. Her efforts resulted in ezCater being recognized as a 2024 Fortune Best Workplace in Technology.

“Mid-sized companies thrive when they leverage speed to outmaneuver, not outspend,” she says. “We’re at our best when we take advantage of our smaller size to stay close to customer needs and work cross-functionally to rapidly iterate on the best solution.”

Finalists

Badar Ahmed, CTO and founder, Protect AI
Dane Maddams, acting director of product, Culture Amp
Dave Bottoms, SVM, GM, marketplace, Upwork
Isaac Lien, co-founder, chief artificial intelligence and product officer at GrandPad, Inc.

Best Product Leader, Startup & Small Company (under 100 employees)

Michelle Duval, founder and CEO, Marlee

Duval’s product leadership has driven exceptional business impact and global reach in just four years at Marlee. She has scaled the business to over 400,000 users across 90,000+ organizations in 194 countries, with adoption by industry leaders including Accenture, Amazon, Meta, Atlassian, Google, Microsoft, Apple and KPMG.

Her product’s mission promotes diversity by democratizing access to professional development tools, giving enterprises new solutions to reduce workplace bia, enhance diversity in hiring and advancement, and understand cognitive diversity. At Marlee, her high-performing, cognitively diverse, global 20-person team, 50% of whom are women, represents multi-cultural, multi-national perspectives.

“Products that are loved aren’t built in isolation — they’re the result of relentless curiosity, deep user empathy, and a team that dares to challenge the status quo,” she says. “Lean in and listen to your team and users, be data-informed but willing to also make bets. “

Finalists

Adam Nash, CEO and co-founder, Daffy
Anand Nathan, co-founder and CPO, AmplifyMD
Dimitry Shvartsman, CPO and co-founder, Prime Security
Guillaume Klein, product growth, WeWard

Most Admired Product Leader

Shailja Gupta, AI/ML platform product manager, ADP

Gupta has been recognized by several prestigious awards, including Rising Star (NTT Data), Most Valuable Professional (McAfee), CSG Mastery, Bravo Award (2022) and Excellence Award (Conglomerate Magazine) for AI and Product Management. At ADP, her work on Analytics Assist, a Generative AI-powered conversational tool, increased user adoption by 30%, reduced report retrieval time by 30%, and boosted Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 48%. She’s led initiatives that have increased customer engagement by 40% and improved AI model accuracy by 25%. Gupta has consistently advocated for responsible AI practices across industries. Her research on bias and LLMs has become a key resource for promoting fairness in AI systems, raising awareness of how AI models can perpetuate societal biases. She’s a judge for the SWE Recognition Program and also mentors aspiring technologists as an academic coach at Carnegie Mellon University and an ambassador for the AI Frontier Network.

“Foster a culture of continuous innovation by staying curious, listening deeply to customer needs, and empowering diverse teams,” she says. “Lead with empathy, authenticity, and transparency. This approach not only drives impactful products but also builds a loyal community, a lasting legacy, and products that change lives.”

Finalists

Burak Sargut, CPO, Sipay
Cameron Adams, co-founder, Canva
Tony Pagliocco, SVP product investment, Aldar Properties
Víctor Díaz-Roig, president — games, Scopely

Most Promising Product Up-and-Comer

Nimisha Sharath, product manager, Uber

Focused on enhancing road safety and driving behavior by leveraging AI at Uber, Sharath’s safety initiatives have reduced crash rates by 25%, leading to $150 million in insurance cost savings and increasing user adoption by 10%, with even higher engagement among women drivers and riders. She often works behind the scenes improving perceptions among regulators in international markets, which helped expedite the launch of Uber Moto in São Paul. During Covid, she used her time to mentor newcomers to the United States, helping them break into product management, despite the tough job market. Additionally, she acts as a mentor and gives countless free talks and workshops to help people up-skill and land PM roles. She serves on the Industry Advisory Board at the University of Washington Seattle, where she has helped raise over $100K to fund scholarships for immigrant students, and played an instrumental role in launching the first-ever Women in Data Science Conference in Seattle.

“Prioritize reflection — learning and looking back are just as important as taking action,” she says. “Focus on delivering real impact by solving meaningful problems, building strong relationships, and communicating with clarity. Never forget the user — always keep their needs at the center of your work to make sure you’re solving the right problems.”

Finalists

Brigitte West, executive director of product, DrDoctor
Prerna Ramachandra, principal product manager, Yahoo
Rudra Roy Choudhary, product manager, Tubi
Ella Hislop, VP of product, Luminance

Learn more about the Product 50 and this year’s winners and finalists at amplitude.com/product50.

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The update starts with new PowerEdge R470, R570, R670 and R770 servers featuring Intel Xeon 6 with P-cores processors in single- and dual-socket configurations designed to handle high-performance computing, virtualization, analytics and artificial intelligence inferencing. Dell said they save up to half of the energy costs of previous server generations while supporting up to 50% more cores per processors and 67% better performance. With the R770, up to 80% of space can be saved and a 42U rack. They feature the Dell Modular Hardware System architecture, which is based on Open Compute Project standards. The controller system also received a significant update, with improvements to Dell OpenManage and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller providing real-time monitoring, while the Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller for PCIe Gen 5 hardware reduces write latency up to 33-fold.

Intel sells off majority stake in its FPGA business

Altera will continue offering field-programmable gate array (FPGA) products across a wide range of use cases, including automotive, communications, data centers, embedded systems, industrial, and aerospace. “People were a bit surprised at Intel’s sale of the majority stake in Altera, but they shouldn’t have been. Lip-Bu indicated that shoring up Intel’s balance sheet was important,” said Jim McGregor, chief analyst with Tirias Research. The Altera has been in the works for a while and is a relic of past mistakes by Intel to try to acquire its way into AI, whether it was through FPGAs or other accelerators like Habana or Nervana, note Anshel Sag, principal analyst with Moor Insight and Research. “Ultimately, the 50% haircut on the valuation of Altera is unfortunate, but again is a demonstration of Intel’s past mistakes. I do believe that finishing the process of spinning it out does give Intel back some capital and narrows the company’s focus,” he said. So where did it go wrong? It wasn’t with FPGAs because AMD is making a good run of it with its Xilinx acquisition. The fault, analysts say, lies with Intel, which has a terrible track record when it comes to acquisitions. “Altera could have been a great asset to Intel, just as Xilinx has become a valuable asset to AMD. However, like most of its acquisitions, Intel did not manage Altera well,” said McGregor.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle