Cisco President & CPO on Rebuilding Products So Agents Can Use Them, Running a $460B+ Company in Founder Mode & the Rule of Thirds

Agents now consume more tokens than humans do, and Jeetu Patel thinks that breaks almost every product built for people to click through. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (CEO at Product School) sits down with Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, for his fifth appearance, to unpack what it actually takes to rebuild products so agents, not just humans, can use them, and how a $63 billion company runs in founder mode.

What you'll learn

• Why products now have two users, humans and agents, and how to design for both

• The stats behind the shift: agents at 5x human token consumption, 60% of compute going to inference

• Why fewer than 2% use agents today, and why Jeetu predicts 30 to 40% within 12 to 15 months

• How agents disintermediate the middleman, and the new business models that creates

• Founder mode vs. functional mode, and why owner mentality wins during a platform shift

• Why a $63B company runs in “war mode,” not “peace mode,” during a refactor

• Why Cisco has “no product managers, only feature managers,” and sells the platform, not products

• How to become a multi-product company by reusing your route to market, not building new ones

• Cisco’s M&A discipline, why it kills acquired brands, and the promise it makes to founders

• The coming compute, power, and data-center supply crunch, and why it favors Cisco

Credits
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Jeetu Patel

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