The people behind September’s conversation
Our September 2025 Product Conversations webinar brought together Itamar Gilad, Brian Balfour, Elena Verna and Sachin Rekhi. This feature introduces the backgrounds behind their invitations and the complementary perspectives we wanted to bring to Pinnacle’s audience.
We selected this line-up to connect evidence-guided decisions with growth systems, monetisation and idea validation. Together, these perspectives linked the question of what to build with how a product can create lasting customer and business value.
Itamar Gilad
Product expert · Author of Evidence-Guided
The experience behind the invitation
Itamar Gilad is a product coach, author and speaker with experience at Google and Microsoft. His book Evidence-Guided explores how teams can combine judgment with research and experimentation to make better product decisions. His work connects clear goals with testing ideas before committing substantial delivery effort.
Why we invited Itamar
We invited Itamar to strengthen the evidence behind product decisions. His approach was relevant to practitioners seeking to distinguish promising ideas from well-supported opportunities and give teams room to learn before scaling investment.
What evidence would justify investing more in an idea, and what would make you change direction?
Brian Balfour
Founder of Reforge · Growth educator
The experience behind the invitation
Brian Balfour founded Reforge and previously served as VP of Growth at HubSpot. His work focuses on growth and customer acquisition, helping technology businesses think systematically about how they attract customers and scale. His perspective connects individual growth initiatives with a broader model for sustained progress.
Why we invited Brian
We invited Brian to connect product decisions with a coherent growth strategy. His experience was relevant to an audience assessing which acquisition opportunities fit their business and how growth can become a repeatable system rather than a succession of isolated campaigns.
How does your acquisition approach fit the value your product delivers and the way your business grows?
Elena Verna
Growth expert and educator
The experience behind the invitation
Elena Verna specialises in product-led growth, experimentation and monetisation. Her educational work includes programmes that help product and growth teams develop practical approaches to these connected disciplines. Her perspective brings customer value, learning and commercial outcomes into the same conversation.
Why we invited Elena
We invited Elena to examine how product usage connects with sustainable business growth. Her expertise was relevant to teams testing growth opportunities, improving the path to customer value and considering how monetisation choices affect the customer experience.
Which experiment would help you understand whether your product creates enough value for customers to pay?
Sachin Rekhi
Product expert and educator
The experience behind the invitation
Sachin Rekhi teaches product innovation and systematic idea validation, alongside approaches to improving product managers’ work with AI. His perspective connects discovering worthwhile opportunities with the practical work of testing assumptions. For teams exploring AI, that connection keeps the purpose of an idea central to the tools used to develop it.
Why we invited Sachin
We invited Sachin to connect innovation with disciplined validation and effective use of AI. His perspective was relevant to product managers seeking to explore ideas faster while preserving sound judgment about the problem, customer value and evidence needed to proceed.
How can AI help you test an idea without mistaking faster output for stronger evidence?
The line-up connected evidence, customer acquisition, product-led growth and innovation. We invited these four speakers to help our audience consider how those disciplines support better product choices.