The people behind September’s conversation
Our September 2025 Product Conversations webinar brought together Ravi Mehta, Jiaona Zhang, Oyama Nzan and Crystal Widjaja. 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 AI-era strategy and team leadership with internal innovation and evidence. Together, the perspectives address both preparing for change and judging whether that change creates value.
Ravi Mehta
Product leadership educator
The experience behind the invitation
Ravi Mehta helps technology companies build effective product teams, develop new products and strengthen their growth. His teaching connects product leadership with strategic choices, including how AI can change a product’s competitive position. His perspective makes the relationship between a team’s capabilities and its direction central to the leadership conversation.
Why we invited Ravi
We invited Ravi to frame the leadership challenge behind digital disruption. His perspective was relevant to product managers and leaders seeking to identify where their strategy needs to change and what their teams need in order to act on it.
How should product leaders reassess their strategy when AI changes what customers expect and competitors can deliver?
Jiaona Zhang
Product expert and educator
The experience behind the invitation
Jiaona Zhang combines product leadership with teaching on product management foundations and leadership in the AI era. Her experience spans consumer and enterprise products, and her work examines the relationship between product design, organisational choices and effective teams. That breadth made her a relevant voice on adapting product practice as technology changes.
Why we invited Jiaona
We invited Jiaona to connect AI-era strategy with the way product teams are organised and supported. Her perspective helped frame why new tools should prompt thoughtful choices about responsibilities and collaboration, rather than simply accelerating existing habits.
Which parts of product practice should evolve with AI, and which foundations should remain central?
Oyama Nzan
Digital product expert
The experience behind the invitation
Oyama Nzan focuses on helping organisations innovate from within so that digital disruption does not catch them off guard. His perspective draws on innovation work at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), connecting digital product thinking with the realities of change inside an established organisation. This brought a practical internal-innovation lens to the line-up.
Why we invited Oyama
We invited Oyama to ground the discussion in organisational change from the inside out. His JLR perspective was relevant to an audience considering how to recognise opportunities, challenge existing ways of working and prepare for disruption before it becomes an urgent external pressure.
How can an established organisation make internal innovation part of its everyday work rather than wait for disruption to force change?
Crystal Widjaja
Product analytics expert
The experience behind the invitation
Crystal Widjaja brings experience in product, growth and data, including her work building the data function at Gojek and later leading growth and data there. Her teaching focuses on product analytics: understanding user behaviour and connecting data with better product decisions. Her perspective helps teams distinguish a useful signal from a dashboard full of activity.
Why we invited Crystal
We invited Crystal to connect the edition’s strategic and organisational questions with evidence. Her perspective was relevant to assessing whether a change improves customer value, how people actually use a product and which measures deserve attention.
What evidence would show that a digital innovation is creating value, rather than just changing how work is done?
The line-up connected strategic direction, team design, internal innovation and product analytics. That combination explains why we invited these four speakers to join our community.