Orchestrating Agentic AI for HR, Inside Rival’s Product Transformation | Poornima Farrar

In this episode of Zero to One: Product Journeys, I sit down with Poornima Farrar, Chief Product Officer at Rival. Her career spans analytics, AI, and HR tech, with leadership roles at Alteryx through their IPO, at Workday shaping AI and HCM, and at Salesforce after the Tableau acquisition. Most recently, she led a full product and AI transformation at Rival.We explore her path from linguistics and academia into product, why she gravitates toward complex back office systems, and how she approaches the intersection of research, storytelling, and execution. Poornima shares how she evaluates trade offs, frames problems for AI driven products, designs product teams for hypergrowth, and builds alignment with exec and engineering partners.We also get into consolidation and product strategy, from deciding what to keep, cut or rebuild, to how modularity, connected experiences and analytics shaped Rival’s direction. She outlines the shift from systems of record to systems of intelligence and what the next decade of enterprise software could look like as AI orchestrates more of the work.A thoughtful deep dive for anyone building in HR tech, AI, or enterprise software.