If you’re a product engineer, engineering manager or PM, we all know how it goes: you go through tons of meetings every day, and only when they end is when real work starts. PRDs, tickets, specs, follow-ups — all the artefact work nobody sees you do. And by the time you’re done, the next meeting is already starting.
One of today’s guests has a name for it: the infinite workday.
And that’s exactly the problem today’s guests set out to fix. Mark Barbir and Sanden Gocka are the founders of Earmark — an AI meeting note taker that turns live conversations into shippable work in real time. We get into how they actually use it day to day, how it helps product teams, where the new bottleneck of product work has moved, and what it looks like when an idea you just said out loud turns into a working prototype before the call ends.
If you’ve been hunting for AI tools for product managers that go beyond generic summaries, I’m walking you through them, and you can decide if it’s worth trying.
Watch the episode on YouTube:
GUESTS
Mark Barbir and Sanden Gocka are the co-founders of Earmark. They previously worked together at Mindbody, a large enterprise SaaS company with a 400-person delivery organisation, and later crossed paths again at ProductPlan, where Sanden was an engineering manager and director. After years of watching product and engineering leaders drown in meetings and artefact work, they set out to build the tool they wished they had: an AI meeting assistant that generates the artefacts a conversation implies, in real time, while the meeting is still happening.
Mark’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbarbir/
Sanden LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandengocka
Earmark: https://www.tryearmark.com
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The Invisible Second Shift: PM Meetings Problem
01:49 The Infinite Workday: Why PMs Work After Hours
07:49 Vision Pro Pivot: From Presentation Coach to Meeting AI
11:35 Why Vision Pro Failed (and What They Learned)
14:13 Engineering Translator Card: Understanding Technical Talk
16:00 Specs, PRDs & Code in Real-Time During Meetings
19:00 Make Me Look Smart: AI for Shy PMs
28:32 PMs Are Now The New Bottleneck
31:56 Dog Food Success: How Earmark Built Earmark
40:09 How to Get Started with Earmark
REFERENCES
Cursor: https://cursor.com
Linear: https://linear.app
MacWhisper — the local speech-to-text tool Sanden used in his early hacked workflow
AssemblyAI (referenced in the co-marketing case study story): https://www.assemblyai.com
CONNECT WITH PRODUCT ENGINEERS
Host: Peppe Silletti
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peppesilletti/
Product Engineers Community:
Website: https://productengineers.com
Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/4sMtRNSgU4
Share this episode with a teammate who is still writing their PRDs at 10pm.
