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Growth Hacking Culture

Growth Hacking Culture

Written by: Ivan Palomino
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The Growth Hacking Culture Podcast is a series of insightful interviews with prominent experts on mindsets, skills and mental resources to grow individually, lead motivated teams and create human-centric work cultures.
These episodes are about thought provoking ideas to scale up and growth hack human-centric and performing work cultures.
Hosted by Ivan Palomino.Copyright 2026 All rights reserved Ivan Palomino.
Economics Management Management & Leadership Self-Help Success
Episodes
  • HR Leaders Will Soon Manage Humans and Agents. Most Aren't Ready. | Tami Rosen
    Jun 2 2026

    The job description for HR leader just changed. Again.

    Not the version that added culture after COVID. Not the version that added AI literacy after ChatGPT. The version that nobody has written yet — the one where you are responsible for a workforce that is part human, part agent, and entirely your problem to lead effectively.

    Most HR leaders are not ready for this. Not because they lack intelligence or intention. Because the function has spent decades being handed other people's problems and called a support function for it. And you cannot build the commercial acumen, the technical fluency, and the strategic credibility required to lead in a human-machine era if you are still running nine-month performance review cycles and buying SAP modules to solve problems that didn't need a SAP module.

    Tami Rosen has led HR at Apple, Goldman Sachs, Atlassian, Luminar Technologies and Pagaya. She is writing a book called Superhuman Companies. Her argument is not gentle: people strategy is business strategy. And the organizations — and the HR leaders — who haven't internalized that are already behind.

    In this conversation with Ivan Palomino, Tami gets direct about what actually separates strategic HR from administrative HR, why the apprenticeship model is the only thing that genuinely works for AI skill development, how the Continuous Learning Cycle replaced performance reviews at Pagaya and got 100% employee participation, and what it means to lead a blended workforce before the industry has figured out the playbook.

    In this episode:

    • Why COVID was the moment HR stepped into the spotlight — and what it has to do now to stay there
    • The four pillars of a superhuman company that stands the test of any crisis
    • Why the apprenticeship model beats every AI training program ever built
    • How to replace the performance review with something that actually develops people
    • The first thing every HR leader should kill to become more strategic immediately
    • Why every business problem eventually becomes a people problem at scale
    • How to think about building vs buying in an HR tech ecosystem full of shiny objects

    This one is for the HR leader who knows the function needs to change and wants to understand exactly what that change looks like in practice — from someone who has already done it at some of the world's most demanding companies.

    Connect with Tami Rosen: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamirosen/ Book: Superhuman Companies — coming soon

    📘 Ivan Palomino's new book (French version) is now available: Périmé?: La science de rester indispensable quand le marché préfère le neuf

    → https://amzn.eu/d/08VSK1OA

    Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace performance.

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    40 mins
  • Stop Measuring Culture. Start Changing It. How AI Makes the Difference | Omar Shbaro
    May 27 2026

    Most HR leaders already know the survey isn't working.

    They know because they've seen the same deck three years in a row. They know because the workshops got scheduled and nothing changed. They know because the employees who participated last year are participating again this year with slightly less enthusiasm and exactly the same frustrations.

    And yet the survey gets launched again. Because it's what you do. Because the contract renews. Because nobody has been given a credible alternative.

    Omar Shbaro has spent years building that alternative. As CTO of VAI Solutions and creator of CultureSim, he starts from a premise that most of the industry quietly avoids: measuring culture and changing culture are two completely different jobs. And until organizations treat them that way, the cycle doesn't break.

    In this conversation with Ivan Palomino, Omar breaks down why traditional surveys produce culture noise instead of readable signals, how AI can finally do what no consultant or dashboard has managed to do — listen to what people actually say and translate it into specific action at three different levels of the organization — and why the most powerful shift an HR leader can make right now has nothing to do with buying better data.

    In this episode:

    • Why culture is a behavioral problem not a reporting problem — and what that changes
    • How AI removes the human bias that distorts most culture diagnostics
    • The difference between culture noise and readable signals — and why it matters for action
    • How CultureSim works at individual, manager and organizational level simultaneously
    • Why there is always a human in the loop — AI advises, it never decides
    • The one question every HR leader should be asking instead of launching another survey
    • Why imperfect action taken today beats perfect data collected next quarter

    This one is for the HR leader who has sat in enough culture debriefs to know something is broken — and is ready to hear what actually works instead.

    Connect with Omar Shbaro: LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/omarshbaro Email: omar@vaisolutions.ai Website: https://vaisolutions.ai

    📘 Ivan Palomino is launching his new book in french: Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New → https://www.ivanpalomino.net/perime-livre-ivan-palomino

    Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace performance.

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    35 mins
  • What Zappos Knew About Trust and Failure That Most Companies Still Refuse to Learn | Megan Petrini
    May 19 2026

    Most organizations say they have a safe to fail culture.

    Then someone actually fails. And you find out very quickly whether they meant it.

    Megan Petrini spent years at Zappos — one of the boldest cultural experiments in corporate history — watching the difference between an organization that genuinely treats failure as data and one that just puts it on the values poster. As a certified professional in talent development, a trust at work practitioner, and author of Manage to Fail, she has spent 16 years studying the habits that quietly destroy team trust and the conditions that actually rebuild it.

    The gap between those two things is where most organizations live permanently. Where new hires lose confidence before they've found their footing. Where unclear expectations create invisible failure traps. Where managers move meetings, disappear under pressure, and wonder why their team stopped coming to them.

    In this conversation with Ivan Palomino, Megan gets direct about what Zappos did differently — including a million-dollar pricing mistake that became a masterclass in what real psychological safety looks like under pressure — and what it would actually cost most organizations to mean what they say about failure.

    In this episode:

    • The single most common trust-destroying habit managers don't realize they have
    • Why the 70-20-10 rule exists and why most L&D programs ignore the only part that matters
    • How to tell whether a company's safe-to-fail culture is real before you join it
    • Why perfectionism in leadership kills momentum faster than any mistake ever could
    • The three pillars of employee engagement — and why a ping pong table isn't one of them
    • What the Zappos CFO said to the employee who cost the company millions in one night

    This one is for the HR leader, the L&D practitioner, and the manager who genuinely wants to build a team where failure makes people better — not smaller.

    Connect with Megan Petrini: managetofail.com | megan@managetofail.com | Book: Manage to Fail — available now

    📘 Ivan Palomino is launching his new book: Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New

    Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the human side of leadership and workplace performance.

    Show More Show Less
    49 mins
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